King County Council votes to ban ICE from county property

The Metropolitan King County Council voted Tuesday to restrict federal immigration enforcement from using county property.

The legislation intends to bar immigration agents from using county parks, buildings, garages and parking lots for staging, processing or as an operations base in immigration enforcement.

Immigration enforcement with a warrant could still make arrests or detain people on county property, but the new legislation aims to bar them from setting up the type of operations that lead to aggressive enforcement and mass arrests.

One individual who has a judicial signed warrant being potentially arrested by ICE, we can't really control for that," said Councilmember Teresa Mosqueda, the lead sponsor. "But we can control for what happens on county land and county-operated land."

Mosqueda said the legislation was meant to be preemptive and she has not heard any reports of immigration enforcement using county property.

It's the latest in a suite of actions by local and state officials using whatever levers they can find to try to rebuff the surge in immigration enforcement and deportations being conducted by President Donald Trump.

Immigrations and Customs Enforcement arrests in the Pacific Northwest jumped nearly tenfold in the last quarter of last year, compared with 2024, as the Trump administration has sought to carry out its campaign of mass deportations. King County saw more ICE arrests than any other county in the Northwest in 2025, although Yakima County and other agricultural communities saw more arrests per capita.

The legislation builds on an executive order, issued last month by King County Executive Girmay Zahilay, which barred immigration enforcement from all nonpublic county-owned property. It expands upon the executive order, including public places like parks. It does not include county-owned roads and sidewalks or county-owned Boeing Field. In 2019, King County tried to ban federal deportation flights from using Boeing Field, an action that was struck down by the courts.

"While we cannot obstruct a lawful arrest by the federal government, we can make sure our land use code is very clear," Mosqueda said.

The County Council went into a private session for over an hour to discuss possible legal risks of the legislation.

The ordinance passed 7-1, with Councilmember Reagan Dunn voting no and Councilmember Pete von Reichbauer absent.

Zahilay said he would sign the legislation. "King County will not allow our properties to be used to intimidate immigrant and refugee communities and violate their rights," he said in a statement.

King County generally does not cooperate with federal immigration enforcement, refusing to hold people for federal agents without a judicial warrant and not asking about people's immigration status.

Seattle, last week, passed its own ban on immigration enforcement staging on city-owned property.

Both Seattle and King County have also in recent weeks voted to bar new ICE detention facilities within their jurisdictions.

The new legislation instructs the county executive to create signs stating: "This property shall not be used for civil immigration enforcement staging, operations, or processing." Signs will be placed at places like parks and vacant lots, especially those that the county deems "high risk for immigration enforcement.

If ICE does use county property for immigration enforcement, the legislation instructs the sheriff's office to ask them to leave. If they refuse, the sheriff's office is supposed to document the activity, including through the use of body-worn cameras. That evidence would then be sent to the prosecuting attorney's office who could seek an injunction or other legal action.

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