13 migrants transferred out of Tacoma onto ICE flight while immigration groups protest

The Trump Administration’s directive of mass deportations is being met with both protests and adherence in Seattle.

The latest deportation by local ICE officials on Tuesday involved 13 adults. The detainees were bussed from the Northwest ICE Processing Center in Tacoma. They arrived at the King County International Airport, known as “Boeing Field.”

As detainees waited to be searched, ICE workers laid their belongings — in plastic bags — on the tarmac. Each detained migrant is allowed to keep and travel with 35 pounds of personal items.

First off the detention center bus was 37-year-old Eulalio Ginez-Zarate, a fugitive from Mexico. He’s facing a homicide warrant when he returns. ICE Field Director Camilla Wamsley alleged that approximately half of Tuesday’s passengers have a criminal past.

“We had a couple of folks who had some child molestation charges,” Wamsley said. “We had an individual with a warrant for aggravated theft, but it’s the gamut. It can go from just somebody who has a removal order with no criminality to somebody who has an active warrant for homicide.”

Regardless of their background, each adult detainee was shackled throughout the transport. Each migrant was shackled at the wrist, waist, and feet before being escorted on board the flight. It’s a part of the ICE transfer protocol.

“Part of that officer safety is to ensure that everybody is restrained, to not encourage or engender any ideas for people to act out,” Wamsley said.

But immigration groups call restraints just one of many human rights violations aboard ICE Air operations.

Immigration groups gather to protest the mass deportations

“They cannot move. We have seen people slipping from staircases,” a spokesperson for La Resistencia, a Washington immigrant rights group, told KIRO Newsradio. “We have talked to people who have been on flights where they’re not giving food. They’re not allowed to go to the bathroom.”

KIRO Newsradio was not able to verify the claims about treatment on board.

La Resistencia held a protest Tuesday outside the airport’s perimeter, demanding an end to all deportations.

The flight that left Tuesday from Boeing Field wasn’t headed abroad, but rather to Arizona. It’s what’s called a “shuffle flight” — a domestic charter plane that moves detainees to different U.S. facilities based on their space, medical needs, or proximity to the border.

That movement can hinder transparency about the flow and treatment of detainees, Phil Neff, a research coordinator for the University of Washington (UW) Center for Human Rights, stated.

“We know that specific people left ICE custody from the detention center on a given day, where the county says there wasn’t a flight, OK? What happened to those people?” Neff said.

On its public website, King County provides two camera feeds of Boeing Field, allowing anyone to live-stream deportation flights. Such flights are increasing to as many as three a week.

According to King County flight logs, ICE flights out of Boeing Field have increased by more than 30% this year compared to the first half of 2024. In a new report, La Resistencia alleges the increase is closer to 75%.

“We cannot rely on ICE,” the spokesperson for La Resistencia said. “They will never give us information.”

Director Wamsley pushed back on that claim. Telling KIRO Newsradio, her office works to make each flight logistically seamless and uneventful. According to Wamsley, detainees are given full transparency about what’s next in their deportation process.

The timeframe from apprehension to final deportation flight can take months, even years.

“It could be a year or two years until they get through the entire process,” Wamsley confirmed. “It’s a case-by-case basis.”

However, the process could be expedited in the years ahead. The recent passage of President Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” secured unprecedented funding for ICE operations.

It provides a runway to provide more staffing, arrests, and one-way tickets out of Seattle for undocumented migrants.