King County Hires Flight Monitor to Track ICE Operations

King County has hired an employee to monitor ICE flights from Boeing Field, following years of activist complaints about immigration enforcement. The new flight monitoring and outreach coordinator will ensure those flights follow safety regulations and count the number of handcuffed and shackled people coming on and off.

The county has long portrayed itself as a reluctant participant in ICE flights, but after being ordered to allow them by the courts, it promised to document how they're used. Now, its website shows the number of inbound and outbound passengers for every immigration enforcement flight using Boeing Field since August 1.

ICE takes inbound passengers to its detention center in Tacoma using buses run by GEO Group, while shuttingtles outbounds to detention facilities elsewhere or deportation staging areas around the U.S. For the first five flights in August, ICE boarded or deplaned 285 people at Boeing Field, according to county figures.

La Resistencia, a group that opposes detention and deportation, has waited for King County to strengthen oversight of ICE flights. In May, it came out with a report accusing local officials of rarely engaging 'in anything beyond performative decrees.' The group's observers have seen safety violations on the video feed inside the airport.

The new flight monitor will observe from camera feeds inside airport offices as well as from the airfield. If they see violations, the county plans to work with whatever agency or company is involved to fix the problem rather than take punitive action.