Letter to the Editor: Recent letter about ICE mischaracterized law
Published 2:00 pm Wednesday, February 25, 2026
Mr. Personius, I take issue with your recent letter (“Local law enforcement should work with ICE,” published Feb. 4).
You assert that immigration is, in some circumstances, a criminal matter, and characterize the Enumclaw police as “refus[ing] to assist ICE.”
You wrote: “When local policies like the “Keep Washington Working Act” conflict with federal law, federal law controls.”
Curious about that law myself, I looked around and found a FAQ from the office of the Washington State Attorney General. Here’s an excerpt: “KWW prohibits law enforcement officials from detaining or taking someone into custody solely to determine their immigration status or based solely on a civil immigration warrant, detainer, or hold request. Being undocumented in the United States is not a crime under local, state, or federal law …agencies are not required to enforce immigration law and KWW thereby limits local LEAs from doing so.”
It sure does look like you’ve egregiously mischaracterized the law.
I’ve spotted some more oopsies in your letter I’d like to correct.
You wrote: “We do not get to pick and choose which laws to enforce.” Oops! That’s not how our nation operates. Here’s an example of the law not being enforced: in August of 2025, Chaofeng Ge was found hogtied and hanged in a DHS prison, and his death is not being investigated.
You wrote: “We are a nation of laws, not of men.” Perhaps you meant “a government of laws and not of men.” Here’s the context: “the legislative department shall never exercise the executive and judicial powers, or either of them: the executive shall never exercise the legislative and judicial powers, or either of them: the judicial shall never exercise the legislative and executive powers, or either of them: to the end it may be a government of laws and not of men.”
Laws are written, enforced, and adjudicated by three different branches of government because the people who founded our country, including the man who wrote what you attempted to quote, understood that there is inherent subjectivity to the law, that its enforcement may therefore involve bias, and they wanted to ensure that Americans could have faith that the law is applied fairly. You don’t seem to understand that.
You wrote: “Fugitives would be taken into custody within the safe confines of a jail rather than on the street, where “bad things” happen.”
Fugitives? ICE are detaining people while they determine their immigration status. These people haven’t been proven to have violated the law.
On Feb. 6th the 5th Circuit of Appeals determined that the government may hold without bail anyone they allege entered the country illegally. ICE are also detaining people solely on the basis of their apparent ethnicity and occupation, behavior described (and green-lit by the supreme court) in Noem v Vasquez Perdomo. Prisons used to detain people of certain ethnicities are called “concentration camps.”
You wrote a letter complaining that local police are not doing more to help an organization that is snatching up ethnic minorities and sending them to concentration camps.
Nancy Butler
Enumclaw
