A Closer Look at the Pierce County Immigration Alliance

In the wake of deadly shootings by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Border Patrol agents, mayors of major American cities, including Minneapolis, Denver, and Newark, have signed laws outlawing federal agencies from staging operations on city property.

Closer to home, Everett Mayor Cassie Franklin issued local protocols last month designed to protect the Snohomish County city from federal overreach. Earlier this month, the King County Council passed an emergency ban on new ICE detention centers.

One organization that hopes Tacoma will follow suit is Pierce County Immigration Alliance (PCIA), a local citizens’ group formed thirteen months ago.

"Our big goals for 2026 are to push forward the decades-long fight to shut down the Northwest Detention Center and see an end to ICE abductions in Pierce County,” Rie Guerrero said in a recent email. "We know that we’re a small organization in a vast federal landscape, but we believe in the power of our community to rise up against injustice and demand sweeping change for Pierce County and beyond.”

Guerrero serves on PCIA’s steering committee and has played an active role in its recent efforts.

"We’re a grassroots organization that believes in building community power and organizing for legalization for all and an end to immigration terror,” she said. "We are one hundred percent volunteers.”

According to Guerrero, the tragic death of Renee Good at the hands of federal agents in Minneapolis earlier this winter galvanized PCIA to push for reform at the local level. During the public comment period of a Tacoma City Council meeting last month, the alliance presented a draft resolution and several demands, including an end to local kidnappings by unidentified masked federal agents and a condemnation of dangerous conditions at NWDC. But so far PCIA’s pleas have been ignored.

"We understand that the city can’t ‘ban ICE’ as a federal law enforcement operation,” Guerrero said, "but they can condemn ICE or formally request that they stop their abductions and withdraw from the city, as cities such as Portland, Minneapolis, and Aurora have done. We also know that the fight to remove GEO Group from Tacoma is a longstanding one, and the tactics of that will require creativity, legal expertise, and strong leadership. We want to see the city truly respond to the longstanding demands of community groups, advocates, and impacted communities, and commit to fully mobilizing its resources to find a way to push the NWDC out of our city.”

GEO is a private, for-profit company that owns and runs several prisons and detention centers, including NWDC, located on the Port of Tacoma’s industrial tide flats. The University of Washington’s Center for Human Rights has released several alarming studies on the ongoing violations of human rights at NWDC, where sexual assaults, hunger strikes, and lawsuits are reportedly commonplace.

PCIA followed its city council presentation with a meeting with several council members and Mayor Anders Ibsen, but made no progress toward its goals. Meanwhile, community members continued to disappear from the streets.

"Four people were abducted from a Home Depot parking lot,” Guerrero said. "Rapid responders mobilized to over a half-dozen reports of ICE activity in the Tacoma area, and by the time most arrived, the scene was empty, or all that was left was an abandoned car in the middle of the street, in some cases left with the abducted person’s immigration paperwork or identification documents in the passenger seat.”

Sumeet Aujla, a physician who serves on PCIA’s outreach committee, is concerned about NWDC’s and ICE’s impact on local health. Detainees released from NWDC report inedible food and unsanitary and dehumanizing conditions, she said, and everyone in the community, even legal residents and military veterans, feels vulnerable.

"I have patients come into my clinic with their passports, birth certificates, and piles of paperwork in a yellow folder for themselves and for their babies just in case they were to run into ICE,” Aujla said. "When patients’ family members are abducted and detained by ICE, when they are deported, that is a health and life stressor on them as well. In schools, I see teens who have been telling me for years that the fear and helplessness is truly harming their mental health.”

Tacoma can change all that, Aujla said.

"I encourage people to remember that all progress that has been made in our history has been at the hands of the workers, the people,” she explained. "Our power is in numbers, and we have to use our power if we want to battle the exploitation and abuses that our system is constantly hitting all of us with. Immigrant suffering and exploitation is within the model of our current system, but I truly believe it will not be like this forever.”

According to Aujla and Guerrero, getting involved can make a difference.

"The most important thing we can do right now is plug in,” Guerrero said, "with our neighbors, our community, and with what we can do in our own scope to make a difference. For some, that may be going to rallies, organizing public comment, and marching in the streets. For others, that may be giving a handful of red cards and the WAISN Deportation Defense hotline to the corner store or coffee shop down the street. Sometimes, though, the most impactful thing we can do is call a friend who we know is having a hard time dealing with everything going on in the world, or a family in our community who may be facing down some of the brunt of this terror, and asking if we can help with groceries, laundry, or a ride home from school. People standing together and standing up for each other is the bedrock of any society, and we’re all at our weakest when we’re feeling alone against the world. It’s going to take all of us to come out of this together.”

Red Cards, created by the Immigrant Legal Resource Center, are small bilingual cards that help individuals assert their constitutional rights, including the right to remain silent and refuse searches without a warrant, during encounters with immigration enforcement or police.

PCIA is operating on a shoestring budget and does not currently have a website, but those hoping to learn more about the organization and its efforts can follow it on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/pcia.wa.