On the morning that roofer Arnoldo Tiul Caal was taken by federal Border Patrol agents to their office in North Spokane — just after dropping his 11-year-old daughter Karla off at school — he had an “unnerving sense they were being followed,” The Spokesman-Review reported.
They had been.
According to records recently obtained by RANGE, the Washington Department of Licensing (DOL) shared Tiul Caal’s driver’s license data with an account associated with Customs and Border Protection (CBP) just two days earlier.
On January 7, CBP twice searched the DOL’s database for Tiul Caal’s license plate number using the national data-sharing platform Nlets via access granted by the Washington State Patrol’s ACCESS platform. Two days after that, Tiul Caal was pulled over by Border Patrol agents. Then one day later, he and his daughter were detained and transported to a notorious immigration facility in Dilley, Texas.
Like the majority of people detained under President Donald Trump’s mass deportation efforts, Tiul Caal had no criminal record or pending charges. His detainment was civil, in response to missed check-ins for ICE’s Alternatives to Detention program, CBP told reporters. Tiul Caal and his daughter have since been released from detention in Dilley after pro bono lawyers successfully argued that they had been unlawfully detained.
But because Tiul Caal’s detainment was an act of civil immigration enforcement, sharing his driver’s license data — which included his home address and identifying photos — with federal immigration agents was an apparent violation of the Keep Washington Working Act (KWWA). The KWWA prohibits the DOL, the Washington State Patrol (WSP) and other state and local agencies from using state government “funds, facilities, property, equipment, or personnel to investigate, enforce, cooperate with, or assist in the investigation or enforcement,” of civil federal immigration violations.
Washington state officials have been aware of the loophole that allowed CBP access to DOL data since at least January 8. That’s when the University of Washington’s Center for Human Rights (UWCHR) published a report verifying nine cases where Washington drivers had their license plate number in the DOL database searched by federal agents. In at least seven of the nine cases, the arrests were civil detainments, not criminal.
“These folks are real Washingtonians who have been affected. They're people with lives and families and communities and rights, and they have been harmed by the fact that the DOL allows these agencies to access its data for civil and not criminal immigration enforcement,” UWCHR’s director, Professor Angelina Snodgress Godoy said at a January 8 press conference about the report. “The reason I draw this distinction between civil and criminal immigration enforcement is not because criminal immigration enforcement is any less disruptive to lives and families — I don't actually believe that's the case — but because that distinction is embedded in state law, when the legislature says no cooperation for civil immigration enforcement, it's then up to state agencies to build a system that complies with that mandate.”
All nine cases identified by UWCHR were immigrants detained on the western side of the state.
Tiul Caal’s case represents the first confirmed instance where DOL and WSP shared data with federal immigration agencies for civil enforcement in Eastern Washington.
RANGE has also identified three other cases in Spokane County where CBP searched immigrants’ license plates in the WSP database prior to detainment: two family members of Tiul Caal and a man from Spokane Valley.
At least one of those cases was also a civil detainment.
On December 28, a 34-year-old family member of Tiul Caal’s was detained by Border Patrol agents after having the license plate for a car he shared with a third family member searched in the Nlets system by CBP six times in the month leading up to his detainment. The searches started on November 29, 2025 and continued through December 22, 2025 — six days before he was detained.
The 34-year-old had one prior arrest for a DUI that was pled down to a reckless driving charge, but the arresting documents from Border Patrol list the statutes making him subject to removal as solely civil charges for being present in the United States without authorization and not carrying valid documents.
In a statement to RANGE, Customs and Border Protection spokesperson Jason Givens wrote that the arrests of the three men were the result of “targeted enforcement operations for being illegally present in the United States.”
Givens wrote that the men had criminal histories including domestic violence, multiple assault charges, multiple protective order violations, burglary, resisting arrest, malicious mischief and DUI. He did not respond to clarification by press time as to which specific charges each person had, but Washington court records show no felony convictions for the 34-year-old or the Spokane Valley man, while the third man is the only one of the men with felonies.
No state or local law enforcement agency participated in or cooperated with Border Patrol in the three arrests, Givens wrote, though Nlets records show the three men were searched by CBP a total of eight times from the end of 2025 through January 2026.
“The arrests were the result of targeted, intelligence-driven, enforcement operations by Spokane Sector Border Patrol agents,” Givens wrote. “CBP is targeting people who are in the country illegally. We will continue to enforce the laws of our nation.”
Going in through the backdoor
Despite historic efforts from advocates across the state pushing for the state officials to curb illegal data-sharing, Border Patrol has continued to have access to search Washington DOL data through the Nlets platform.
In 2018, The Seattle Times uncovered proof that the DOL was regularly sharing Washington residents’ personal information with federal immigration authorities — a practice then-Governor Jay Inslee apologized for and promised to stop.
Thus began a game of whack-a-mole.
In July of 2025, reporters with KING 5 in Seattle discovered that the DOL was still allowing Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to search DOL license plate data through a backdoor, and that an account registered to ICE had been making thousands more searches under the new Trump administration than they had under former President Joe Biden.
The DOL said they revoked ICE’s backdoor access in August 2025, but in January 2026, the UWCHR report showed that ICE had been searching DOL data at least into November, this time through a new backdoor: the Nlets system.
State officials said they cut ICE access to Nlets in mid-November, but that they would allow Border Patrol continued access, because it’s necessary for CBP’s work at the border and airports. However, the UWCHR report revealed that at least through the end of 2025, CBP was using the DOL data in civil immigration enforcement. The Tiul Caal case shows the practice has continued into 2026.
A joint statement from WSP and DOL after the January UWCHR report stated that they “are reviewing CBP’s use of Nlets, what actions other states have taken, and are looking at all options to protect Washingtonians while also protecting public safety.”
Washington Gov. Bob Ferguson, who called Tiul Caal and his daughter’s detainment “wrong and un-American,” in a statement to the Spokesman-Review, did not respond to multiple requests for comment by press time.
The Attorney General’s Office — which is currently suing the Adams County Sheriff’s Office for KWWA violations — did not respond to questions from RANGE about whether the DOL sharing Tiul Caal’s data with CBP constituted a KWWA violation. Spokesperson Mike Faulk cited attorney-client privilege between the DOL and the Attorney General’s office.
City spokesperson Erin Hut said in a written statement to RANGE that the mayor is concerned about the issue and will be looking into it further.
Spokane City Council Member Zack Zappone described the data-sharing as “concerning,” and wrote in a statement that, “Government should be taking safeguards to protect people in our community, not put them at risk.”
Michael Cathcart, the lone conservative on the Spokane City Council, criticized what he sees as the state’s “inconsistency and false promises.”
“Washington has taken a strong public stance against federal cooperation, even going so far as to sue local jurisdictions for perceived violations. At the same time, it continues to maintain access to DOL systems because it understands those systems cannot be fully shut down without real public safety consequences,” he wrote, in part. “But the bigger issue with trust may not even be about formal access. A back door into the DOL system was apparently left open for years, potentially exposing sensitive data in ways that run directly against the intent of federal privacy laws like the Driver’s Privacy Protection Act. We still do not fully understand the scope and impacts of that exposure.
These contradictions create false commitments by many public officials that likely does a lot more harm than good and undermines public trust across the board including immigrant families.”
