By Kari Mar and Luisa Loi
La Conner Community News
The question in Mount Vernon and Burlington has not been whether the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement activity has increased. Residents have watched it happen.
The question was how much.
Newly released federal records provide an answer: dramatically.
A La Conner Community News analysis found at least 111 ICE arrests explicitly recorded in Mount Vernon, Burlington, Sedro-Woolley and Anacortes since October 2022. Eighty-one of them — nearly three-quarters — occurred during the first seven months and five days of 2026.
The data affirms what residents have been seeing with their own eyes: ICE is operating in Mount Vernon and Burlington more frequently than at any other point covered by the nearly four years of records.
Mount Vernon accounted for 64 arrests in 2026 through Aug. 5. Burlington accounted for 15, with one each recorded in Sedro-Woolley and Anacortes.
By comparison, the data shows only two arrests in Skagit County cities during all of 2024 and 22 during 2025.
The increase accelerated this spring. The records show five local arrests in January, three in February and six in March. That rose to 10 in April, 16 in May, 21 in June and 17 in July. Three more were recorded during the first five days of August.
“Prior to June, we were losing multiple community members to ICE every week. Beginning in June, it has ramped up to multiple community members being abducted every day,” one of the leaders of a local immigrant support network who spoke on condition of anonymity told La Conner Community News in July.
The local spike closely mirrors — and in some respects exceeds — the statewide trend reported Thursday by The Seattle Times.
The Seattle Times reported that ICE arrested about 700 people in Washington in July, up from roughly 230 in February and about 50 in December 2024, the month before President Donald Trump returned to office.
The Times based its report on records obtained through public-records litigation by the Deportation Data Project, a University of California-based research group. La Conner Community News analyzed the same newly released federal data to isolate records naming Skagit County cities.
Arrests expand beyond people with convictions
The local records also reveal a significant change in whom ICE is arresting.
All eight Skagit County arrests recorded before Jan. 20, 2025, involved people ICE classified as “convicted criminals.”
That is no longer the case.
Of the 81 local arrests recorded in 2026:
- 30 involved people classified as convicted criminals;
- 15 involved people with pending criminal charges; and
- 36 involved people ICE classified as “other immigration violators.”
The shift became particularly pronounced this summer. Between June 1 and Aug. 5, 30 of 41 local arrests — 73% — involved people classified as “other immigration violators,” rather than people with convictions or pending charges.
Thirty-one of those 41 people were also marked “NO” in ICE’s final-removal-order field.
The classification does not establish that a person has never had any contact with the criminal justice system. It does show that ICE itself did not place the person in either of its two criminal categories at the time of arrest.
The local pattern is almost identical to what is happening statewide. The Seattle Times reported that about 70% of the people ICE arrested in Washington during June and July had neither criminal convictions nor pending charges reported by the agency.
Nationally, ICE made approximately 43,000 arrests in June and 49,000 in July, according to a New York Times analysis of the federal records. The New York Times found that a majority of the immigrants arrested in July had not been charged with or convicted of a crime. Fewer than 4% had a past violent-crime conviction, the newspaper reported.
“ICE will continue to make arrests routinely across the United States. All aliens who violate U.S. immigration law are subject to arrest and detention, regardless of their criminal histories,” an ICE spokesperson wrote in an email to La Conner Community News in July.
Most local arrests happened in the community
The Skagit County data does not support the idea that the increase is primarily the result of ICE taking custody of people already being held in local jails.
Of the 111 local records, 105 — 95% — were classified by ICE as at-large arrests. Six were classified as custodial arrests. All six custodial arrests occurred in Mount Vernon during 2026.
The arrests were also heavily concentrated in the morning. Eighty-three percent were recorded before noon, and 60% occurred between 5 and 10 a.m. Local advocates previously stated that immigrants are frequently detained during traffic stops in the early morning as they commute to the farms where they work.
On 19 separate city-date combinations, ICE recorded two or three arrests in the same community on the same day. Those clusters are consistent with coordinated enforcement activity, although the data does not establish whether the arrests were connected or part of formal operations.
The Seattle Times reported similar patterns elsewhere in Washington. Immigrant advocates told the newspaper that agents have stopped vans carrying construction, painting or landscaping equipment and have arrested people at gas stations, stores and other public locations. The newspaper did not report whether those specific tactics were used in Skagit County.
The New York Times reported that ICE had grown to approximately 29,000 employees by June, up from about 21,000 when Trump took office, and has increasingly relied on state and local law-enforcement partners. ICE is now approaching the administration’s target of 2,000 arrests per day, according to the newspaper.
The Skagit records do not explain what resources, intelligence or partnerships ICE is using locally. None of the local arrests was labeled as part of the federal 287(g) program, which deputizes participating local officers to perform certain immigration-enforcement functions.
Mount Vernon accounts for most arrests
Across the full period covered by the records, Mount Vernon accounted for 82 of the 111 arrests identified in Skagit County cities. Burlington had 19, Sedro-Woolley had nine and Anacortes had one.
No arrests were explicitly coded to La Conner, Concrete, Lyman, Hamilton, Bow, Edison, Rockport or Marblemount.
That does not mean no arrests occurred in those communities.
The federal dataset does not include a county field, and 760 Washington records have no city listed. Exact locations are also largely absent. Of the 111 local records, 100 use the generic location description “FDL GENERAL AREA, NON-SPECIFIC,” 10 contain no location description and one says only “Seattle Fugitive Operations.”
The figures therefore represent a minimum, not necessarily a complete count of ICE activity in Skagit County.
The Deportation Data Project and The Seattle Times have also cautioned that the underlying ICE records contain missing information and some duplicated entries. La Conner Community News removed two local rows that the dataset specifically flagged as duplicates and standardized spelling variations such as “Mount Vernon,” “Mt. Vernon” and “Sedro-Woolley.”
Even with those limitations, the direction of the data is unmistakable. What had been a growing collection of sightings and community reports is now a measurable pattern: ICE arrests have surged in Mount Vernon and Burlington, and the agency’s local focus has expanded well beyond people with criminal convictions.
Kari Mar is the editor and publisher of La Conner Community News.
Luisa Loi is a general assignment reporter for La Conner Community News.
