FERNDALE — The warehouses with barbed-wire fencing are nestled among a heating and air conditioning supply company, an animal health distributor and a Mexican restaurant and nightclub.
This nondescript industrial park on the southern edge of Ferndale is where the Department of Homeland Security has operated since 2018 with two satellite offices.
One facility is being used by Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), said Robert Hammer, Special Agent in charge of Homeland Security Operations in the Pacific Northwest.
The lesser-known division of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), has been operating out of the complex since 2020. The group investigates the illegal movement of drugs, guns, money, child exploitation and human trafficking across the U.S. border, according to its website.
A U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility operates out of a warehouse in a business park in Ferndale. (Hailey Hoffman/Cascadia Daily News) “Because it’s an investigative office, most all of our investigations are plainclothes detectives, and unmarked vehicles,” Hammer said.
The agents had operated without much notice until local immigration and farmworker rights groups learned about their presence at the Pacific Industrial Park in Ferndale.
At a time immigration reform is one of the country’s pressing issues, ICE has come under increasing public scrutiny in recent years.
Members of Bellingham’s Immigration Advisory Board and Community to Community Development, an immigrant and farmworkers rights group, have worked to figure out what takes place at the complex.
They first suspected ICE’s presence in Ferndale when a Whatcom County immigrant said he was detained at an unknown office in the city in August 2018. But they were unable to identify a location.
Then last summer three county residents living in the United States without legal permission said they were held at the industrial park complex.
The information led Brenda Bentley and Liz Darrow, members of Community to Community Development, to organize weekly protests near the buildings, drawing 10 to 20 activists.
“The vigils are a moral stance to a human rights issue,” said Bentley, 56. “I believe we have an obligation to stand in solidarity with our undocumented community to expose ICE and where they hide in our communities.”
Approximately a dozen people join the Community to Community protest outside the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Ferndale each week. (Hailey Hoffman/Cascadia Daily News) To confirm ICE’s location, the organizers talked to neighboring businesses about what was taking place at the office park complex and discovered through public records an encroachment permitting fee “to place entrance cable to new DHS-ICE building at 1390 Commerce Pl.”
Also, emails from the City of Ferndale, obtained through a public records request by the blog Noisy Waters Northwest, provided more evidence, including a second building rented by the government at 5200 Industrial Pl. Cascadia Daily News also has obtained copies of the emails.
A description of the second building lists one tenant as the Bureau of Customs and Border Protection, or Border Patrol. Like ICE, the Border Patrol is under the umbrella of the Department of Homeland Security. Border Patrol began leasing the building in 2018.
According to a company profile, the primary functions of the Border Patrol office involve finance, taxation, monetary policy and federal government business. A van with DHS license plates was parked in the building’s lot recently on a weekday but otherwise no visible signs of the agencies’ presence could be found.
“At first, we really thought it was one place, now there’s a second place,” said Alfredo (Lelo) Juarez Zeferino, a member of the city’s Immigration Advisory Board. “How many more unmarked buildings are there?”
Mahmoud (Sam) Boulos, a local businessman and founder of SYB Holding Co., who owns and leases both buildings to the government, declined interview requests.
U.S. officials agreed to be more transparent about the facilities after Bentley, Darrow and others publicized their activities. Hammer organized a tour for Immigration Advisory Board members Dec. 20 to try to allay community concerns about the facility.
“We wanted to make sure that they could see for their own what actually is inside that building,” Hammer said. “We just want to make sure the community is informed about what is and what isn’t taking place in their community.”
Hammer said many of his detectives work in unmarked buildings to “protect not only the integrity of the investigation, [but] sometimes there’s undercover officers.”
Agents need to protect the identities of victims and citizens who come to the office to assist investigations, Hammer noted.
Darrow, an advisory board member who participated in the tour, said the Homeland Security Investigations facility had three 6-by-8 foot holding cells, with a bench and a toilet in each. She and her colleagues saw multiple interrogation rooms, and an armored vehicle, military-style uniforms and gas masks in a garage.
Darrow, 41, still had concerns about U.S. immigration law enforcement’s presence after the tour.
“Nobody wants drugs or human trafficking,” she said of the investigative unit’s cross-border duties. But “they still can and do detain individuals whose only crime is not having paperwork.”
Hammer said in a follow-up statement to Cascadia Daily News that no one is detained at the Ferndale facility for more than several hours.
“Probable cause is required for an arrest and those individuals are processed, fingerprinted and transported to court or an accredited detention facility in an expeditious manner in accordance with HSI policy,” he said.
ICE operates out of a second building in the same complex. (Hailey Hoffman/Cascadia Daily News) The existence of unmarked federal law enforcement buildings in Bellingham’s backyard concerns immigrant families who fear deportation, Juarez said.
Juarez, who picks berries at local farms, said people don’t know where to find family members when they are detained for violations of U.S. immigration laws.
“For the family member inside, they don’t know exactly where they’re at to let the people on the outside know,” Juarez added.
Juarez has experienced the fear of being inside an ICE holding cell firsthand. In 2015, he was detained for eight hours in a facility he cannot clearly identify to this day. Community to Community Development representatives aided his release before U.S. officials could deport him.
In August, the city settled a federal civil lawsuit alleging a Bellingham police officer used racial profiling during a traffic stop when contacting immigration agents about Juarez, who was 15 at the time.
The police department generally does not enforce federal immigration laws, although council members in 2017 declined a request to declare Bellingham a sanctuary city. The Whatcom County Sheriff’s Office follows the state’s immigration restrictions that limit local authorities from assisting federal agents in roundups of unauthorized people.
The Center for Human Rights at the University of Washington reported ICE and Border Patrol agents made 376 apprehensions in Blaine and Sumas over 15 months between 2019–2020. The numbers were among the state’s highest due to the proximity of these towns to the border between the United States and Canada.
Immigration Advisory Board members plan to lobby Bellingham officials to open a place where local families can get help finding those who have been detained by immigration agents.
In the meantime, Darrow and Bentley continue to protest and monitor ICE’s activities. Bentley, who gives fellow protesters hand-painted picket signs at the weekly rallies, hopes the public pressure forces government officials to abandon Ferndale.
“Maybe they’ll move on,” she said. “We have the stubbornness and the will to turn up every week.”
