Carmen Paniagua’s phone had sat silent all day, and she began to worry.

It was early December, and her brother-in-law was supposed to call. He was being held at the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facility in Tacoma, Washington.

“I knew something was wrong,” Paniagua said. “There was no way he was going that many hours without contacting us.”

Every hour, she looked him up in the immigration agency’s online detainee locator database. He was listed in Tacoma – every hour – until shortly after midnight. He had been scuttled 1,300 miles to El Paso, Texas.

“When he called me – as soon as he was able to – he didn’t know what day it was, what time it was,” Paniagua said. “I feel like they’re doing this on purpose. They’re just trying to get him tired and see that there’s no hope for him, so he self-deports.”

As detentions ramp up this year under the Trump administration, detainees are undergoing dizzying, cross-country flights more frequently, an OPB analysis of deportation data shows.

Planes are leaving the Pacific Northwest, ferrying detainees thousands of miles away. The Trump administration has sent five times more people at least 1,000 miles than in the last year of former President Joe Biden’s term.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security did not respond to OPB’s questions about its transfer policy.

Some detainees are moving so circuitously that it seems to defy explanation.

A 35-year-old woman from Brazil spent 86 days ping-ponging between three states: from Washington state to Arizona to Louisiana, then back to Arizona, then Washington, to Arizona, and then Louisiana again.

The rapid relocations can cause detainees to miss court dates, impact their ability to connect with lawyers, and even affect their health, legal experts and family members said.

“It’s a huge, huge hurdle,” Jordan Cunnings, legal director at Innovation Law Lab, said.

She noted transfers have been increasing all year, but have hit a higher gear this fall.

OPB analyzed federal detention data stemming from ICE’s Seattle Field Office, which oversees immigration enforcement across multiple states in the region, including Oregon and Washington state.

Immigration enforcement officials have sent 1,500 people on trips more than 1,000 miles from their initial detention facility.

For comparison, 337 people detained under Biden last year traveled that distance. In 2023, before the election year, that number was just 90 people.

For family members like Paniagua, the transfers seem punitive.

“Why else would they take him so far away from us?” she said.

Her brother-in-law, José Paniagua Calderon, made national headlines after video footage appeared to show him screaming in pain after ICE officers allegedly drove over his foot during his Dec. 4 arrest. The attention prompted U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s top spokesperson to describe his screams as an “Oscar-level performance.”

Tricia McLaughlin, in a post to the social media site X, said the X-rays “showed ZERO fractures, dislocations or injuries.”

Paniagua Calderon told his family he was X-rayed, but hasn’t been able to see the images.

Carmen Paniagua and other family members were only able to visit him once at the Northwest ICE Processing Center in Tacoma. When they got there, her brother-in-law was already seated in the visitation room behind a glass wall, visible only from the shoulders up.

“He said he was in pain,” Carmen Paniagua said. “We didn’t want him to concentrate on that, so we started talking about positive things, so he wouldn’t get distracted and not think of that.”

Then, he was transferred to El Paso, Texas. Carmen Paniagua said she’s talked to her brother-in-law just once over the phone. All other communication has been written, she said, but he’s described worsening pain in his legs.

The rise in transfers coincides with a scarcity of open space at detention centers.

Tacoma’s detention facility, with nearly 1,600 beds, is the largest in the Pacific Northwest. It is the most common stop for people detained in the region. And, for people detained in 2023 and 2024, it was most commonly the final stop before being either released or deported.

According to the data, the facility’s busiest stretch under Biden was in February and March 2024 – at about 50% capacity.

Since President Donald Trump returned to office, the facility has been at least at 80% capacity every month. It is often almost entirely full.

Top immigration officials are now playing a grim version of musical chairs.

In recent court depositions, Seattle Field Office Director Cammilla Wamsley said detainees are being moved more quickly to accommodate the surge in immigration arrests.

More transfers, she said, allows them to “maximize” the “capacity of the limited bed space we have on hand, so we can increase arrests.”

“It’s like a hand-in-hand thing,” Wamsley told attorneys.

For detainees, families and immigration attorneys, the transfers are coming at a whipsaw pace.

Under Trump, nearly 2,500 detainees in the Pacific Northwest jurisdiction have been transferred at least once, according to the data. Of those, 650 have been transferred at least three times. Twenty-seven people have been transferred six times.

A 37-year-old Ecuadorian man who was picked up in June near Seattle was transferred, on average, every four days.

After his initial stop in Seattle, he was flung 5,600 miles in less than a month before being deported.

Portland resident and Venezuela native Yusmari – who declined to provide her last name out of concern for her and her detained partner’s safety – told OPB her partner was shuttled from Tacoma to Texas and then to two separate facilities in Louisiana over the course of four days.

“It’s a shock, a fear that you don’t know what’s happening or where he is, if he’s OK, if he’s not OK, if he’s eaten anything, if he’s had water,” Yusmari said in Spanish, which OPB translated. “It’s something that would destabilize anyone.”

The out-of-state transfer led Yusmari’s partner to attend two separate immigration hearings without an attorney, she said. Yusmari said the River Correctional Center in Louisiana put him in solitary confinement.

Louisiana has been described by other outlets, such as The Guardian and The New York Times, as very effective at deporting people. It is also among a list of states that don’t allow lawyers to represent someone remotely. They have to appear in-person.

“There have been many cases where we’ve had attorneys in the Northwest ready-to-go, but then say ‘I can’t move forward anymore,’ because a judge won’t allow remote attorneys,” said Cunnings, of Innovation Law Lab.

The organization both represents some immigrants and helps match them with attorneys elsewhere.

Families are left scrambling. So are attorneys and immigrants’ rights advocates.

Natalie Lerner, an attorney who is heavily involved in immigration issues, described how difficult it can be just to try to find the detainee.

“Each time they’re transferred, there’s a different system to learn to re-establish contact,” Lerner said.

Even when they do find the person, the threat lingers that they can be spirited away again by the time a family tracks down an immigration attorney who wants to take the case.

“Some immigration lawyers will follow people, but it depends on the lawyer,” Lerner said.

A coalition in Portland, including Innovation Law Lab, the CLEAR clinic and a farmworkers’ group, are suing the Trump administration for shuttling detained people so quickly that attorneys can’t find them and give legal advice.

Carmen Paniagua said she and other family members are still trying to find an attorney for her brother-in-law. But while they searched for a lawyer in El Paso, he was transferred to a county jail in Brazil, Indiana.

The sudden, 1,200-mile diversion felt designed to dangle him just out of reach, she said on Saturday.

“No family should have to fight this hard just to know where their loved one is, or whether they are safe. No family should be kept in the dark while their relative is transferred like cargo across the United States,” Paniagua said. “We demand answers. We demand accountability. And we demand that his rights, including his right to medical care and humane treatment, be respected immediately.”

U.S. DHS did not comment on the claims made by Carmen Paniagua or Yusmari about detainees’ treatment.

OPB reporters Tony Schick and Alejandro Figueroa contributed to this reporting.

METHODOLOGY:

In order to find transfer data, OPB analyzed the arrests and detentions data collected by the Deportation Data Project, a group of academics and lawyers who have been publishing droves of immigration data they’ve obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests.

OPB used Google Colab as a python notebook and analyzed the data using the Pandas library in Python 3. OPB used GeoPy library for calculating mileage.

The analysis included: identifying all unique individuals whose arrest fell under the Seattle Area of Responsibility, filtering those individuals in a separate spreadsheet of detentions, then analyzing those detentions and how the individual traveled.

News Source : https://www.opb.org/article/2025/12/22/under-trump-northwest-immigration-detainees-are-traveling-further-from-families-legal-help/