SEATTLE — As fears mounted over increased immigration arrests and deportations across Washington state, five Snohomish County families believed their favorite campgrounds in Mount Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest would always be a place they could feel safe together.

Their belief shattered last Friday, when the families awoke to armed federal immigration agents — accompanied by U.S. Forest Service rangers — yelling and shaking their tents just before midnight, then arresting five men who emerged.

The nighttime raid traumatized the men’s children and wives, who are now scrambling to pay for an immigration lawyer and living expenses without their families’ primary breadwinners. They are also grappling with losing the one place their family could set aside fears of federal immigration enforcement and enjoy time together.

Without it, no place feels safe — not even their homes, said 19-year-old Carmen, who watched agents handcuff and arrest her father, uncles and godfathers in the middle of the night.

“That’s what broke me,” said Carmen, who asked to use her first name only to protect her and her family members’ safety. “(My cousins) were traumatized where they felt safe and they felt like they could be with their families.”

The Labor Day weekend raid appears to be among the first known instances of federal immigration agents partnering with the U.S. Forest Service to target people camping in federal forestlands. On July 13, U.S. Customs and Enforcement agents detained 13 people in an enforcement operation in North Carolina’s Pisgah National Forest, according to reporting by The 19th.

While immigration arrests have surged across the U.S. and Washington state over the last year, many have unfolded on busy city streets and been witnessed by passersby.

This surge follows President Donald Trump’s pledge to deport the “worst of the worst,” a mission that’s included hiring 12,000 more U.S. Customs and Enforcement agents since July 2025 and demanding 2,000 arrests a day across the U.S. earlier this summer. Many of those arrests were of people with no criminal records and with active immigration cases.

Four of the men arrested last Friday have no criminal records. One of the men, a 32-year-old, was convicted in 2016 in Snohomish County District Court on one count of first-degree negligent driving, a misdemeanor, state records show.

On Wednesday, a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson confirmed ICE agents last Friday arrested five men, all originally from Mexico, during a joint operation with the U.S. Forest Service in the Mount Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest. The men are not U.S. citizens and are in ICE custody pending removal proceedings, the spokesperson said.

In response to an inquiry about the arrests, the U.S. Forest Service said its law enforcement and investigations division does not enforce immigration laws, but “routinely” works with federal agencies that do. Those partnerships can include “targeted enforcement” in places where “public safety and federal land management responsibilities intersect,” according to a statement Tuesday from the agency.

Neither federal agency said what prompted them to target the men for deportation.

Rangers demanded IDs hours before raid

Carmen and her extended family live in the areas of Marysville and Everett and have camped at the Red Bridge campground in Mount Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest several times per year for the last four years. The site was their refuge to hike and cook together while the younger cousins played in the nearby river, Carmen said.

Over more than a dozen prior camping trips, the families had only once spoken to a U.S. Forest Service ranger who stopped by their campsite to warn them about fire danger. When family members who had gone for a six-hour hike returned around 6:30 p.m. Friday, they were surprised but not concerned to learn two rangers had visited their campsite hours earlier and warned those who had stayed behind to pick up their trash, Carmen said.

The family tidied their campsite, but the rangers returned shortly after 10 p.m. — this time demanding to see all of the adults’ IDs. When Carmen asked why, she said one of the rangers told her it was to have a record of them warning her family about their trash.

Carmen said she told the rangers some of her family members did not bring their IDs on the camping trip, and others had left theirs inside their cars parked several minutes away, she said.

“He said, ‘I can wait. You can go get them,’” she said. “He was sounding mad, and we were getting scared.”

The rangers collected and took pictures of IDs from three adults, then wrote down the full first and last names and dates of birth of the other adults in the group. The pictures and information, the rangers said, would be used in case they had to issue them tickets for not collecting their trash, Carmen said.

The rangers walked off and the families, relieved, went to bed inside their tents about 11 p.m., hoping to wake up early for another hike.

“Next thing you know, we wake up to someone outside shaking our tents forcefully, saying, ‘Come out, we’re police,’” Carmen said. “And, ‘Come out if you don’t want us to use our force against you guys.’”

Carmen, who had been sleeping in a tent with her mother, father and three younger sisters, said she stumbled outside, where three armed law enforcement agents in green vests shined flashlights in her eyes and demanded to know who else was inside her tent. One of the rangers who had come by earlier was standing with the agents, this time carrying a rifle. The second ranger stood farther away, near the families’ cars, she said.

Her father came outside and the agents asked him for his ID, telling him they were “investigating something” and asking if the campers had any drugs or guns with them. After photographing the man’s ID, Carmen said the agents asked to speak to her in private on the opposite side of the campgrounds.

“Then they told me, ‘OK, I need you to stay calm,’” she said. “And he’s like, ‘We’re actually immigration agents and we have to take your dad.’”

Carmen began to cry, realizing the agents were going to arrest her father and the four others on the trip. She said she begged them not to detain the men, and to consider their children who were sleeping and would wake up to find their fathers missing.

“I said, ‘No, you can’t take them. You’re ripping apart families,’” she said. “They said, ‘It’s the law, we have to do it.’”

It was ‘as if they were fishing’

One by one, Carmen watched the agents shaking her other family members’ tents and yelling at them to come outside until the other fathers emerged. The agents asked some of the men where they were born and if they had “papers” before handcuffing them, drawing screams from one of Carmen’s young cousins who begged the agents not to take her father, Carmen said.

After each man was handcuffed, the agents said into their radio, “‘We got one, we got one,’” Carmen said, “as if they were fishing.”

The agents lined up the men and gave them each a flashlight before starting to walk them toward the road where three trucks with flashing police lights were parked. Carmen said she felt a deep heaviness as the men said goodbye, asking her and their respective wives to be strong and “push through” before they were put into the trucks and driven off.

Left alone in the darkness with no cell service and without their husbands, the women rushed to wake their children and leave the campsite, terrified the agents would return, Carmen said.

Because of the holiday weekend, the families had to wait until Tuesday to speak to an immigration lawyer or the five men, who are being detained at Tacoma’s ICE detention facility. Carmen said her father told her he was scared he and his relatives would be separated and transferred to different facilities.

Back home in Snohomish County, Carmen said each day since last Friday has been painful. Her family is struggling to gather the $100,000 needed to pay their immigration lawyer to represent the five men, while also paying their rent and other bills. An online fundraiser another family member created to help cover legal fees and families’ living expenses had raised $58,000 by Friday.

Her cousins had to go to their first day of school on Tuesday without being dropped off by their fathers or getting to say goodbye to them. Carmen said she had to postpone her return to Everett Community College because she could no longer afford tuition without her father’s help.

“He’s always told us that we need to be better than everyone — better than what he was — and said, ‘I wasn’t able to study because I came here to give you guys a better life, so you guys should do it for me,’” Carmen said. “We’re trying our best to hang on.”

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