The U.S. Department of Homeland Security on Tuesday, November 3, publicly pressed Washington State authorities to honour an immigration detainer for a man serving a prison sentence in Seattle — and said, in its own words, that Washington authorities have refused. DHS said U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement lodged the detainer on October 14 for Leomar Alexander Lopez Zambrano, a citizen of Venezuela whom DHS describes as an illegal alien, after he was convicted on two counts of third-degree child molestation and sentenced to 15 months in prison in Seattle, where DHS says he currently remains in custody. If the detainer continues to be refused, DHS said, Zambrano will be released after his sentence without ICE being notified. This article carries no details about any victim: the convictions involve a minor, and Awaaz Punjab does not identify minor victims or publish details that could do so.
Source: U.S. Department of Homeland Security (Nov. 3, 2026)
The DHS statement, issued from Washington under the headline “Sanctuary Insanity,” is a political document as well as a factual one, and its claims are reported here as DHS's claims. DHS said Zambrano illegally entered the United States through Texas in June 2023, was arrested by the U.S. Border Patrol, and was then released into the country by the Biden administration. DHS did not, in the statement, give a release date for Zambrano, name the specific Washington facility or agency holding him beyond locating his custody in Seattle, or include any response from Washington State, King County or Seattle officials. Independent reporting of the statement on Tuesday, including Jurelist's account, carried the same core facts — the October 14 detainer, the two convictions, the 15-month Seattle sentence, and DHS's call for Washington to cooperate — and likewise carried no Washington response.
Source: Jurelist (Nov. 3, 2026)
Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, in the statement, said: “This illegal alien has been convicted on TWO counts of child molestation, yet sanctuary politicians in Washington are refusing to honor the ICE detainer and hand this disgusting criminal over to us after he finishes his prison sentence.” He added: “DHS is calling on Washington authorities to honor this detainer and cooperate with us so we can make sure this pedophile can never again roam our streets and harm American children.” Those are the secretary's words and characterisations, reported as such; the underlying conviction and sentence figures are the factual core DHS published, and no Washington authority quoted on Tuesday disputed the conviction itself — the dispute DHS describes is over what happens at the prison gate.
Three things are established by DHS's own published statement: a detainer was lodged on Oct. 14, the man named was convicted on two counts and sentenced to 15 months, and DHS says Washington will not honour the detainer. Three things are NOT in the statement: his release date, which Washington agency holds him, and any Washington-side explanation. Where this article explains Washington law, it does so from Washington sources, separately sourced below.
What an ICE detainer actually is
An ICE detainer is a federal request — not a court order or a judicial warrant — asking a jail or prison to do two things: notify ICE before releasing a person ICE believes is removable, and, in some forms of the request, hold the person briefly beyond their release point so ICE can take custody. That distinction is the legal heart of fights like this one in state after state. Supporters of honouring detainers, including DHS under the current administration, argue they are how convicted offenders pass directly from a sentence into immigration custody instead of being released. Critics, including Washington legislators who wrote the state's law, argue that a civil immigration request should not extend a person's detention without a judge's warrant, and that local police cooperation with ICE makes immigrant communities afraid to report crime or cooperate with investigations.
Washington's law points the other way
Washington is not improvising its position case by case: the state legislature set it in 2019 in the Keep Washington Working Act, RCW 10.93.160. Research by the University of Washington Center for Human Rights and know-your-rights guidance from the Washington Immigrant Solidarity Network summarise what the Act does: it prohibits local police, sheriffs, jails and school resource officers from asking about immigration status, from holding someone on an ICE or CBP civil detainer or an ICE administrative warrant not signed by a judge, and from notifying ICE or CBP of a person's release in civil matters, and it bars local agencies from contracting to enforce immigration law. The same sources note one important exception: the state Department of Corrections — the prison system for people sentenced to more than a year — is exempted from those prohibitions. That exception is why the exact custodial agency matters in the Zambrano case, and why DHS's failure to name it leaves the legal position less clear than its headline suggests.
Source: University of Washington Center for Human Rights — Protecting Immigrant Rights
The Act has been fought over ever since. In a case reported by The Spokesman-Review and carried by Police1, Adams County Sheriff Dale Wagner took his battle with the state to Congress after Attorney General Nick Brown sued his office in March, accusing it of violating the 2019 law by helping federal agents detain and question people and sharing information with immigration officials — allegations Wagner denies. Supporters of the law in that reporting argued that forcing state and local police into immigration enforcement diverts their resources and undermines the community trust police rely on. That is the standing Washington argument on the other side of DHS's Tuesday statement, even though no Washington official was quoted responding to the Zambrano detainer itself in the coverage checked on Tuesday.
The two ways this ends
From here, the case has two practical endings, and DHS itself described the second one. If Washington authorities honour the detainer, Zambrano would be transferred to ICE custody when his sentence ends, and his future would be decided in immigration proceedings — where a conviction of this kind would be central to the government's case — rather than by release at the gate. If they do not, DHS says he “will be released back onto the streets without ICE being notified” when the 15 months are served. DHS did not say when that sentence ends, so no responsible report can give readers a release date; what can be said is that the argument is happening now, while he remains in custody, precisely because the transfer decision has to be made before the sentence runs out.
Why this matters beyond one case
Washington State is home to a large Punjabi and wider South Asian diaspora — in Seattle, Tacoma, Kent, Renton and the farming and trucking corridors of the Yakima and Skagit valleys — and detainer fights land differently in mixed-status families, among work-visa holders, and among truckers whose livelihood depends on licences, border crossings and clean records. A single DHS press release does not change anyone's immigration status, and it is not legal advice; what it signals is that Washington's 2019 limits and the federal government's detainer campaign are on a direct collision course, case by named case. For Washington readers who want verified help rather than rumours, the Washington Immigrant Solidarity Network's Deportation Defense Hotline is 1-844-724-3737, Monday to Friday, 6 a.m. to 6 p.m., according to its published guidance.
What happens next is, first, a Washington decision: whether the authority holding Zambrano treats the October 14 detainer as one it can or must honour — a question Washington law answers differently for a local jail than for the state prison system — and whether any Washington official publicly answers DHS's Tuesday statement. Nationally, expect this named-case pattern to continue: DHS has used the same release format for other detainer disputes, and each one tests the same fault line between a federal request and a state law. Awaaz Punjab will report a Washington response, a transfer, or a release in this case as a new development, with the same rule applied throughout this story: convictions are reported as convictions, official claims are attributed to the officials who made them, and no minor victim is ever named or described.