Posted in Places to Visit

National Park Service Police Are Working With ICE to Arrest Immigrants

   Published Date: March 16, 2026

After years of outreach to Latino communities to welcome this underserved groups, the National Park Police is teaming up with ICE to arrest and deport Latinos visiting land under National Park administration. According to a recent article in the Washington Post, at least ten immigrants were taken into custody at National Park Service (NPS) territory in the Washington area. As the Latino community learns about ICE and the National Park Police working together they are likely to avoid NPS land where they may be pulled over for being Latino and turned over to ICE.

The Post gives three examples of when this happened in the last eight months:

“During the Trump administration’s law enforcement surge in D.C., U.S. Park Police tailed a Guatemalan man along Rock Creek Parkway, following him to a market in the Petworth neighborhood that September day because, they said, he had been driving with a ladder on his van.

When he stopped, according to court documents, federal immigration agents showed up and took him away.
In December, a pool maintenance worker driving his employer’s van approached a road barricade just outside the city and was instructed by Park Police to stop. But it was Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents who scanned his driver’s license and arrested him on the spot, said the worker, whose identity was withheld in court documents.
And in another December arrest that started with Park Police, ICE agents handcuffed a mechanical repair worker from Nicaragua who was in the United States on humanitarian parole and sent him to a detention center to be deported.”
The new policy will discourage non-whites from visiting NPS sites.
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Author: Patrick Young