The Washington attorney general claims in a new lawsuit that the sheriff in rural Adams County has been breaking state law for at least three years by helping federal immigration officers round up and collect information on suspected undocumented residents.
And since the election of President Donald Trump, Sheriff Dale J. Wagner has taken the position that the Keep Washington Working Act, a state law passed in 2019, is “illegal,” the lawsuit states.
The law, passed with bipartisan support, restricts the ability of local authorities to participate in the enforcement of federal immigration law.
“The State cannot stand by when elected officials publicly boast that they are breaking state law and putting their own communities at risk,” Attorney General Nick Brown said in the lawsuit, which was filed Monday in Spokane County Superior Court.
Wagner, however, disagrees.
“The state’s restrictions attempt to tie the hands of law enforcement, making it harder to cooperate with federal agencies that help keep dangerous individuals off our streets,” Wagner wrote in a statement posted to Facebook on Monday. “Public safety should never be a political issue, yet this lawsuit prioritizes ideology over the safety of our communities.”
According to the state in the lawsuit, the law allows law enforcement agencies to focus on their core duties of public safety by protecting all residents fairly and building trust with the community.
Adams County is in the southeast part of the state, about 80 miles south of Spokane.
The lawsuit sets the stage for another legal showdown as the Trump administration takes aim at “sanctuary” cities and states that decline to cooperate with large-scale deportation of migrants.
But the Washington case differs from ongoing cases in Louisiana and Indiana where the state attorneys general have gone after sheriff’s departments that have refused to cooperate with ICE operations.
Defending the Adams County Sheriff’s Office and the county, the other defendant named in the lawsuit, are lawyers from America First Legal, an organization co-founded by Trump aide Stephen Miller.
“Stephen Miller’s extreme views on immigrants are no secret,” the lawsuit states. “He has repeated white nationalist talking points and is responsible for shaping some of the Trump Administration’s harshest immigration policies.”
In 2019, the Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil rights group, received a trove of emails from before the 2016 election in which Miller cited and promoted white nationalist ideologies of white genocide, immigrants as criminals and other views.
In a statement released on Feb. 26, before the lawsuit was filed, America Legal First confirmed it was already helping Adams County defend itself “against the unlawful and abusive effort by Washington state officials to enforce illegal and dangerous sanctuary laws.”
On Feb. 20, a law firm allied with American Legal First urged Brown not to sue the sheriff’s office or Adams County.
“Federal law is supreme over state law, and Adams County cannot discriminate against the federal government and its immigration enforcement efforts, nor can the County impede these efforts, as the Sanctuary State Statute requires,” attorney Joel B. Ard wrote in a letter to Brown.
Brown, in the lawsuit, insisted that “Washington has the right and the responsibility to decide for itself how to use its own resources to keep residents safe and the economy strong.”
“The federal government has no authority to coerce or direct local law enforcement for its own purposes,” the lawsuit states.
NBC News reached out to Wagner, who has been the Adams County sheriff since 2015, for comment about the lawsuit. He is the top law enforcement officer in a part of the state where agriculture is the main industry and more than half of the 20,000-plus residents are Hispanic.
Brown, in the lawsuit, charges that Wagner’s deputies “have unlawfully held people in custody based solely on their immigration status.”
“They have gone out of their way to enable federal immigration agents to interview or question people in custody, including transporting people in county vehicles expressly for that purpose,” the suit states.
Also, Wagner’s deputies “have proactively and routinely shared the nonpublic, personal information of hundreds of Washingtonians — including birth dates, home addresses, driver’s license numbers, and fingerprints — with federal immigration officials,” the suit states. “All of this conduct expressly violates state law.”
Brown said that the county’s refusal to comply with the Keep Washington Working Act (KWW) is an “anomaly” in the state and that his office has, since last year, been “engaged in good faith settlement negotiations in the hopes of resolving the case without costly litigation.”
“But the inauguration of President Donald Trump in January 2025 changed things,” the suit states. “Adams County and the Sheriff took a new approach — rather than comply with KWW, they now claim it is illegal.”