Immigration officials conducted an operation at the site of the largest wildfire in the state, fire officials said.
The incident appeared to be a rare case of federal officials enforcing immigration laws at the site of an emergency.
Officials in charge of fighting the Bear Gulch fire in the Olympic National Forest said in a brief statement Wednesday night that they were “aware of a Border Patrol operation” at the site of the fire.
“The Border Patrol operation is not interfering with firefighting activity and Bear Gulch firefighters continue to make progress on the fire,” the officials said in their statement.
Hours earlier, The Seattle Times reported that two people fighting the blaze had been arrested earlier in the day. It cited interviews with firefighters, whom it did not name, and what it described as video of a confrontation between the firefighters and law enforcement agents.
The fire officials did not say whom the operation had targeted or why. They referred questions about the operation to the Border Patrol office in Port Angeles, which referred questions from Peninsula Daily News on Thursday to a public information office in Blaine.
Federal and state officials did not immediately respond to inquiries about the fire.
The blaze in the forest was the largest in the state as of Thursday morning, having consumed nearly 9,000 acres.
The Seattle Times report said the federal agents had made the arrests after showing up Wednesday morning at a site near Lake Cushman, where two crews of private contractors had been assigned to cut wood for a local community. The Bear Gulch fire is burning next to the lake.
Sen. Patty Murray, D-Seattle, released a statement on Thursday about the arrests, criticizing President Donald Trump and his administration.
“Trump has undercut our wildland firefighting abilities in more ways than one — from decimating the Forest Service and pushing out thousands of critical support staff, to now apparently detaining firefighters on the job,” Murray said in the statement, according to The Hill.
“This administration’s immigration policy is fundamentally sick,” she continued, adding that “no one should assume this was necessary or appropriate.”
“Here in the Pacific Northwest, wildfires can, and have, burned entire towns to the ground. We count on our brave firefighters, who put their lives on the line, to keep our communities safe — this new Republican policy to detain firefighters on the job is as immoral as it is dangerous,” Murray said in the statement.
The Washington lawmaker said she’s reached out to the Trump administration requesting immediate answers on “the whereabouts of the detained firefighters, and the administration’s current policy regarding immigration enforcement during active wildfires,” according to The Hill.
Border enforcement operations do not normally occur at active firefighting sites. During the 2021 wildfire season, the Department of Homeland Security said immigration enforcement would not be conducted in places where disaster and emergency response and relief was being provided, “absent exigent circumstances.”
In some cases, federal immigration agents have assisted firefighters by helping with evacuation efforts.
The Bear Gulch fire was 13 percent contained of as Wednesday evening, officials said in an update. Officials have said that the fire, which started in early July, was caused by human activity. The exact cause is under investigation.
Parts of Washington state were under a red flag warning early Thursday. Many roads, trails and campfires inside Olympic National Forest were closed.
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Peninsula Daily News contributed to this report.
