Amid a surge in civil immigration arrests in the Yakima Valley, community members are raising concerns about a viral video of an ICE arrest outside the Yakima police and jail building.The video, which was originally posted by a community member and later reposted Monday by the advocacy group Yakima Community Aid, has amassed more than 80,000 views on Instagram. It shows a Yakima corrections officer escorting a man to the gate at the south end of the Yakima Police Department, where three ICE agents apprehend him. In the video, the officer appears to hand a large plastic bag to one of the agents before closing the gate.The video has sparked concerns that the two agencies may be collaborating.Yakima Police Chief Shawn Boyle said that isn’t the case.Boyle said the officer in the video was releasing a DUI suspect who had been in custody at the jail. When a person is taken into custody, the department collects their personal belongings. When the person is released, the department’s procedure has been to wait until they reach the gate to return their property.“Sometimes there's knives or cigarettes or other contraband in the personal property, so the normal process would have been for him to walk to the gate, open the gate, the person walks out of the gate, then they hand them their property,” Boyle said.In this instance, ICE agents were waiting at the gate and took the man being released before the officer had the chance to return his property, Boyle said.“That corrections officer was kind of left in a predicament where he was still in possession of this person's property, and (the suspect) was now being handcuffed by the immigration officers, and so he made the choice, the reasonable decision, I believe, to hand that property to the officer who was taking him into custody so that property remained with him,” Boyle said. “Then, obviously, he turned around and went back to his duties.”Boyle said the Yakima Police Department has since changed its procedure to give people their belongings prior to opening the gate. He added that the apprehension happened outside of the Yakima Police Department’s property, and the department didn’t notify ICE about the person. He said he assumes the agents were using a court docket publicly available online, which shows release schedules.The police department, municipal court and the city jail are all housed in the Richard A. Zais Jr. Center for Law and Justice on South Third Street downtown.Community concernsJamie Ortiz, who took the video, is a volunteer with the Yakima Immigrant Response Network, or YIRN, a group focused on documenting immigration arrests and connecting affected families with resources. She regularly receives messages from people in the community with reports of ICE activity. Ortiz said a Yakima Community Aid organizer was inside the municipal courthouse the morning of the incident; Ortiz said she is not affiliated with the community aid group.Ortiz said she saw the immigration agents in the video waiting in their vehicles at the back gate for about half an hour before the man was released. Ortiz said she saw the agents get out of their vehicles just before the gate opened, at which point they apprehended the man and accepted the man's belongings from the Yakima corrections officer.Roughly 10 minutes later, Ortiz took another video of ICE agents apprehending a man inside the municipal court lobby.For months, federal agents’ use of court dockets to make arrests outside of the Yakima County and city jails has been scrutinized by immigrant rights advocates. Washington’s Courts Open to All Act, which went into effect in June 2020, restricts civil immigration arrests in or around courthouses and prohibits court staff from sharing information like citizenship status with immigration authorities.From her understanding, Ortiz believes the second incident she documented is a violation of that law."These people need to have their due process to be found guilty or innocent, and if they are guilty, then they need to pay the price," Ortiz said. "ICE going in after walking into court, ripping them out, sending them to ... Mexico or you know wherever — those victims aren't getting justice, are they? And that's the main reason for the Courts Open to All Act is to allow that due process to occur."ICE officials have previously told the Yakima Herald-Republic that the ability of law enforcement to make arrests at court facilities is "common sense" and is safer because people have gone through security screening. They also said that the Supremacy Clause of the U.S. Constitution makes it clear that state laws do not control federal law enforcement.Noemi Sanchez, a Yakima Community Aid organizer, said in a statement to the Yakima Herald-Republic that the group is deeply concerned by the footage of a community member leaving local custody and being immediately detained by ICE.Even if YPD didn’t directly contact ICE, Sanchez said, the incident raises a bigger question.“A system does not have to involve an explicit phone call between agencies to produce the same harmful result,” the statement said. “If federal immigration agents can use local jail information, release practices, public databases, or the physical infrastructure surrounding a police facility to identify and detain people as they leave local custody, immigrant communities are still being exposed to immigration enforcement through their contact with local policing systems. And that is what our community witnessed.”Sanchez added that the group wants to know what information about people in local custody is accessible to ICE, how federal agents are using that information, what information YPD provides when someone asks about a person’s release, whether Yakima can further restrict the publication or disclosure of information used for civil immigration enforcement, and what additional protections can be put in place around local jails, courts and other government spaces.The state’s Keep Washington Working Act also prohibits local law enforcement officers from assisting in civil immigration arrests.Boyle said the Yakima Police Department follows that law, and regularly has conversations with officers about it. Command staff have even gone as far as to have meetings with ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) supervisors to express concerns.“We focus on local law enforcement,” Boyle said. “We are not going to ask people where they're born, their nationality or where their immigration status is. So we encourage people, if they are victims of crime, to communicate with the police department so that we can solve their crime, and not be in fear that the Yakima Police Department is going to take enforcement action on them due to their immigration status.”