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A federal appeals court has kept alive a Ritzville man’s civil rights case against Adams County, ruling this week that his lawsuit over being held for U.S. Border Patrol without a judge’s order can move forward — the same week a Washington Attorney General’s lawsuit accusing the county of the same practice went to trial in Spokane.
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed on Sept. 21 a district court’s decision allowing Serafin Rangel-Sembrano’s due-process claims against Adams County to proceed, according to the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project (NWIRP), which represents him, and court filings tracked by legal reporting service Law360. The panel held that the lower court had jurisdiction and that existing case law does not block his constitutional claim that he was detained without a bond hearing.
Rangel-Sembrano’s case, filed in U.S. District Court in Eastern Washington, describes a chain of events that has become the county’s most consequential legal exposure. According to the complaint on file with NWIRP, he was arrested March 9, 2023, on a nonviolent charge that was later dropped, and held at the Franklin County Jail, which contracts with Adams County to house its inmates. He was granted a personal-recognizance release on a separate municipal charge, and the complaint says the district court’s release order reached jail staff by 1:23 p.m. on March 10, 2023. Instead of releasing him, the complaint alleges, an Adams County Sheriff’s deputy — identified as Deputy Evan Armstrong — had him transported more than 70 miles to Ritzville and turned over to Border Patrol without a judicial warrant.
That transfer is the conduct at the center of a separate, larger case: Washington Attorney General Nick Brown’s lawsuit against Adams County and its sheriff’s office, filed in Spokane County Superior Court in March 2025 under the state’s Keep Washington Working Act. The AG’s office alleges that, since at least 2022, Adams County deputies held people in jail based on their immigration status, helped federal agents question people already in county custody, transported detainees in county vehicles for handoff to immigration authorities, and shared confidential personal information with federal officials — all conduct the state law was written to prohibit for local police and sheriffs.
That case reached a bench trial this week in Spokane County Superior Court, according to KHQ, with a judge — not a jury — hearing the state’s evidence that Adams County’s practices violated the 2019 law. The hearing was expected to run through Thursday. Brown’s office has said the county was in “good faith settlement negotiations” late last year before talks broke down.
Adams County Sheriff Dale Wagner has not backed down from the practices at issue. He has publicly rejected the state’s suit, calling it an attack on public safety and saying the county intends to keep cooperating with federal immigration agents regardless of the outcome. Wagner has argued the Keep Washington Working Act “ties the hands” of local law enforcement and accused the state of “prioritizing ideology over the safety of our communities.” The U.S. Department of Justice has taken the unusual step of intervening on the county’s side, arguing in a separate federal filing that Washington’s law conflicts with federal immigration authority and the U.S. Constitution, and that the state’s claims should be dismissed outright.
What has not surfaced publicly in either case is testimony from anyone held under the challenged practices beyond Rangel-Sembrano himself — no jail roster data, no count of how many people have been transferred to federal custody since 2022, and no accounting from the Adams County Commissioners, who fund the sheriff’s office and the county’s jail contract with Franklin County, of what liability the county may be carrying into a verdict. The commissioners have not issued a public statement on either case, and the county’s Sheriff page and public meeting agendas posted online make no mention of the trial.
The stakes reach beyond the courtroom. Adams County’s jail does not house its own inmates — it pays Franklin County to do so, a detail buried in the Rangel-Sembrano complaint that means every transfer decision on the record was made by an Adams County deputy acting inside a jail the county does not operate. Othello, where farmworkers make up a majority of the workforce that keeps the county’s food-processing plants running, has the most immediate stake in how the sheriff’s office treats immigration status during ordinary bookings — traffic stops, misdemeanor holds, the routine business of small-town policing that, if the state’s case succeeds, could be forced to look very different.
Neither case has produced a ruling on the merits as of this writing. If the Spokane County Superior Court judge rules against the county, Adams County could be ordered to change how its deputies handle immigration holds; if the Ninth Circuit’s decision stands, Rangel-Sembrano’s individual claim for damages proceeds toward its own trial. Either outcome will be decided in a courtroom more than 60 miles from Ritzville, over a policy set inside the Adams County Sheriff’s Office and defended, so far, by the sheriff alone.
Sources: Northwest Immigrant Rights Project, KHQ, Washington Attorney General’s Office, KHQ.
