Motel 6 will pay $12 million for handing guest lists over to ICE

For the second time in just a few months, Motel 6 is settling a lawsuit after giving private guest information to Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

The hotel chain agreed to pay $12 million in a lawsuit filed by the state of Washington, NPR reports. Washington's attorney general Bob Ferguson said Motel 6 shared information of about 80,000 guests with ICE between 2015 and 2017, per NPR.

The information led to investigations targeting guests with Latino-sounding names in the Puget Sound region, and many ended up facing questioning from ICE, reports NPR.

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"According to our interviews with employees at Motel 6, ICE agents would circle the names that looked Latino-sounding and ran those names through a database and then would detain individuals based on those random checks," Ferguson told NPR.

Reporters at The Phoenix New Times first uncovered the practice in Sept. 2017, discovering that ICE agents had made numerous arrests at Motel 6's in predominantly Latino neighborhoods in Arizona. Motel 6 agreed to pay $7.6 million in damages in November of 2018 and said the practice would be discontinued at that time, per NPR.