ICE has confirmed the arrest of a Kenyan national who was working for a Washington state agency that serves children, according to RedState. One arrest. One illegal alien. One state payroll. Small story on the count sheet. It shows how deep this goes.

The details are what you'd expect. A foreign national in the country illegally, holding down a job inside a government agency tasked with looking after kids. Washington state runs background checks for the people it hires, or at least it claims to. Somehow a man with no legal right to be in the United States at all cleared whatever screening the state had on the books and collected a paycheck from the taxpayers.

For those who don't follow this beat, an ICE arrest confirmation means the agency has vetted the identity, checked the immigration history, and put its name on the record. The press likes to muddy this. A confirmation is a documented arrest of a documented illegal alien, not a rumor from a neighbor or a tip line call.

Twenty-six years in the Border Patrol taught me that the worksite angle is the part people should pay attention to. Illegal aliens don't just wander into state employment by accident. Somebody hired him. Somebody processed his paperwork. Somebody in a state office looked at a Kenyan national and decided the normal rules didn't apply. Whether that somebody used a stolen Social Security number, accepted a foreign ID, or simply waved him through, those are questions Washington's governor should be answering this week. She won't, but she should.

Washington is a sanctuary state, so none of this should surprise anybody. The legislature in Olympia has spent years building a wall between state agencies and federal immigration enforcement. State workers are barred from asking about immigration status in most cases. The result is exactly what you'd predict: an illegal alien ends up on the payroll of an agency that deals with children, and nobody in the state apparatus lifts a finger until federal agents show up and do the job the state refused to do.

The children's agency angle matters. This is not a meatpacking plant or a construction site. This is an institution built around vulnerable kids, funded by your tax dollars, staffed in part by a man who had no lawful right to be in the country, let alone drawing a public salary. Parents in Washington trust these agencies with their families. The state owes them an explanation of how a person who should have been flagged by ICE ended up inside the system instead.

The predictable response is already forming. Advocates will call it a tragedy, say he was just working, claim the arrest tears apart a workplace or a community. I've heard the speech a thousand times. Working illegally is still illegal. Every job held by an illegal alien is a job taken from someone with a right to be here, and every state dollar paid to one is a dollar stolen from the citizens who funded it.

Watch for the follow-up on this one. ICE confirmations usually mean there's an immigration court date coming and a removal proceeding behind it. If he has prior encounters or an old deportation order, the process moves fast. If Washington officials stonewall the paperwork, that'll tell you how deep the sanctuary protection runs.

The count moves up one. A Kenyan national is off a state payroll and into the system where he should have been all along. Meanwhile, Washington's agencies keep operating under rules that made this possible in the first place, and Olympia will keep pretending it's nobody's fault.

Final tally: one arrest, one sanctuary state embarrassed, zero answers from the governor's office. We'll take the one.