On August 21, 2025, UWCHR released our latest report, “Gross Human Rights Violations in Washington State: Enforced Disappearance and Refoulement,” tracing the connections between Washington state institutions and grave human rights violations against Washingtonian migrants by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP).
We found evidence of greater local involvement in such cases than previously known, including cases where people with Washington state ties were illegally expelled to a notorious El Salvador prison or transferred to U.S. military detention facilities at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Other cases include families with U.S. citizen children detained incommunicado by Border Patrol for days or weeks in Washington state.
While primary responsibility for these abuses rests on the U.S. federal government, we also documented the involvement of local public and private institutions in these practices. These include Seattle-Tacoma International Airport and King County International Airport (Boeing Field), both of which provide the infrastructure through which deportations happen daily; Washington State’s Department of Corrections, which collaborates with ICE in the detention of migrants completing a prison sentence; Signature Aviation, a private company providing fuel and support to private charter flights operating for ICE at King County International Airport; and the Washington State Investment Board (WSIB), which invests the retirement funds of public employees in GEO Group, as well as the firms that own Signature Aviation.
On Thursday, August 21st, we hosted a press conference to explore our findings, joined by partners and allies linking the report to their ongoing work:
“Human rights violations perpetuated by GEO Group and ICE are happening right in our backyard,” said La Resistencia organizer Josefina Mora-Cheung.
For years, La Resistencia has monitored and documented ICE Air flights from King County International Airport/Boeing Field. Mora-Cheung noted that in recent months, observers have recorded increased rates of ICE Air flights; the widespread use of shackles, including, in some cases, the use of the excessive full-body restraint known as the WRAP; inhumane transfer of people with medical conditions and illness; increased effort of ICE to hide information about ICE Air flights; families uncertain of their loved ones’ whereabouts; and a lack of transparency from King County and a failure to follow through on their commitments including sharing data on the number of passengers on any of these flights, or sharing a full list of ICE Air flights happening at the airport.
Mora-Cheung shared their call to action: “La Resistencia, with the partnership of UW Center for Human Rights, believes that it is critical to shed light on these blatant attempts to disappear our immigrant communities, and the escalated attacks on detained people both within and out of detention. We must work together to stop the attacks on immigrants, and the only way is by freeing them all.”
“No Washington state resident or worker deserves to be subjected to abuses like enforced disappearance and refoulement.” Pia Rivera-Jones, Deputy Director of the Peoples’ Organizing Initiative at Martin Luther King, Jr. County Labor Council, spoke to the report’s relevance for workers’ rights in Washington state:
“We are seeing that this report from UW Center for Human Rights is incredibly valuable because it is equipping us with the data to stand up for due process, for us to be prepared to bargain protective contracts that protect our migrant and immigrant workers from similar abuses, and also to start looking into certain agencies, start asking questions and seeing what else can be done and what can we do together.”
Malou Chávez, the executive director of Northwest Immigrant Rights Project—an organization defending and advancing the rights of immigrants through direct legal services, systemic advocacy, and community education—sees the ramifications of human rights violations against migrants in Washington state in her work:
“We are day to day, seeing how this administration’s goals of mass deportation, mass detention, are impacting our communities. We are witnessing how our communities and our loved ones are being snatched, apprehended, taken to a detention center. That includes people with criminal history, without criminal history, our colleagues, students, workers, our loved ones. It does not matter what the person’s background is. The secret removal and detention of people is harmful to all. The bottom line is that there needs to be transparency and accountability.”
UW Professor of Law Angélica Cházaro spoke out against continued collaboration between the Washington Department of Corrections and ICE:
Prof. Cházaro stated, “Today’s report gives everyday people the information we need to fight back, to push against Trump, yes, but also to push our own elected leaders to do better, to stop active cooperation between our state prison employees and ICE, to conduct audits of every state and local agency, including the Port of Seattle, to figure out exactly how our state and local government infrastructure is being used to facilitate ICE disappearing our neighbors, leaving their families in an excruciating limbo. This report should be prompting every named actor not to defend or justify their collaboration [with ICE] but to figure out how to end it. The details in the report call for nothing less.”
UW Center for Human Rights Director Prof. Angelina Godoy, described the intention of the report, saying, “It is fair to say to our elected officials who run these institutions, ‘What are you doing?’ And that is what this report is asking, we are asking them to stand up for the fundamental human rights of all Washingtonians. And when they tell us, as they have, that they don’t know that this is happening, and that even if they did know, there would be nothing they could do—that’s simply unacceptable.”
Prof. Godoy continued, “Do Washingtonians want their loved ones to be snatched off the street and vanished into a foreign gulag with no legal process? I don’t think so. Do Washingtonians want to board a flight by United Airlines, Alaska Airlines, Delta, or any of the other airlines operating out of Sea-Tac Airport that are secretly smuggling individuals onto flights in a concealed fashion, who may be transported to their deaths, alongside other passengers? I don’t think so. Do Washingtonians want our retirement funds invested in the companies that profit from these practices? I also don’t think so. That is what the report is here to put before the public of Washington, to inform us, to ask us what we can do better, because we believe our state deserves better. We believe all human beings have fundamental rights, and there is no excuse for their abrogation.”
Coverage of the press conference:
- KUOW, Gustavo Sagrero Álvarez: “Secrecy and enforced disappearances: WA human rights group sounds alarm about ICE“
- KREM 2 News, Emmalee Appel: “Report alleges several Washington institutions are complicit in ‘gross’ human rights violations amid uptick in ICE activity“
- UW Daily, Morgan Bortnick: “UW Center for Human Rights report finds ‘gross human rights violations’ in Washington state deportation cases“