UWCHR’s Research Coordinator Phil Neff sits down with Andrea Marcos, reflecting on his time as he prepares to depart after thirteen years at the Center for Human Rights. In July 2026, Phil will move on to a new role as Senior Research Analyst with the Deportation Data Project.
Andrea Marcos: Phil! It’s so sad to sit down with you to do this interview, but also an honor to get some reflection time with you. You started at the Center in 2013? That’s thirteen years ago! Can you set the scene a little bit for us? What was the Center like then, what was the work, what did you think you were getting into when you started?
Phil Neff: Yes, I had relatively recently moved back to Seattle from Guatemala, where I worked for a couple of years as part of Network in Solidarity with the People of Guatemala (NISGUA). I was invested in and closely tracking issues around justice for wartime human rights violations in Central America because that was a big part of the work that I was doing with NISGUA. The Center for Human Rights was just three years old at that time and a Center project about the Yellow Book really caught my eye. The Center was trying to track down information about individuals mentioned in the Yellow Book and individuals who were reported killed or disappeared during the war. I eventually applied for and was hired for the Project Coordinator job for Unfinished Sentences, working on the Yellow Book and the Testimony Archive.
Doing work related to historical human rights violations in Central America, and immigrant rights in the U.S., have been through lines of my time at UWCHR. I think the most interesting, exciting, and challenging piece about working at the Center for Human Rights has been that for each of the projects we’ve taken on, we’ve had to either learn a new skill set or make connections with other people who had skills necessary for that project. For the Yellow Book, we had to learn how to rigorously compare multiple sets of lists of potential victims of human rights crimes. For the Testimony Archive, we had to learn how to edit and publish hours worth of oral histories. We’ve had to learn different skill sets through that work, particularly with data analysis.
If I were to just look at a government data set about immigration enforcement, for example, there’s so much I wouldn’t understand if I wasn’t also getting information from on-the-ground advocates and impacted community members. That’s all part of data analysis, I think.
AM: What do you think about the role of data in the work of the Center and in human rights research at large?
PN: I am always excited to learn new skills in analyzing and presenting data. I think any research endeavor involves the collection of data in one form or another. Either you’re interviewing someone and then converting their words into data or you’re collecting documents and doing a systematic review of those. For me, all research is data science, essentially. The image we have of data analysis is that you get a big spreadsheet and it has all the information you would possibly want in it, right? And sure, that can be a really useful resource, but it also doesn’t tell the whole story. What I really appreciate about the Center’s research approach is trying to use documentation and data sets to understand what’s happening on the ground, and the impacts in real people’s lives—and how that can then be utilized for positive outcomes for advancing human rights. If I were to just look at a government data set about immigration enforcement, for example, there’s so much I wouldn’t understand if I wasn’t also getting information from on-the-ground advocates and impacted community members. That’s all part of data analysis, I think.
What I really appreciate about the Center’s research approach is trying to use documentation and data sets to understand what’s happening on the ground, and the impacts in real people’s lives—and how that can then be utilized for positive outcomes for advancing human rights.
AM: I have interviewed a number of students who’ve worked at the Center, and each and every one of them at some point says something about a unique ethos of learning and conducting research here, similar to what you just mentioned. Students highlight things like both learning the craft of meticulous research while balancing emergent human rights needs and relationships. Can you talk about this? What do you think about the culture of research and the practice at UWCHR?
PN: It’s been the privilege of a lifetime to get to work with Angelina and at the Center for so many years. The Center for Human Rights is a collective project. So much of that particular ethos is, in part, a reflection of Angelina and the Center’s values and commitments. Sometimes the work of the Center can feel similar to the philosophy of accompaniment: doing research in the spirit of accompaniment, walking alongside those we are in partnership with, trying to do research that is directly informed by the needs of partners, and then directing the research findings back to communities.
I think to be a good human rights researcher, you have to care, connecting to the broader importance of the work. You have to care through both the mundane and boring parts of the work, as well as the engaged, motivating, rich, relational parts of the work. You have to care about the people you work with, you have to care about the subject matter and the gravity that it has. And you have to take care in the process.
AM: You’ve seen the Center through a lot of really important work that has led to things like exposing King County’s role in deportation flights, raising concerns about the use of automated license plate readers threatening immigrant and reproductive rights, revealing ICE’s use of a Cowlitz County juvenile jail to detain migrant minors, documenting crimes against humanity in El Salvador, monitoring compliance with Washington state’s sanctuary laws, and so much more. But I know that not all of our research projects “work out.” Tell me about that—how do you view “failed projects” when it comes to human rights research? When you get documents back after public records and they don’t tell the story you thought they would, what do you do?
PN: Failure is just part of the research process. Research involves iteration, you try one thing and if it doesn’t work out, you try another, and then you try again and again. The intergenerational model of the Center helps support that process—we do work that spans more than one student’s timeline, which is typically not long enough to process public records. We get responses to FOIA requests sometimes eight years later, long after the original student put in the request. And it can be rare that you’re going to get exactly what you expected on the first request, and even rarer still to find a “smoking gun.” But occasionally you do!
I think there are a few different types of failures. One type might look like a project where you had some set of initial goals, and not all of those goals play out in the long term, but the project itself is completed, it comes to fruition. I think a more serious failure is when you have a project itself that is not viable, or the theory of change is off. The more costly failures are when a whole project doesn’t pan out. Sometimes you go down a rabbit hole of trying to get data about something and it is not what you expected. But, if you don’t try anything, you will never know, and some rabbit holes do sometimes pan out.
AM: Something that I hear a lot from students at the Center are reflections on what it’s like to work in a “pass the torch” model that you just mentioned, where our ongoing work spans beyond an academic quarter, year, or career. Our students work on something while they’re here, graduate, and new students come in and pick up that work and continue it. People become part of a long legacy of human rights researchers and advocates. And it just kind of clicked for me that you are passing the torch like our students do. How do you see yourself in that kind of legacy of torch holders? What are you passing on to the next iteration?
PN: This is a nice way to think about it. I know that the Center will keep doing great work. And I have wondered: what am I leaving behind? What skill sets have I transferred to the team? What structures have I built that people will continue to use? I think some of that is intangible and hard to measure. The Center’s role, besides research, is also one of teaching about human rights research, how to do it. You get to see students who’ve been a part of the Center go on to do great things. It’s an honor to have contributed to, in some small way, a student’s ability to engage with human rights topics. It’s one of the Center’s true gifts—catalyzing people to feel like they’re part of a community of change. I feel part of that.
AM: Do you have favorite projects you’ve worked on? Or most challenging projects? In your experience from the work that you’ve done here, what do you think makes a good human rights researcher?
PN: I think to be a good human rights researcher, you have to care, connecting to the broader importance of the work. You have to care through both the mundane and boring parts of the work, as well as the engaged, motivating, rich, relational parts of the work. You have to care about the people you work with, you have to care about the subject matter and the gravity that it has. And you have to take care in the process.
The project that is most moving to me that I worked on in the Center is the Unfinished Sentences project, and particularly the story of Efraín Arévalo Ibarra. It’s hard to talk about without getting emotional! When I think about that case I get choked up every single time because that case involved the kind of documentation that we knew must exist—U.S. government documents about the war in El Salvador that have information on people disappeared by the Salvadoran government—that can be so hard to find, and we found it. There are so many people looking for their disappeared loved ones, people still searching for their family members, and in so many contexts—both in El Salvador, murdered by the government 40 years ago; and right now, right here, people missing in detention and deportation processes in Washington state. With cases like that, it’s worth it. If you can help in one single case, all the work is worth it.