Center’s seventh FOIA lawsuit would compel proactive release of three key types of documents on a quarterly basis On November 13, 2024, the University of Washington Center for Human Rights (UWCHR) filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), seeking to require

Letter from the Director Dear Friends, I’d like to think of this annual report as something like a time capsule. It recounts the activities our Center for Human Rights conducted in our fifteenth year. Having helmed our center since those early days when our existence was a bit more, shall we say, aspirational than actual,

In 2023–24, UWCHR supported multiple scholars who came to UW after fleeing violence in their home countries. These included Mahir Hazim, who shares his experience as an Afghan legal scholar in the interview below. Mahir Hazim is an acting assistant professor of law at the University of Washington School of Law. Previously he was a

In 2024 we continued to monitor conditions at the Northwest Detention Center (NWDC) in Tacoma, documenting emergent crises affecting people detained at the NWDC, including the death of Charles Leo Daniel and a series of suicide attempts at the facility during the first quarter of the year. In both cases, these crises were first reported

Since 2012, UWCHR researchers have been working in partnership with Salvadoran human rights defenders to uncover new documentation about atrocities committed in the context of the Salvadoran armed conflict. We began this work at the urging of former political prisoners in El Salvador, who were urgently pressing their government to allow access to its records

In August 2024, we published “Paths to Compliance: The Effort to Protect Immigrant Rights in Washington State,” an update from our Immigrant Rights Observatory project monitoring implementation of pro-immigrant legislation in Washington State, finding both signs of progress and ongoing concerns. With provisions restricting many forms of collaboration between local and state agencies and federal

Over the past year, the Strategies for Massage Parlor Workers’ Rights project has experienced huge strides in connecting students, faculty, staff, and the larger UW research community to the Seattle region’s mostly unlicensed Asian immigrant massage workers.  Deepening collaborative research practices that  began in 2022–2023, this project, led by Massage Parlor Outreach Project in collaboration

  This year we embarked on a new collaboration between immigrant rights group La Resistencia, UWCHR, and Hinton Publishing to showcase the stories of people in deportation proceedings in Washington State. A team of 17 students worked to gather the stories of people facing deportation through Boeing Field (and in some cases, folks already deported).

The 2023–24 academic year brought new opportunities and deepened relationships among the Indigenous Rights and Environmental Sustainability project’s students, faculty, and community partners. During the summer and fall of 2023, we brought two new University of Washington School of Marine and Environmental Affairs (UW SMEA) graduate students onto the project: Thor Belle and Kayley Pingeon.

Funds from the Lisa Sable Brown award have supported research for my dissertation, “Nascent Moves: Loss, Desire, and In/Visible LGBTQ Resistances in Bangladesh,” which argues that to understand queerness in postcolonial global south modernities, we need to employ the lens of kotipona. Kotipona is a way of life and refers to being flamboyant and having