Letter from the Director Let’s see if I can write this letter without using the word “unprecedented.” This deep into the pandemic, I figure we’re all sick of hearing that word. I know I, personally, am eager to return to some sense of normalcy, even as the pandemic and the multiple other crises detonating in

Updates from UWCHR’s various projects from our 2019-2020 Annual Report: Family separation in the Pacific Northwest, our Immigrant Rights Observatory, ICE Air and deportation flights, Unfinished Sentences El Salvador, and the Panama Files and other work for access to information as a human right.

The UWCHR has obtained documents that provide a detailed look at the use of solitary confinement (also known as segregation) in the Northwest Detention Center. These documents, to our knowledge the first of their kind to have been released about any ICE detention facility in the United States, permit a deeper understanding of how segregation is used than has been previously available.

Over the last several years, UW faculty, students, alumni, and community members have worked together to implement programs based on principles of restorative and transformative justice in Washington state. Alongside incarcerated people, survivors of violence, and others, Prof. Katherine Beckett and Martina Kartman of the UWCHR and LSJ’s Rethinking Punishment project began work that has evolved into Collective Justice (CJ), an organization “harnessing the collective power of communities to build new pathways of accountability and healing.”

The University of Washington Center for Human Rights (UWCHR) has launched a new research project to monitor compliance with state laws seeking to protect immigrant rights. The UWCHR’s “Immigrant Rights Observatory” will use public records research and community partnerships to investigate how local and state government agencies have implemented provisions of the Keep Washington Working

Una nueva colección de 94 documentos desclasificados ha sido agregada a la biblioteca de FOIA de Oraciones Incompletas. Algunos de los documentos son los primeros en salir de un archivo de informes de inteligencia antes desconocido; se ha solicitado su desclasificación en totalidad.

A new set of 94 declassified U.S. government documents have been added to the UW Center for Human Rights’ El Salvador FOIA Collection maintained by UW Libraries. The documents in the new tranche cover a wide range of topics, shedding light on the depth of the U.S.’s role in Salvadoran military operations and revealing a previously unknown cache of intelligence records, of which the UWCHR is now seeking declassification.

Cowlitz County Youth Services Center in Longview, WA, and the juvenile Northern Oregon Regional Correctional Facility (NORCOR), in The Dalles, OR, are two of only three facilities in the nation where immigrant children who are taken from their families by ICE are detained, without access to due process or the protections mandated for migrant youth under the 1997 Flores Agreement.

UWCHR reviews documentary evidence substantiating longstanding allegations of medical neglect at the Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma, WA.

Immigrants detained at the Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma, WA have consistently reported sanitation issues including spoiled food and dirty laundry, which raise grave health concerns in light of the COVID-19 pandemic.