Letter from the Director As a professor and a parent soldiering through the third year of schooling upended by pandemic conditions, it’s sometimes hard to be upbeat. My eight-year-old recently said she doesn’t want to join the rest of the family at the dinner table because all we ever talk about is “the destruction of

When I first learned about the Freedom of Information Act, I pictured something resembling a high-security vending machine: you punch in what you want and, instantly, pages upon pages of high-level, top-secret information are dispensed on command. Unfortunately, this paints a somewhat unrealistic picture of the work we do at the UW Center for Human

UWCHR report shows some local law enforcement jurisdictions continue to collaborate with ICE and Border Patrol despite restrictions in Washington state law.

The first report of the UW Center for Human Rights “Immigrant Rights Observatory” monitors the implementation of and compliance with Washington state laws protecting immigrant rights.

UWCHR reports on concerns related to health and safety in immigration detention at the Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma, WA, including COVID-19 risks; and reviews transparency and oversight mechanisms including the potential for increased state and local regulation.

On December 3, 2020, members of the Washington State Congressional Delegation wrote a letter to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Office of Inspector General requesting an “immediate investigation into the recent allegations of violence against detained immigrants and a comprehensive review of the use of solitary confinement at the [Northwest Detention Center]”. The letter,

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