Letter from the Director Most readers of this annual report already know it’s been a rough year for both higher education and human rights. Our Center for Human Rights sits at the nexus of these two fields, so we’ve been in the thick of it. While I don’t know what our work will look like

This report is part of a series regarding Human Rights Conditions at the Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma, Washington, based on ongoing research efforts and released to highlight initial findings in the urgent context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Contents: • Introduction • Background, Methodology, and Human Rights Standards • Sanitation of Food and Laundry •

Receiving the Benjamin Linder Fellowship this year has been a great honor that has allowed me to continue my work for the UW Center for Human Rights, researching human rights abuses during El Salvador’s civil war of 1980-1992. This work requires a huge level of organization—new documents and correspondence need organizing, new FOIA requests need

Over the past year, my work with Zaytoon UW and the Zaytoon Scholarship Network has been defined by urgency, resilience, and collaboration. Recognizing the absence of a formal Palestinian-led organization on campus, myself and another Palestinian student initiated the formation of Zaytoon UW. Officially launched on October 2, 2024, Zaytoon UW was led by a

Summary Flock Safety automated license plate reader (ALPR) networks have become increasingly common in Washington state. Records obtained by UWCHR researchers via public records requests reveal that at least eight Washington state law enforcement agencies enabled direct, 1:1 sharing of their networks with U.S. Border Patrol at some point during 2025; effectively opening the “front

I am honored to have been selected as a Dr. Lisa Sable Brown Fellow for 2025. This grant supported me in conducting research in spring and summer of 2025 for my master’s thesis titled: The Impact of Ecosystem Change, Labor, Immigration, and Fisheries Policy on Migrant Tuna Fishers in the U.S. North Pacific Albacore Fishery.

In September this year, through the generous support of the Peter Mack and Jamie Mayerfeld Fund, I had the privilege of facilitating a two-day workshop on records management, archives, and digital preservation with Karapatan and other human rights organizations in Quezon City, Philippines. The workshop was an important space to reflect on how recordkeeping practices

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

Executive summary This report reviews local involvement in gross human rights abuses against immigrants, focusing on forced disappearance and refoulement. Its findings reveal that the connections between Washington state and these crimes are broader and deeper than has been previously known. They are broader because there are many more cases of Washingtonians being subjected to

On June 3, 2025, a court in rural El Salvador read the text of its historic verdict, for the first time holding high-ranking former military men accountable for the violence against civilians that characterized the country’s long and bloody armed conflict. The case involved the March 1982 killings of Dutch journalists Koos Koster, Jan Kuiper,