Last week, on September 20, 2022, we filed a lawsuit against DHS and ICE for failure to lawfully respond to FOIA requests. ICE’s stonewalling of our FOIA requests leaves us with no other option but to bring suit against the agency. We bring FOIA litigation because we know that access to information is a human

This spring quarter, the Benjamin Linder Fellowship has allowed me the opportunity to continue the research into the enforcement of the Keep Washington Working (KWW) and Courts Open To All (COTA) acts which UWCHR’s Immigrant Rights Observatory team began conducting in 2019. Their August 2021 report, Protecting Immigrant Rights: Is Washington’s Law Working?, analyzed the

This report is part of a series of research reports by the University of Washington Center for Human Rights examining Immigration and Customs Enforcement Air Operations nationwide.  Download additional resources: Haiti: Sports Travel & U.S. Deportation of Haitian Asylum-Seekers Introduction Every week, thousands of migrants are shackled at the hands and feet and forced onto

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 •

Research Informs Debates Over Tacoma’s Northwest Detention Center For years, people detained at the Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma have reported human rights concerns, though a lack of transparency regarding the facility’s operations has made these difficult to investigate independently. Recent years have seen Congressional inquiries, cases in federal court, and numerous campaigns by advocacy

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

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.

During December 2019, UWCHR Director Prof. Angelina Snodgrass Godoy and undergraduate research intern Maya Green [International Studies, Art History] traveled to Panama City to share research into U.S. government archives regarding the 1989 U.S. invasion of Panama, dubbed “Operation Just Cause” by the U.S. military. Here Maya shares reflections on the visit and the significance

The UWCHR is excited to be part of the Panama Files project, a multidisciplinary, multinational project in partnership with the journalist collective Concolón, to help recover historical memory of the 1989 U.S. invasion of Panama and further human rights objectives.