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.

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.

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.

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.

In February the Department of Justice sued King County, WA to reopen Boeing Field in Seattle for deportation flights. Later that week, the UWCHR released a video explainer, produced by UW students and alumni, giving background on the ICE Air deportation flight network.

In recent days many have focused a great deal of attention to the conditions under which migrants—including many children—are being held along the U.S.-Mexico border. Yet far fewer people are aware of the extent to which interrelated rights concerns crop up right here in Washington state. Student researchers at the UWCHR have set out to

Across Washington state, ICE and Border Patrol are increasingly carrying out immigration enforcement arrests at or near courthouses, raising serious concerns about access to justice for all Washingtonians.

The advent of regular ICE Air deportation and detainee transfer flights via Yakima Air Terminal-McAllister Field has deepened Yakima’s role in immigration enforcement in the Pacific Northwest, but the flights build on prior infrastructure centered on the pipeline between Yakima County jail and the Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma.

A newly-released Department of Homeland Security document reveals allegations of serious abuses on ICE deportation flights, including accounts of mistreatment, excessive force, due process violations, and deaths.

A database of ICE Air’s deportation flights reveals records of more than 34,400 passengers picked up by ICE at Boeing Field in King County, Washington.