By The Center for Human Rights

The COVID-19 pandemic has spurred urgent and growing concerns about the health of immigrants held in detention centers in the United States. In fact, awareness of the problem is not new: in 2016, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) inspector general raised deep questions about the agency’s preparedness for a possible pandemic event,[1] concerns that were reiterated last December when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) denounced DHS for having medical infrastructure it described as “not sufficient to assure rapid and adequate infection control measures.”[2]

Here in Washington, over the course of recent years, increasing activism by people detained at the Northwest Detention Center[3] (NWDC) and community supporters has spurred pointed criticism by elected officials at the local, state, and national level of conditions within the facility. Sustained media attention and multiple lawsuits have also forced the facility to defend its practices. In March 2020, the Washington State Legislature passed HB 2576, a law mandating inquiries into state and local oversight mechanisms regarding conditions in the NWDC, further underscoring the perceived need to address gaps in understanding regarding the health and welfare of those housed within the facility.

In this context, the UW Center for Human Rights (UWCHR) considers it important to make our ongoing research on conditions within the NWDC available to the public. As part of our longstanding effort to examine the human rights implications of federal immigration enforcement in our state, UWCHR has sought, since 2017, to obtain information about conditions of detention in public and private detention facilities where immigrants are housed in Washington state.[4] While our efforts to obtain information about conditions within the NWDC have been only partially successful due to the lack of transparency surrounding the facility, the information we have obtained is sufficiently concerning, particularly in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, that we are choosing to share our initial findings with the public even as our collection and analysis of further data continues.

This report will be published as a series discussing areas of human rights concern at the facility, including background, methodology, and relevant human rights standards; sanitation of food and laundry; allegations of medical neglect; use of solitary confinement; COVID-19 and health standards; reporting of sexual assault and abuse; and uses of force and chemical agents. The report includes research updates covering concerns about cleanliness at the detention center going unanswered and a look at the context for Charles Leo Daniel’s death at the NWDC.

The Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies, University of Washington

By Mark Dow

American Gulag takes us inside prisons such as the Krome North Service Processing Center in Miami, the Corrections Corporation of Americas Houston Processing Center, and county jails around the country that profit from contracts to hold INS prisoners. It contains disturbing in-depth profiles of detainees, including Emmy Kutesa, a defector from the Ugandan army who was tortured and then escaped to the United States, where he was imprisoned in Queens, and then undertook a hunger strike in protest. To provide a framework for understanding stories like these, Dow gives a brief history of immigration laws and practices in the United States—including the repercussions of September 11 and present-day policies. His book reveals that current immigration detentions are best understood not as a well-intentioned response to terrorism but rather as part of the larger context of INS secrecy and excessive authority.

Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004. 429p.

By The Southern Poverty Law Center

The detention of immigrants has skyrocketed in the United States. On a given day in August 2019, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) held over 55,000 people in detention – a massive increase from five years ago when ICE held fewer than 30,000 people. Unsurprisingly, the United States has the largest immigration incarceration system in the world. What’s more, the federal government spends more on immigration enforcement than for all principal federal law enforcement agencies combined, according to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General. As of April 2019, Florida had the sixth-largest population of people detained by ICE in the United States, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University. On a daily basis, ICE currently detains more than 2,000 noncitizens in the state, mostly in South Florida, which is home to four immigration prisons: Krome Service Processing Center (Krome), owned by ICE; Broward Transitional Center (Broward), operated by GEO Group, a Boca Raton-based for-profit prison corporation; and two county jails, Glades County Detention Center (Glades) and Monroe County Detention Center (Monroe). Despite the fact that immigrants are detained on civil violations, their detention is indistinguishable from the conditions found in jails or prisons where people are serving criminal sentences. The nation’s immigration detention centers are little more than immigrant prisons, where detained people endure harsh – even dangerous – conditions. And reports of recent deaths have only heightened concerns.

Montgomery, AL: Southern Poverty Law Center, 2017. 104p.

By The American Civil Liberties Union

Today, the United States has just 5% of the world’s population but nearly 25% of the world’s prisoners. But it has not always been this way. Thanks to the “War on Drugs,” irrationally harsh sentencing regimes, and a refusal to consider evidence-based alternatives, the U.S. prison population grew by more than 700% between 1970 and 2009—far outpacing both population growth and crime rates.1 In the past decade, the growing criminalization of immigration has further contributed to this mass incarceration crisis. According to the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) now refers more cases for federal criminal prosecution than the FBI.2 Nationwide, more than half of all federal criminal prosecutions initiated in fiscal year 2013 were for unlawfully crossing the border into the United States—an act that has traditionally been treated as a civil offense resulting in deportation, rather than as a criminal act resulting in incarceration in a federal prison.3 This is dramatically changing who enters the federal prison system.4 The tipping point came in 2009, when more people entered federal prison for immigration offenses than for violent, weapons, and property offenses combined—and the number has continued to rise each year since.5 The criminalization of immigration also enriches the private prison industry. Once prosecuted, noncitizen federal prisoners are mostly segregated into thirteen “Criminal Alien Requirement” (CAR) prisons. The CAR prisons are unusual in three respects: they are some of the only

New York: ACLU,, 2014. 104p.

By Southern Poverty Law Center, National Immigration Project Of The National Lawyers Guild. And Adelante Alabama Worker Center

The findings of this study demonstrate that the immigrant detention system is already rife with civil rights violations and poor conditions that call into question the DHS's commitment to the due process rights and safety of detainees. Many of these detainees have lived here for years; others recently fled violence in their home countries to seek refuge in the United States.This report is the result of a seven-month investigation of six detention centers in the South, a region where tens of thousands of people are locked up for months, sometimes even years, as they await hearings or deportation.operated by private companies and three by county sheriffs. All are paid by the DHS on a per diem basis. The report is based on tours of each facility and more than 300 in-person interviews with detainees. They represent more than 5 percent of the average daily population of the detention centers studied. From facility to facility, their stories are remarkably similar accounts of abuse, neglect and rights denied – symptoms of an immigrant detention system where the failures of the nation's immigration system intersect with the failures of its prison system

Southern Poverty Law Center National Immigration Project Of The National Lawyers Guild Adelante Alabama Worker Center. 116P.