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Jackie O’Ryan Communications Director, OneAmerica
jackie@weareoneamerica.org
SEATTLE—The findings of Voices from Detention: A Report on Human Rights Violations at the Northwest Detention Center (NWDC) confirm human rights abuses are taking place at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility on the tide flats of Tacoma. This report is one of the first of its kind to measure conditions at a detention center with international human rights legal standards and U.S. Constitutional protections. It is a collaboration between OneAmerica, a nonprofit organization advancing immigrant, civil and human rights in Seattle and the Seattle University School of Law International Human Rights Clinic.
“As Americans concerned with upholding our Constitution and ensuring justice, we should remember that America is degraded when our government fails to uphold those very rights that make this country great,” said Pramila Jayapal, executive director of OneAmerica (formerly Hate Free Zone). “When some people’s rights are abused, all our rights can be abused.” You can read all press conference remarks here.
“We measured the conditions at the NWDC against the requirements of international law and domestic Constitutional law,” said Gwynne Skinner, an international human rights expert who oversaw the Seattle University/OneAmerica study. “Conditions at the detention center violate obligations under international law, including customary international law and the Refugee Convention. The center’s holding of asylees in detention violates the U.S.’s obligations under the Refugee Convention and constitute cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment.”
Skinner also says the conditions at the center violate the 5th Amendment of the Constitution in that they amount to punishment. However, there is no domestic statutory law that governs the conditions of federal immigrant detention centers. There are the National Detention Standards, issued in 2000, that give guidance, but they are not binding. Even those standards are not being followed.
Other rights being violated include the right to counsel, the right to family unity, due process violations due to the forced signing of papers, right to medical treatment, especially emergency medical treatment and mental health treatment.
Violations of immigration law are civil violations not criminal violations. The detention center in Tacoma is designed to hold people who have committed civil violations and is only meant to be a short term holding facility. But many are held long-term in conditions that are worse than a prison, and the population of the center is twice that of what the building was designed for.
Voices from Detention details the results of interviews conducted over eight months by students at Seattle University Law School’s Human Rights Clinic. Interviews were conducted with 41 detainees, a family member and 4 attorneys. Every incident detailed in this report was corroborated through additional interviews or by research. Students also were able to ask questions of ICE officials and officials running the detention center. Center officials were ultimately informed of the study before it was published and released.
Findings of the report include the following and more:
* Lack of legal due process, including violations of attorney-client privilege
* Detainees pressured to sign papers through threats and physical intimidation
* Mistreatment of detainees by guards and federal marshals
* Inadequate medical care, especially emergency care
* Inadequate treatment of the mentally ill, including refugees who had been persecuted in their homelands
* Insufficient quantities of food and incidents of food poisoning
* Poor living conditions due to severe overcrowding
* Language barriers for detainees
This report was funded by the U.S. Human Rights Fund and the Fund for Nonviolence and can be found on the OneAmerica website at www.WeAreOneAmerica.com.#
