Protecting Immigrant Rights: Is Washington’s Law Working?
By The University of Washington, Center for Human Rights
2019’s Keep Washington Working (KWW) Act and 2020’s Courts Open to All Act (COTA) place Washington state at the forefront of national efforts to protect immigrant rights through state law. Yet the mere passage of these laws doesn’t mean they’re actually being enforced. After 18 months of research evaluating the implementation of KWW and COTA through the analysis of practices in 13 priority counties, this first report of the University of Washington Center for Human Rights (UWCHR) “Immigrant Rights Observatory” shares several key findings. Because the local police and sheriffs have historically played a significant role in bringing Washingtonians into contact with federal immigration enforcement, this report focuses on the ways in which law enforcement agencies and jails have implemented KWW. Key findings include the following:
Law enforcement agencies across our state are dedicating energy and effort to KWW implementation—though not, for the most part, using the Attorney General Office’s model policies designed to provide guidance to local agencies on this process.
Everyday policing still blurs into opportunities for federal immigration enforcement. Despite KWW’s prohibitions on the sharing of non-public information about immigrant Washingtonians with ICE/CBP for purposes of civil immigration enforcement, some local police and sheriff’s deputies continued to summon federal agents to the scene of traffic stops, to provide tips about the location of specific individuals, and to participate in multi-agency task force operations that include civil immigration arrests.
Washington jails and prisons remain key points in the pipeline to immigration detention and deportation. In the booking process, some jails continued to request place of birth information that the law bars them from gathering, and to share it—as well as other information—with ICE/CBP. Detainers, or “immigration holds” which request jails keep custody of individuals beyond their release date to facilitate their apprehension by ICE/CBP, continued to be honored in multiple jurisdictions.
Jail contracts in flux. KWW mandates Washington’s jails to cease holding immigrants in civil detention under contract with ICE/CBP by December 2021; in anticipation of this date, at least two jails have already terminated the practice. However, one other jail has indicated it expects to continue its contract with CBP beyond that date, using probable cause statements from CBP to justify the detention as criminal rather than civil detention.
Areas unaddressed by the law remain cause for concern. These include regular DOC-ICE release notifications, local/federal database interoperability, and other ways in which immigrants with criminal recormcnairds—not necessarily even convictions—experience law enforcement and the justice system in dramatically different ways than other Washingtonians, solely because of their citizenship.
Seattle: University of Washington, Center for Human Rights. 2021