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

By The University of Washington, Center for Human Rights

In 2019, the Washington state legislature passed a landmark “sanctuary” law aimed at safeguarding immigrant rights, the Keep Washington Working Act (KWW). In doing so, it prohibits many once-routine practices that, in the past, funneled many Washington state residents into contact with federal immigration enforcement. While many migrant justice organizations worked hard to secure the law’s passage, in achieving victory they also faced an important challenge. The law’s requirements are sweeping, but the provisions for its enforcement – its “teeth” – are quite modest. Unlike the Sanctuary Promise Act subsequently passed in Oregon, Keep Washington Working does not task any agency with monitoring or responding to violations of the law. And it does not contain a private right of action, which would incentivize efforts to secure compliance by allowing individuals or organizations to recover damages from jurisdictions that violate the law. Indeed,  in the early days of the law, some jurisdictions openly indicated their intention to flout its provisions, signaling that implementation challenges were likely ahead. Since 2020 the UWCHR has examined the law’s implementation, both in policy and practice, across Washington. In this context, it is not easy to know whether the law has accomplished the changes it promised for Washington’s communities. For this reason, since 2020 the UWCHR has examined the law’s implementation, both in policy and practice, across Washington. While real-time monitoring of conditions in communities across the state exceeds our capacity, we conducted this work by sampling areas and practices identified as high priority concerns by partner organizations, including the Washington Defender Association, Northwest Immigrant Rights Project, ACLU of Washington, Columbia Legal Services, OneAmerica, and Washington Immigrant Solidarity Network, and using public records requests to document patterns of concern.6 We also rely on analysis of quantitative data obtained from ICE through requests and litigation under the federal Freedom of Information Act to track enforcement trends in our state in ways that shed light on shifting practices. (We anticipate publication of a full report on those trends in the weeks ahead.) Our first report on KWW’s impact, “Protecting Immigrant Rights: Is Washington’s Law Working?”, was published in August 2021, and identified areas of progress as well as concern. Today, we offer an update on the law five years after its entry into force. While concerns about lack of compliance remain, and we note some of these below, we also highlight some of the behind-the-scenes ways that advocates in civil society and government have acted to ensure the law is effectively securing protections for the rights of migrants in Washington. 

Seattle: The University of Washington Center for Human Rights 2024. 20p.