Secrecy and enforced disappearances: WA human rights group sounds alarm about ICE

The University of Washington’s Center for Human Rights is warning that federal immigration action has crossed a new boundary and is now breaking international humanitarian law.

The report zeroes in on 16 cases where people have been arrested by government agents and held for extended periods of time without access to a lawyer, or to the outside world. The legal term for such detentions is “enforced disappearance.”

“What I'm talking about is cases where days or even weeks go by that families still don't know where their loved one is,” said Center for Human Rights Director Angelina Godoy.

All of the cases covered in the center’s report have connections to Washington state. The people involved were either Washington residents, they were held at federal facilities in the state, or they were deported through Tacoma’s ICE immigrant lockup.

“The level of secrecy is what's different in these cases,” Godoy said.

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The report highlights two families who were held in Customs and Border Patrol custody at different facilities in Washington state.

One family of asylum seekers from Africa was held for 24 days at the Ferndale Customs and Border Patrol office in Whatcom County. During their detention, family members were not allowed to make phone calls. Human rights advocates and concerned community members were refused information about the family’s presence at the facility, according to the report.

The other family was split up. While visiting family from Canada at Peace Arch Park on the U.S.-Canada border, a woman from Honduras and her U.S. citizen children were taken into Customs and Border Patrol custody in Ferndale. Meanwhile, her husband was arrested in Portland and held at the Northwest ICE Processing Center in Tacoma. They were held for an estimated two weeks without the ability to contact lawyers and obtain legal help.

“The case raises obvious concerns about forced disappearance,” the report said. “The family did not appear in the ICE Locator, they appear to have been moved to avoid detection.”

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Most of what the report called forced disappearances are people deported to third countries, some to a prison in El Salvador in violation of a federal court order.

In addition to the two families, the report focuses on 14 cases where people were either sent to an immigrant lockup in Guantanamo Bay, the Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo in El Salvador (the Terrorism Confinement Center) also known as CECOT, or to a third country.

In many cases immigrants were deported to situations that were unsafe, which is another human rights violation called "refoulement."

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At least seven men either lived or passed through Washington state who were held in CECOT in El Salvador. They joined more than 200 other Venezuelan nationals who faced abuse and torture at the center, including allegedly being shot at with rubber bullets.

According to a report from Propublica, the Trump administration knew more than half of the over 200 Venezuelan deportees held in CECOT had no criminal record, and had only violated immigration laws. Venezuela and El Salvador would later hold a prison swap freeing the more than 200 men.

“Although their return to Venezuela is a positive development, it does not erase the responsibility of the U.S. government, GEO Group, King County, Signature Aviation, and Global X for their roles in transporting prisoners to a site where their disappearance and torture was a foreseeable outcome,” the report states.

There are likely more cases than the 16 included in the Center for Human Rights’ report, Godoy said.

She acknowledged that local and state governments cannot actively prevent the federal government from enforcing immigration laws.

But Godoy suggested that people who are concerned about the violations documented in the report should get creative about how to best protect people in their communities and how to respond to human rights abuses they witness or hear about.