Exclusive: WA Congressional delegation flags declining Tacoma detention center conditions in letter to ICE

Conditions have deteriorated for detainees at the Northwest ICE Processing Center in Tacoma, warn several Washington Congress members, as Immigration and Customs Enforcement detains more immigrants at the facility.

A letter sent Tuesday from Democratic U.S. Senator Patty Murray’s office to Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons lays out mounting concerns about access to legal counsel and medical care, and raises questions about whether staffing at the detention center is adequate.

The letter cites reports from local service providers and advocates with access to the facility, including reports of at least three pregnant women in detention who claim they have not been able to receive appropriate medical care. It also references two suicide attempts in April and challenges for detainees to access behavioral care.

“None of this is remotely acceptable — you and the entire Trump administration have a basic moral and legal obligation to the people who have been detained and are under your care,” the letter states.

The letter demands increased oversight and “immediate steps to improve conditions and practices at [the detention center] to comply with existing standards and laws and ensure that people in immigration detention are being treated with basic dignity and respect.”

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“Violations of the law or any abuse of human rights will not go unnoticed or unchallenged,” the letter states, referencing national detention standards that set guidelines for the facility.

Democratic U.S. Senator Maria Cantwell also signed the letter, along with seven Democratic U.S. Representatives from Washington: Emily Randall, Pramila Jayapal, Kim Schrier, Suzan DelBene, Adam Smith, Rick Larsen, and Marilyn Strickland.

Questions about staffing levels at the facility have persisted this year as ICE arrests increased and the Tacoma detention center filled to capacity. ICE makes some detention statistics publicly available but it doesn’t provide an ongoing headcount of detainees at each facility. Several academic researchers, however, do track headcount through ongoing public records requests.

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Records show the number of people held at the Tacoma facility nearly doubled during President Trump’s first six months in office, and at times this summer appeared to surpass the facility’s capacity of 1,575 beds, according to government data provided by ICE, processed by the Deportation Data Project and analyzed by University of Washington Center for Human Rights.

The latest available data shows a headcount of 1,427 people held at the Tacoma facility on Oct. 16.

Detainees have engaged in hunger strikes over the years to protest living conditions at the facility, and recently more detainees and advocates are pointing to a staffing shortage as an exacerbating issue.

“I talked to a lot of the guards there and they all would tell me that they were very short [staffed], and so that's why our food or the medical attention was never on time for folks,” Alfredo Juarez Zeferino told KUOW in July, after spending four months in the Tacoma detention center before deciding to give up his legal fight and return to Mexico.

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“If we're sick and we need to see a doctor, we have to wait for a whole day or multiple days before we can go see a doctor,” Juarez said.

Juarez, a well-known farm labor organizer in Washington’s Skagit Valley, was detained by ICE in March due to a traffic stop in his teens, which briefly landed him in ICE custody and with a subsequent deportation order he said he never knew about until immigration agents arrived this year to enforce it.

“If we can get answers back from this [letter], then we can use that information to require them to put more, let's say, medical doctors or healthcare doctors at the facility, to improve the food service,” Murray said Tuesday in an interview with KUOW.

The Congress members’ letter also highlights concerns about access to legal counsel.

“Attorneys have faced significant delays to meet with their clients, making adequate legal counsel more difficult,” the letter states. “At times, attorneys have had to wait at the facility for up to 6 hours to see their clients.”

The facility has typically allocated seven rooms for attorneys to privately meet with clients, but some of these rooms are now being used for virtual attorney meetings or video hearings.

“We have also heard from advocates with access to the facility that, at times, only one visitation room was available and interviews for facility staff were being conducted in these attorney visitation rooms, ” the letter states.

Elizabeth Benki, a directing attorney with the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project, told KUOW these recent obstacles and slowdowns at the detention center have affected her organization’s ability to take on as many cases as it normally would.

“Each case is just more time-consuming,” she said. “It requires so many more hours and each case can be so much more unpredictable. It would be the outlier if you had to wait in the past to meet with a client, whereas now it's more the standard.”

The letter also calls for ICE to release noncitizens who do not pose a threat to public safety, as the issue of detainees getting released on bond continues to be a hurdle.

Recent court rulings struck down a Trump administration policy to deny bond to a broad category of people who previously were eligible, including people with no criminal history. Still, Benki said judges at the Tacoma immigration court are not following that order, requiring attorneys to petition in federal court to get detainees released on bond.

“We anticipated that the Tacoma judges would follow that order but they have not been, so we've been forced to file these enforcement actions,” Benki said. Those extra court filings also cut into the time attorneys would otherwise spend on additional cases at the detention center, she added.

“It's never been this tough,” Benki said. “It’s pretty devastating, the year that our staff have had…having really huge hurdles put in front of us.”

Tuesday’s letter gives ICE a Jan. 16 deadline to answer several questions about staffing levels, detainee headcount, medical and legal services, and other human rights concerns at the Northwest ICE Processing Center.

In recent months, KUOW has also made multiple, similar information requests to ICE and GEO Group, the private contractor that operates the Tacoma facility. ICE has not provided answers, and in response to KUOW’s questions this week about staffing levels and various policies raised in the letter, an ICE spokesperson recommended “a FOIA request to get personal information on a detainee.”

Murray said she will continue to track these ongoing concerns at the detention center and use her oversight position on the Senate Appropriations Committee to hold ICE accountable.

“We can enforce our immigration laws in a humane way,” Murray said. “It seems to me that what the Trump administration is doing is using cruelty as immigration enforcement and that, to me, is unacceptable.”

KUOW's Gustavo Sagrero contributed reporting.