For the last 15 years, Jorge Barón has been the executive director at the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project — a nonprofit at the center of some of the biggest immigration fights in the region.
Last week Barón left the organization as he campaigns for a King County Council seat. In May, the Seattle-based nonprofit named Malou Chávez as its new executive director.
KNKX social justice reporter Lilly Ana Fowler sat down with Barón ahead of his exit. They discussed Trump-era policies like the travel ban; laws meant to protect immigrants trying to get help from law enforcement and the court system; the fight to close Tacoma’s ICE detention center; and the new immigrants showing up in Washington state.
Listen to their conversation above, or read selected quotes below.
Key Takeaways
On whether new laws meant to stop local law enforcement from working with federal immigration officials, and keep courthouses safe are working.
They are working. In fact, I was telling somebody earlier about this. One of my earliest cases at NWIRP was working with survivors of domestic violence, who had been involved in a car accident and a minor fender bender, but the police had come. This had been actually on the east side, this is before Keep Washington Working to be clear. And the police had run her driver's license through the database and saw that there was a prior deportation order. And because this was before Keep Washington Working, they contacted ICE, you know, they detained her on behalf of ICE and then eventually transferred her to ICE custody. And she ended up being down at the detention center. That kind of situation should not happen today.
On whether the ICE detention center in Tacoma will ever shut down.
I hope so. I hope that our experiment and our emphasis on immigration detention that this country has been in for the last few decades will cease. Do I think it's going to happen? You know, in the short term, unfortunately, I don't see that. I think the political realities at the federal level are pretty daunting right now.
On immigration challenges ahead.
We're seeing a lot of new arrivals from a number of new regions. So obviously, there was the large group of people from Afghanistan that came that got evacuated, we're still dealing with their cases, right, that's still ongoing. I think there was a lot of tension when the evacuation happened.
There's also people who are arriving from other places, because of conflicts, there was people from Ukraine, there's people from Russia, who are actually leaving because of the political persecution that they're facing, because they may disagree with either the government or the war, or both. And so they’re seeking protection.
And then we're seeing a lot of displacement from other regions.
We're seeing people from my native Colombia, Venezuela, a lot of folks are arriving in our region that we weren't seeing five, 10 years ago.
I think the challenge is that we still have a lot of people who've been living here for a long time who still need assistance with a range of immigration matters.
Whether it's, you know, survivors of domestic violence who are facing the threat of deportation or, you know, having abusers use that as a tool of control in in an abusive pattern. But then we also have these large numbers of new residents in the state that need assistance navigating the asylum system.
