Immigration and Customs Enforcement

Nine people held at the Northwest ICE Processing Center in Tacoma have joined in a hunger strike to protest what they say are unclean conditions amid worries about a COVID spread. The strike began last week, according to the group La Resistencia.

A new report by the University of Washington Center for Human Rights shows that there have been more than 60 sexual abuse allegations — ranging from harassment to assault — at the ICE detention center in Tacoma.

It’s been more than two years since families and friends have been able to visit loved ones in person at the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility in Tacoma. ICE suspended visitations at all detention facilities in early 2020 and has kept that policy in place. Now, national and local immigrant rights groups have started to push back after visitations at federal and state prisons have largely resumed.

In times of crisis, the federal government can grant foreign nationals temporary protections that allow them to work, and deportations can be deferred. Immigrant advocates are demanding that people from Ukraine get those protections, too, and that includes detainees at Tacoma's ICE facility.

Ever since GEO Group, the private prison company that runs the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention center in Tacoma, suspended its detainee worker program last month, some immigrants have been speaking out about conditions deteriorating.

Detainees who clean dishes, floors and do other work at Tacoma’s ICE detention center must be paid Washington state’s minimum wage. That’s according to ruling handed down Wednesday in federal court. GEO Group, the private prison company that runs the facility, had paid working detainees as little as $1 per day.

Earlier this year, Washington state banned private prisons. Since then, there’s been a lot of back and forth about exactly when the Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center in Tacoma should shut down. A new court case could determine if the ICE facility must close its doors years before lawmakers expected.

An immigrant rights activist who had been facing deportation says she can now remain in the U.S., after the Department of Homeland Security agreed to drop her case. Maru Mora Villalpando, a Mexico City native who has been in the U.S. since 1996, said Tuesday that an immigration judge last week approved the decision.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, must test detainees for COVID-19 before they are transferred from the southern border to the detention center in Tacoma, a federal judge ruled this week.

Police, jail staff and other local law enforcement across Washington state continue to share information with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or…