Immigrant Detainee Justice Project
The Immigrant Detainee Justice Project is a partnership between the Access to Justice Institute (ATJI) at Seattle University School of Law, the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project (NWIRP) in Tacoma, and the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University (NYU) School of Law.
NWIRP is one of the largest legal services organizations in the country committed to promoting justice for low-income immigrants. NWIRP serves over 10,000 low-income immigrants and refugees annually from more than 100 countries across Latin America, Asia, the Middle East, Eastern and Western Europe and Africa. NWIRP-Tacoma works exclusively with immigrants detained at the Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma. NWIRP-Tacoma monitors detention conditions, represents individual clients, and provides daily Know-Your-Rights presentations and legal advice to detainees.
The Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law is a non-partisan public policy and law institute that focuses on fundamental issues of democracy and justice. A singular institution—part think tank, part public interest law firm, part advocacy group—the Brennan Center combines scholarship, legislative and legal advocacy, and communications to win meaningful, measurable change in the public sector. The Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law has been working on assessing and documenting the ways in which immigration courts in particular address the language access needs of immigrants.
Through the Immigrant Detainee Justice Project, SU law students will attend, observe, and analyze detained court proceedings which take place at the Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma. The purpose of the observation is to: 1) provide valuable information about the visiting rotating immigration judges presiding over detainees at the Northwest Detention Center; and 2) to document the ways in which detainees with language access needs, in addition to mental health issues, are addressed by the immigration courts at the Northwest Detention Center.
The information law students provide will be used by NWIRP attorneys to provide better information and legal assistance to the 90% of detainees at the Northwest Detention Center who do not have legal representation. This information will be archived and made available to NWIRP attorneys and pro bono attorneys who have cases before the visiting rotating immigration judges. In addition, this information will be used by the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law to document the ways in which the immigration court system at the Northwest Detention Center meets the language access needs of detainees and to advocate for change as necessary.
Interested law students will be asked to attend an hour-long training and will be given specific forms to fill out during the course of each observation. An average court “observation” will take about 2.5 - 3 hours, excluding travel time. Limited gas subsidies may be available and carpools can be arranged. Students can volunteer as often as one time per week to one time per month, or just one time.
If you have already been trained, and are interested in participating in the Immigrant Detainee Justice Project this semester OR if you have not yet been trained and would like to participate this semester, please contact ATJI Program Assistant, James Tan, at tanj@seattleu.edu.
Do you know?
- Washington is one of the top refugee resettlement states in the country.
- One in eight people living in Seattle is foreign-born.
- Seattle is among the nation's top dozen cities for human trafficking.
- More than 85% of immigrants facing deportation have no legal counsel.
- Tens of thousands of children every year lose a parent to deportation.
