State officials said they have not inspected the private immigrant detention center in Tacoma since last year amid legal pushback, but a recent federal court opinion could reinforce state-level oversight of health and safety conditions for detainees.
The Department of Labor & Industries reported it last inspected working conditions at the Northwest Immigration Processing Center in summer 2024 and found no violations. GEO Group, the private company operating the detention center, has challenged the state’s authority to conduct inspections and since barred entry to L&I as well as Department of Health inspectors.
“Despite hundreds of complaints and our ongoing efforts, NWIPC continues to deny entry to DOH staff,” DOH spokesperson Kara Kostanich wrote in a statement. “Our mission is to protect and improve the health of all people in Washington, including those in detention, who are among the most vulnerable in our state.”
GEO Group has contested a 2023 Washington state law that authorized new oversight of the private detention center, arguing the law unfairly discriminated against the company as the only such center in the state. Legislators amended that law earlier this year to include other facilities and impose specific penalties on health and safety violations.
The U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals issued an opinion on Aug. 19, overturning a lower court ruling that barred state officials from conducting inspections, and clarifying that the state has authority to regulate many types of civil detention facilities such as mental health institutions.
“The key issue in this case is whether the entities to which we should compare the NWIPC are state prisons or civil detention facilities,” the opinion states. “[We] conclude that the appropriate comparators are civil detention facilities.”
The case will now go back to U.S. District Court in Seattle for further proceedings.
The Department of Health had filed a separate lawsuit last year, seeking a court order to allow inspectors into the detention center to observe detainee quarters. L&I spokesman Matt Ross told Cascade PBS that the agency has maintained it has ongoing authority to conduct its workplace safety checks, but confirmed it had not inspected the center since last year.
“We already had authority under state law and the state constitution to inspect conditions for workers,” he wrote in an email, “and were already conducting routine inspections into workplace safety and health at the site.”
GEO Group recently dropped a lawsuit to block L&I from releasing records from its 2024 inspection after a Cascade PBS reporter requested those materials under the Public Records Act. The company sought an injunction against L&I in January, arguing that disclosing the inspection photos and reports to the media could undermine security at the facility. Cascade PBS was named as a defendant in the action solely in its capacity as a requestor under the Public Records Act. GEO did not seek legal or equitable relief against Cascade PBS.
In attachments to its filed complaint, GEO Group included a live hyperlink to more than 200 L&I inspection photos. Most of the photos depicted items related to workplace safety regulations such as fire extinguishers, stairways, cleaning chemical labels or personal protective equipment. Some photos included shackles, gas masks or tactical gear.
L&I later provided Cascade PBS with heavily redacted copies of those photos. Cascade PBS then asked L&I to conduct an administrative review of those redactions and officials provided a second set of similarly redacted photos, citing a security exemption raised by GEO Group.
Many redactions blacked out doorways, windows or the locations of security cameras. L&I contended the redacted photos contained “specific and unique vulnerability assessments or specific and unique emergency and escape response plans at a city, county, or state adult or juvenile correctional facility, or secure facility for persons civilly confined.”
“In this case we removed the location of security cameras, video surveillance images, and types of weapons and restraints,” an L&I records officer wrote to Cascade PBS.
GEO Group ended its case against L&I and Cascade PBS in June, filing a voluntary request for dismissal before any substantive proceedings or rulings occurred in the case.
An attorney affiliated with the Washington Coalition for Open Government, a nonprofit organization advocating for government transparency, told Cascade PBS that exemptions that allow public agencies to redact information should be applied narrowly. The attorney pointed to Does v. King County, a 2015 case in which officials tried to block the release of surveillance footage of a shooting on Seattle Pacific University’s campus.
The state Court of Appeals held that providing surveillance footage did not in itself compromise security and that footage could be released with limited redactions of student identities.
GEO Group did not respond to requests for comment on the latest federal court decision. The company is expected to file a response to the opinion by Sept. 16.
State representative Lillian Ortiz-Self, D-Mukilteo, who sponsored both inspection bills, lauded the recent court decision, calling it an act of “justice” and a step toward holding the NWIPC accountable for its numerous alleged human rights abuses.
“We certainly should not be letting a private facility come in and profit off the backs of our most vulnerable people,” she said. “And that’s what’s been happening — with no accountability — very little from the federal government, if any, and none from the state. They’ve been able to do whatever it is that they want, but they’re doing it in our state, and I think that’s the difference.”
The panel of appellate judges held that multiple sections of the state’s inspection law did not conflict with the “intergovernmental immunity doctrine,” which protects federal agencies from state regulation or discrimination. The judges ruled that requiring DOH to adopt rules that ensure safe and sanitary conditions to people in immigration detention and enforcing civil penalties for violations of such conditions did not rise to that level.
“[T]he panel held that it would not decide at this point whether Washington regulates the conditions of confinement at the NWIPC differently from the way it regulates the conditions of confinement in other civil detention facilities,” the panel wrote. “Because the district court incorrectly concluded that the appropriate comparator was Washington’s prisons, the panel remanded to allow the district court to make the comparison with other civil detention facilities.”
The judges concluded that allowing GEO to compare its operations to prison would “ignore the critical fact that inmates in Washington’s prisons have been convicted of crimes, and that the conditions of their confinement are part of a penal regime.”
“By contrast,” the opinion states, “none of the detainees held in the NWIPC has been convicted of — or even charged with — a crime.”
Before the DOH could implement its own rules, the panel found that the already-existing contractual requirements that were implemented on the NWIPC by the state were “almost identical” to the requirements imposed under Washington law on the types of civil detention facilities.
Ortiz-Self said the decision would help Washington achieve parity with California — which, since 2017, has empowered state investigators to inspect the state’s network of immigration detention centers.
“We want it for all facilities — public or private — because we feel a sense of accountability as the state that is housing these facilities,” she said. “And in the California determination, they said, ‘Yes, as a state, states do have a right to inspect and have standards for private facilities.’”
Kostanich with DOH said the agency is still determining its next steps in the case.
“We are optimistic the federal courts will clarify DOH’s authority,” she wrote, “allowing us to conduct investigations that promote transparency and protect the health and well-being of everyone inside the facility.”
