Word on the Street » Northwest Detention Center

Public document showdown averted

News Tribune Staff — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 22:18:06 +0000

A court battle over open records and the company that operates the Northwest Detention Center has been avoided.

The GEO Group, which has operated the 1,030-bed Northwest Detention Center since 2004, filed a petition in Pierce County Superior Court last week to block the release of several documents requested through public-disclosure laws.

Here’s what happened:

Tim Smith of the Bill of Rights Defense League filed the request to obtain tax records from The GEO Group. He said he filed the records to "better understand the operations of the facility and current efforts to expand its operations." The

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Oppositon to detention center expansion

News Tribune Staff — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 18:21:18 +0000

The Northwest Immigrant Rights Project put out a press release opposing the expansion of the Northwest Detention Center, which I wrote about last week.

Northwest Immigrant Rights Project (NWIRP) today expressed its opposition to the decision of the Department of Homeland Security to expand the capacity of the Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma, Washington. According to local news reports, the private contractor which runs the facility, the GEO Corporation, will be expanding the capacity of the detention center by 50% so that it can hold up to 1,500 individual at a time.

"The widespread detention

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Quarantine ends for most at Northwest Detention Center

News Tribune Staff — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 21:37:58 +0000

I’ve just written something for tomorrow’s paper about the ending (for most) of the quarantine at the Northwest Detention Center on Tacoma’s Tideflats.

Click below to read it:

The quarantine of more than 900 of the 1,000 immigrants held at the Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma ends Wednesday, six days after a detainee fell ill with chickenpox and federal officials locked down the facility.

Court cases for immune detainees resumed Tuesday, and deportations start again as early as Wednesday, said Lorie Dankers, a spokeswoman with Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Visits

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What a mountain of paper does to a man

News Tribune Staff — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 00:14:08 +0000

I realize I’ve been slacking with updating the blog. There’s good reason.

I sent a records request to the Tacoma-Pierce County Health Department:

And it returned almost 1,700 pages:

And I’ve had to boil it into something semi-readable:

Protest to ‘shut down’ downtown?

News Tribune Staff — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 16:08:12 +0000

Talk about a downtown protest about the Northwest Detention Center, a federal immigration prison on the Tideflats, has been brewing for a little bit. Here’s a link to a planning session about it, which includes this:

Downtown Will NOT have business as usual! We plan on shutting down the downtown area of Tacoma to send a very clear message that will be heard by all that we do not want this detention facility anywhere near us and our communities.

There will be a designated ‘Green Zone’ at S. 17th and Pacific on the corner and in

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