About
The United States maintains the largest immigration detention infrastructure in the world, detaining approximately 380,000 to 442,000 persons per year. Persons, including legal permanent residents with longstanding family and community ties, asylum-seekers, and victims of human trafficking, are detained for weeks, months, and sometimes years. The 1980s gave rise to two major prison corporations, GEO Group and Corrections Corporation of America, that lobbied the government for laws that expanded detention and other forms of incarceration. The Northwest Detention Center (NWDC) was founded in 2004 and is privately run by GEO Group and is located 4.3 miles away from the University of Puget Sound. There are approximately 1,600 detainees in the NWDC. The average profile of someone detained at the NWDC is a male, who came in without permission, and were picked up by ICE for a broken taillight and other minor offenses.
Amanda Díaz's summer research project is a digital oral history project on the various perspectives on the Northwest Detention Center (NWDC). She interviewed a variety of subjects; current and former detainees of the Northwest Detention Center, family members affected by detention and deportation, local activists and legal advocates in the Seattle, Tacoma and Bellingham area that work toward gaining justice for these families. In addition to this Scalar page, this oral history project is also housed at the University of Puget Sound's Special Collections. In essence, the goal of this research project was to provide a snapshot of the NWDC from a variety of perspectives (i.e. people detained, families of detainees, activists, legal advocates, etc.)
Biographies
Amanda Díaz is a senior who created her own major between the disciplines of Politics and Government, Latino/a Studies and Sociology/Anthropology. This American Studies major explores the importance of race/ethnic politics, narratives, knowledge/power, and their relationship to questions of law, immigration, and national politics in the Americas. She plans on attending law school after she graduates from the University of Puget Sound to pursue a career in immigration law. She currently works at the Center for Writing Learning and Teaching as a Writing Advisor.
Andrew Gomez is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Puget Sound. His research focuses on immigration, the history of Latinos in the United States, and digital public history. He received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2015 and is currently editing his dissertation on early Cuban communities in Florida into a book-length manuscript. His writing has appeared in the Journal of American Ethnic History, Cuban Counterpoints, and InterActions.
