good evening everyone and thank you for being here for those of you don't know me my name is angelina good boy and i am the helen h jackson chair in human rights here at the university of washington and the director of  thank you so much for being here all of you i'm here tonight to present our centers to latest research reports about deportation flights on ice air both nationally and from king county those reports are also available online and i heard you to consult on there and share them widely we're also here today to hear from three distinguished panelists and i want to welcome them as community leaders with rich perspectives to share about the importance of these issues they are also people who contributed directly to the research that we are here today presenting so in many ways their insights have already enriched our perspectives that are brought forward in the reports themselves before i dig into the research that i keep saying i'm going to talk about i want to also acknowledge something else that many of you may already have heard because it was front page news yesterday dow konstantin county executive issued an executive order expressing his intention his goal of banning all deportation flights by private charters at boeing field that deserves a round of  some people have asked me how that changes what we're going to talk about that's exactly what came as a huge surprise to me yesterday as some of you who were with me at the moment i receive the news know who pushed me over with a feather so did this just this change we're going to talk about well actually from my point of view it doesn't  the executive order is long on vision it embraces a beautiful vision that i'm happy to get behind it's bold and beautiful and it's it articulated with eloquence king county values but it's very short on specifics it commands for example county officials to take all appropriate measures to limit collaboration with deportations lights that sounds good what are those appropriate measures the devil is always in the details and so that's what i believe makes tonight's discussion more important than ever right and ongoing research and advocacy on these issues is more important than ever that executive order is the first of its kind in the nation so now it's on us to make sure we do not rest until the bulled principles and visions articulated there are brought down to concrete policies and we stop those flights because the entire rest of the country is watching for us to show them it can be done how do we do this well first we have to learn how the flights work and that's where the intimate and boring details that i'm about to expose you to come in that's what i want to talk about tonight and then we have to learn to fight like hell and i think we have three excellent panelists that can tell us how to do that and give us lots of tips and  list our services in following them forward in that task so with no further ado let me take you into the machinery of mass deportation that is air before i do i want to say a few words about how we got this work under way to begin with so we began this research in twenty eighteen in response to requests from community partners indeed some of the partners that are here today and they're represented here today because members of immigrant communities here in king county have long known about deportation flights happening at king county international airport or boeing field folks know that their family members are taken there and shipped out of the country and many of long wondered how is this possible if boeing field is a publicly owned and administered airport and we are supposedly a sanctuary county indeed want to have most of the most progressive sanctuary ordinances in the nation how is this happening so that was our first research puzzle that we set out to investigate and it's still reflected in the report's title of hidden in plain sight in a way there's sort of a paradox around deportations that we learned as we did this work you know we all know deportations are happening our president mentions them on the daily everybody knows these are there are flights taking people to other countries all the time you can go to boeing field and see with the naked eye images like this which was taken just weeks ago by one of our student photographers you can track the flights online if you have access to the internet anybody can it's an open secret it's not a surprise and yet strangely or perhaps not so strangely the mechanisms by which people were being placed on those planes the business relationships through which people are profiting from the moving of bodies into those planes and across the country and out of the country had remained largely secret and shrouded in secrecy until now and that's why we think this research is important and this particular moment is important to talk about those mechanisms so we started out by filing a fire request a freedom of information act request and through that last year we obtained a copy of  repatriation tracking system it's a database that contains over one point seven million records each of those records and you can scroll through it and keep scrolling through it and keep scrolling through it and keep scrolling through it and each of them  individual person shackled hands and feet and dragged across the tarmac and forced onto a plane somewhere in the united states between fiscal year two thousand and eleven and fiscal year twenty nineteen so when we first got that database which i said self gave to us through oil we then complemented that with public records requests in four different u s states and three different foreign countries our raft of interviews and the analysis of publicly available documents and the very hard work of the students you recognized earlier  possible for us to draw the conclusions that we are sharing with you tonight so what this map here shows is ice air flight paths within the united states these are paths taken by private planes chartered through a web of public and private relationships that profits off the detention and deportation of migrants and we have a whole report on the national data and what that reveals but i want to save the time i have the brief time i have with you tonight to talk specifically about what it tells us about what's happening here in king county so this chart refers to king county during this same period from twenty teams from i'm sorry twenty ten to twenty nineteen almost thirty five thousand people were directly deported through boeing field and as you can see in these numbers the rate of deportations through boeing field fluctuates over time these numbers match up roughly are the rates route map roughly on to national figures but on average three hundred fifty pounds injures were removed from king county international airport every month so one of those fights go well some of them are direct removals there have been flights that leave boeing field and land in guatemala or in china but most the overwhelming majority in fact are in direct flights there are transfers to deportation hubs that ice maintains just like united airlines or american they all have their hubs well i says hubs are along the southern border in the southern states of the united states there are five different hubs you can see  some of them reflected here on the map from those hubs they're either placed on another plane and flown abroad or in the case of mexican nationals they're often bussed directly across the border and also some people are relocated to another detention center so from these places some people are taken to be locked up in another part of the united states and in this way it's impossible to separate the flights from the detention centers themselves this is a window into the profit making enterprise of housing and moving bodies and there's also flights coming into boeing field now those flights tend to be lighter in terms of passengers because this is the business of deportation but there's also people being brought into our county presumably to fill beds at the northwest detention center where as you may know there's a bed quota of eight hundred people per day providing an incentive there for ice to shuffle people around the country in order to fill those beds so as this map shows where people coming to k b s are bowing feel they're coming from those border areas what this means is that the border is here it's right here so when you read the news about what's happening on the border when you read about family separations and children being pride from their parents arms and asylum seekers being incarcerated those people they're coming here and so we shouldn't afford ourselves the luxury of thinking that because we live in progressive king county those issues aren't happening here they are and that's what this data shows our county is intricately in matched in a national network of deportation and incarceration and providing a platform for profit making from those prophecies now the bulk of the detainees or deportees if you will are from mexico and the countries of what am el salvador often refer to as the northern triangle of central america by overwhelming numbers of those are the majority of those who are being deported but we also see growing numbers of deportees in particularly the just the last couple of years from other longstanding communities in king county including cambodians somalians and many others who came in some cases as resettled refugees only now decades later to face deportation there are many many human rights concerns that arise in this process and the data that we have gathered sheds new light on some of them as some of you may have heard there are accounts of few and far between but there are counts of atrocious physical violence transpiring on the planes themselves the most famous of these is the account of a failed deportation flight in december twenty seven thousand to somalia that wound up didn't even make it all the way to somalia but in senegal it stopped and was held on the tarmac for twenty three hours which time the detainees remain shackled as they do on all these flights for the entire time they were physically beaten some of them were dragged down the aisle of the plane others were tasered some were put in full body body restraints the detainees described as body bags were subjected to other forms of physical violence denied access to the restroom some were forced to soiled themselves in their seats what's unusual about that flight is that it returned to the united states it went so drastically wrong that ice decided to turn the plane around and bring those folks back to the u s and many of them filed a lawsuit as a result that's what makes it unusual because we know about it there is no mechanism by which passengers on other flights can report what happened to them we have no way of knowing how common those accounts of that somali flight are of the interviews that we conduct we heard about routinely racist degrading treatment even here on the tarmac of boeing field so i think we shouldn't focus only on these egregious accounts of physical abuse not only because we don't know how widespread they are but because it obscures the violence that is deportation itself and family separation is deportation the the wrenching of people from their family members and forcing them on to planes to a country that many of them have never even known is a form of violence and this data sheds new light on due process concerns that often arise in that process strikingly in fact ice's own database contains a column titled status where they register the deport ability of the individual in question in a series of alphanumeric codes and there are analysis of those codes we found that of the people deported from king county some one hundred  fifty seven on direct removal flights were being removed despite having pending appeals before the u s courts that means those deportations are unlawful those people have not exhausted their legal process in the united states and the nonetheless being put on a plane and when i asked immigration attorneys about this they all knew cases like that it's not rare in fact that one hundred fifty seven is probably a drastic undercount because as i said before so many of the flights are internal transfers and we're being conservative with these numbers only direct removals in addition some two thousand six hundred fifteen people deported through boeing field had no access to the courts whatsoever throughout their process this should not surprise us most of the people being deported in this country now are deported through  process is called expedited removal and associated with expedited removal which means they are never intitled to a hearing for judicial review of their case for a judge to hear what happened and this is all inscribed in the data that we reviewed so how does this happen well this is a complex chart that we took a lot of time trying to figure out ways to clarify to show the relationships between private and public entities that make this possible right here in king county i want to be clear the county itself does not have a contract with ice but what the county does is it rents space to private companies which are called f b o those are fixed base operators they have hangar space at king county airport and this is true at other airports throughout the nation king county is not unusual clearly see aviation which has recently been bought by modern aviation is the principal f b o involved in profiting from deportation flights which are carried out by private charters at king county international airport those f b o those are the entities that are profiting from the flights which are contracted through a series of cut contracting and sub contracting relationships so you see ice there at the top they have a single air charter broker called classic air charter which is in charge of coordinating organizing and coordinating all of these flights across the nation and the world they in turn hire private companies to run the planes to staff the planes to to shackle the folks being put on them and to provide all the associated support with that process those companies in turn do business with f b o is like here at king county airport clichy and the airport itself derives income from those companies rental of hangar space to facilitate those activities as well as from landing fees and fuel charges associated with deportation flights and their part king county is legally responsible for overseeing their operations ensuring that they safe and lawful yet as we learned in this process you can see here this is just one example of an invoice filed by king county to swift air which is the number one private charter operator in this segment of the u s market the county has conducted no inspections no audits of these companies operations despite the fact that they have the right to do so under the terms of their contract they routinely renew leases for as long as thirty five years without have are having ever engaged in any effective oversight of their practices so i'm gratified to hear that the county is expressing an intention to change that the fact that their records however are so sorely lacking or that their process of making public the records that they may have leads us to be cautious about embracing those intentions in till we see concrete results this is just a screen shot from one of the databases that we are working with in which i cross checked or cross referenced the ice air database we got from ice with the records we got from king county about flights coming in and departing from king county and what you're seeing there on all those yellow bars our flights that ice records show went through king county and the king county claims it has no records of but as i said you can track this all on the web in fact somebody set up a twitter account that enables you to and i would suggest you follow it because in the days that come there will be more deportation flights there was one yesterday there may be another one later this week there's certainly be one next week and say certainly these things are unpredictable there's likely to be one next week and i think we need to be aware of this i think we need to be demanding results from the county and no better way to do that than to make ourselves aware through our own trustworthy mechanisms of what's happening this is one way to do it you can get notifications and directly to your phone please follow it so right the handle is  good evening everyone first i want to say thank you to professor good boy and the you'd have center for human rights for the hard work that you guys have been doing and for shining a light and exposing the harsh conditions that folks are going through it is so important that this work is being done that we expose u s immigration customs and border washington and being in this room today i just want to say that because it's flowing through my head as i speak that said i'm glad to be here to be discussing something very important and something very personal to me as deportations to somalia as you guys heard i came to the u s as a refugee when i was three years old and fled somalia with my family and so to be covering this is it's very personal  and very close to my heart  a has been affected by decades of civil war political violence and humanitarian crisis today al shabaab which is a known terrorist group has used many forms of violence to take control of the region and they've been doing that since two thousand and six on october fourteenth to twenty seventeen of the capital city the city of somalia experience one of the deadliest terrorist attacks  that has been seen in the recent history of the world associate press reported that five hundred people were killed three hundred wounded just last month in one week there were seven different car bombings that happened in distro in the last few years the country has experienced what has been called the worst droughts and famines in the twenty first century so if you do i see on the state department website it says do not travel to somalia due to crime terrorism kidnapping and piracy it is a level four country which is basically the highest threat level a country can be scaled at but despite the warnings issued by our u s department of state ice is continuing to deport folks there in a report that was released to our office by ice it showed that over five hundred individuals were deported to somalia and twenty seventeen that that number was triple the number from twenty sixteen many of individuals who are being deported or raised in refugee camps outside of somalia and and sought asylum in the united states as refugees who are fleeing persecution and violence many of the individuals have family members who live here in the united states they lived in the united states for decades themselves some of the folks who have been deported to somalia do not even speak the language that are fluent in somalia anymore because they've been here since they were kids and don't have family connections there anymore which make them very vulnerable to militant violence somalia is experiencing food water crisis that compromise human rights in addition to overwhelming turmoil and conflict the united nations high commissioner for refugees has urged countries from refraining urged countries to refrain from forcibly removing individuals who have entered a country as a refugee back to to somalia specifically actually  say that any area that has been affected by military action or isn't suing displacement remains fragile or insecure after military action or remains under or partial control of non state armed groups and that's  the show is but ice is continuing to deport folks there to the conditions in the region these deportations are violating the following human rights treaty and customary laws the nine hundred fifty one refugee convention and the one nine hundred sixty seven per protocol which basically says that should not be returned to a country where they face serious threats to their life and freedom as well as a un convention against torture the international covenant for civil and political rights which was adopted by the u general assembly to promote the respect of individual civil and political rights among all committed parties the united states and those rights include the right to life the right to freedom and also the right to due process and fair trial and that's one of the things that we're seeing now happening is where folks are being deported when they have pending appeals in court today many somali refugees as you heard professor good boy say alleges that u s immigration authorities have treated them with cruelty on deportation flights and you guys have to think like these flight twenty four hour travel times we're talking about they are reporting being kept in handcuffs you know being shackled without food water limited access to lavatory or no access in a court document a fellow somali deportees states and i quote when the planes toilets over filled with human waste some of the detainees were left to urine and bottles or on themselves in a b b c report a fellow they all experienced the following abuses and i quote being mazed with the gas being threatened to be killed while we were in shackles they were just throwing us against the wall and on the ground folks who have been deported like i said have family members who are u s citizens and their family members are not even being notified of when these flights are going to take off they don't know when the deportation dates are they can't even say bye or make any sort of plans for wherever that person may be going and that's a problem a u s citizen mother shared with me her personal story about her son being deported to make the show which she essentially described as a death sentence she said he had no money no one to welcome him there she was devastated she was in tears and then she asked me if i could imagine what it would be like just being blindfolded and being put on a plane to machine i told her  to the persecution and hardships of hundreds of deported somalis and it is you know the united states has a moral and political obligation to a void returning refugees to areas of extreme conflict these deportations are violating international laws and that seek to protect folks who come here as as refugees you know so we've urged ice to whole to all depart deportations to somalia and  increase transparency for those affected by deportations that have been on previous flights and i will conclude there but i just want to say i'm so glad that we're having this conversation and talking about this and making sure that you know we all do something about it and i think king county did the right thing by ordering an executive order but i think there's more that can be done and it feels good to see this room full and with folks who want to do something about this and i'm happy to talk about this more  i'm sorry that's messed up one thousand second now and you and we continue hearing of ice going outside our houses in arresting people so how can we say that we actually are in a sanctuary county and  hypocrisy and so we cannot continue saying that this is a sanctuary city a sanctuary county or a sanctuary state whatsoever when the reality shows a completely different situations you know the most surprising thing about all the data in all the information that the students and i had you know god was the fact that when people are deported they're not seeing us passengers because they didn't buy a ticket so you hear like ralph nader talking about bus and your rights right well because you bought your ticket but in our case if we get the port it would not even seen us passengers were seeing us cargo talk about a slavery coming back  n i just grabbed pictures from the internet really didn't take me long to find pictures of the shackles there soprano of them and does show you how common disease is just incredible the level of this is this is kind of what we face when we get calls from the tensions center and when we talk to families ice is suspected to just look down to keep up to just do whatever they inflict upon us that even on their way out people who still feel there's no solution to to our problems that somehow we deserve these and this is happening here in king county access to information bailable in this is the first time through these work of the center for human rights international human rights clinic we're showing no the united states is not that place even we say that to people  detain when they call us especially people from cuba you know they call us and they say they told me this is a land of freedom and i've been detained for so many months and i said to them well they lie to  stuck in traffic and well you know i mean you're stuck in traffic in seattle anyway all the time so no i don't know why people complain about it but we did it because we believe that we needed well so we were facing the challenge of we're going to do an action we don't know how many people are going to show and we don't know if there's going to be arrests so we've really had to do a lot of work to ensure that we were able to provide safety to people that are right why you for agreeing with me and so while we have nine career courageous people shutting down the street being arrested really is the same day on tuesday with no charges then taking advantage of they decide to fight us and they decide to put charges against our people and they don't want to drop them so we continue exposing these machine and we have actually  several groups some of your press in here throughout the state on how these machine operates not only in king county we know that now jakim i supposedly know the taney people supposedly because they were may not too because they lost a lawsuit but they still doing it we of course we know and and this is a graphic that we put together last year because we wanted to showcase this is not only a seattle problem now washington a state problem but how deep it goes we still don't know but we need to make sure that people are aware of what's happening in how each of those localities are responsible for those numbers right for every person that disrupted has to do something with it and they should be also held accountable not on the ice but in our experience with this report and trying to engage with  to outbreaks of chicken pox one right after the other one and then moms and we went to city of dot com and said this is happening what are you going to do and they're like well your problem and if you talk to each other like  anything to us if they don't one so they're really good at just you know passing the buck and it felt the same way with king county because it turns out i even if you read their executive order they're like we didn't know we just didn't know june twenty eighth you know what there's the partitions how did the happen let me tell you in twenty fourteen when we did our first shutdown action that was february twenty four of twenty fourteen that was how to use that there was a recent why this is the statement of a good friend of mine that i met in the national center got to go he used to call me almost every day in he have horrible medical problems still dos he was the part that but  can i share my story i think that lisa does the least i can do and i should do so this is a quote from  do you have to treat us this way he supports a short flight in summary twice three stops in every stop they have to get out from there the plane and come back because they were adding more people leaving my country i don't want to see you ever again and also the nice way i can put it in their weight they talked to him so every time they were there where broadening to their plane they were to same kind of humiliation they had to go through so it was three stops and then they so that really took two days for him to go from the u s to outside of other all the way there as people were talking about the soma the nightmare of the house that flight that we know he said you have no idea what i just went through so you think i just read it so he told us you know it also did the entire hours how they were recent why they were sitting there for so many hours why they came back and all i can tell you what is in explaining a very simple way how does section it's going to look like we don't know it's not clear so i don't know you but i mean people can talk and talk and talk i'm more of an actual person and i think most of you know that in our group that's what we don't write we don't we only get to talk like these when we're invited the usually we don't but let me tell you that even if started back in twenty twelve and you know with democrats in power and it still took us seven years so how frustrated i am with politicians so as this is signed and hopefully implemented the press will still have to see if these bill actually simply meant that and we see less detentions in washington a state we will see an increase of people being brought to the airport feel to be detained because that coming from the southern border so i think that's constant reports of people say and beans cheek and fruit they constantly fine maggots alife so because we have so how do you know you know have you seen them how do they look you say you're gonna do otherwise we're going to keep you in check and don't start crying you we're coming after you right usually there's five of them but there were only two there and there's all the other smaller buses but as you can see that's full i was driving out so i took these so they're not like the best pictures so i try to zoom in and there they see enough buses there tells you where are those buses right and so as i was leaving that tension center i saw another bus coming in and i turn around and i tried to catch another empty to day one of our colleagues swim back again and she sold buses leaving their parking lot which means now they're going to go get new people from other places to bring into that attention center because finding again and again how private corporations benefit from our misery again and again geo is one of them you want to mention all of these new names that we have to learn otherwise they won't be able to operate and so what we want king county is to stop colluding with gross violations of people's humanity because they are they can claim they didn't know let's say they actually didn't know it doesn't matter they're doing it and that's the problem and if they do then oh well they know now so let me tell you when i started looking at all these data we realized th was something huge that we needed to do a lot of assistance you know we're all volunteers we have a lot of work to do good thing that hunger strikes have not happened this year here in tacoma but we have been supporting hunger strikes  politicians coming out and talking about you know how horrible that he's i think that we want to make sure is that if anybody any county official any elected official really feels bad about these the really believe this is horrible should be working with us they should not just taking advantage of should shouldn't be a photo moment i think that was it was clear for for all that press conference and one of the main ones clay lacy last for thirty five years and according to the legal information that we have us recently renewed so when says he's banning these leases by when i was going to wait thirty five years sorry we can't wait that long so we went to a real time line to end those leases and how come to an ounce an odd it's now how come they didn't do it in the past i mean it's just obvious that something had to be done there and they have to understand that we cannot allow for  what we don't want to waste thirty five years for these to happen we're giving you thirty five days and we're being really nice thirty five days starting today so make sure that let us know if they answer the phone the metal let us know if you were able to leave always mail let us know if they get back to you or something tell him we're counting the days you have thirty five da no more no less we're being nice we could have said less again but we're going to stick with it thirty five because again as he was a speaking people had already took off from king county to be the just now when one of the panelists were speaking i was getting a text from a family member sayin my son is getting deported next week so this is something that should have been done years ago wait for his political career to take off if he really truly cares about these he would have done it on june twentieth eighteen but why did he waited for the day before of these these release of th