A new report from the University of Washington Center for Human Rights raises questions about how sexual assault investigations are handled at the Northwest ICE Processing Center in Tacoma.

Records obtained by UW researchers show 172 separate reports of alleged sexual abuse or assaults from 2015 to 2025. The reports include a range of allegations against detainees and facility staff.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement and GEO Group, the private company that operates the immigrant lockup, are both tasked with investigating these incidents and adhering to federal standards of documentation and reporting while they conduct their investigation.

Angelina Godoy, director of the human rights center, said the report shows that ICE and GEO group are skirting the rules.

“I know what the accountability process is supposed to look like ‘cause it’s written down,” she said. “But they have clearly departed from that.”

She said rules are in place, but they are being ignored.

“They have these elaborate accountability mechanisms and choose simply to ignore them because they assume there will never be any consequence for them,” Godoy said.

Of the 172 separate reports, researchers found that ICE and GEO’s investigations determined that 19 of the reports were substantiated, 90 were determined unsubstantiated, and 36 were unfounded.

According to federal standards, substantiated allegations means allegations of sexual assault were investigated and verified to have occurred.

Unsubstantiated, according to those same federal standards, means allegations were investigated and there wasn’t enough evidence to determine whether the sexual assault happened.

One example of an unsubstantiated claim included in the UW report involves an incident where a detainee was able save a semen sample as evidence of a sexual assault. The detainee alerted an auditor who visited the facility, and an officer with the Tacoma Police Department came the same day to speak to the victim and retrieve the sample. Two months later, the report shows, the Tacoma Police Department told GEO they were not going to investigate and “GEO’s internal investigation then concluded.”

Yet, three months later, Tacoma Police notified GEO “that the semen sample had finally been sent to the lab, and that analysis of its results confirmed that the contents included human sperm matching the DNA of the individual identified by the victim as his rapist.” By then, neither victim nor perpetrator was at the facility anymore — and the accused perpetrator was never charged with a crime.

A separate account of alleged sexual assault not mentioned in the report is detailed in a lawsuit filed this year. Attorney Colin Prince said the lawsuit is over GEO Group’s longstanding policies and practices of failure to investigate and discipline employees with serious claims of abuse.

In court documents, attorneys allege that during a standard pat-down in 2024 a facility staff member groped and grabbed a man’s penis and testicles. The lawsuit alleged the officer had conveniently positioned the pat-down to occur out of sight of surveillance cameras. This was not the first time the GEO Group staffer had allegedly done this.

According to the lawsuit, the detainee and another detainee alleging physical assault from another GEO Group employee both called Tacoma Police Department – where the Police Department “effectively ignored them and allowed the defendant GEO Group to investigate itself,” a common practice for 911 calls that come from the facility.

Prince said GEO Group later deemed the sexual assault incident “unsubstantiated” in records they collected over the lawsuit.

With mass deportations, the speed of which people are pulled through the facility on their way to potential deportation is cause for alarm — especially when it comes to accountability for abuse at the facility, Prince said.

“One of the real problems here is that the very nature of the detention center is transient,” Prince said. “People come through there, and they can be abused, and by the time anything can be done about it, they’re often gone.”

GEO Group would not comment on the staff member or their current status at the facility, but a spokesperson said they follow the same accountability standards set forward by the federal government — the same standards lawyers and the human rights researchers are now calling into question.

“This report by the University of Washington Center for Human Rights is part of a long-standing, politically motivated, and radical campaign to attack ICE’s contractors, abolish ICE, and end federal immigration detention by proxy,” said Christopher Ferreira, a spokesperson for GEO Group.

“We take all allegations related to sexual abuse and harassment with the utmost seriousness and have comprehensive policies in place to prevent, identify, investigate and remedy such instances.”

A 2023 investigation from the Department of Homeland Security found that administrators at the Tacoma immigrant lockup failed to meet standards for its sexual assault reviews.

The human rights center used to have an open line of communication with the operators of the Northwest ICE Processing Center years ago, but that relationship has long frayed.

“Any agency, whether it’s government or private business or anybody interested in accountability has to understand the importance of there being external oversight,” Godoy said.

The agencies that once held ICE accountable for its detention facilities are now fewer and fewer. The Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman, once responsible for conducting independent oversight over detention facilities, was recently closed under the Trump administration.

“Oversight bodies looking at DHS have been spectacularly ineffective, even when they existed, and now they for the most part really don’t exist or have been so downgraded that we cannot have a reasonable expectation that they would be able to do much,” Godoy said.

She said the decrease in oversight has been going on for decades, under both Democratic and Republican administrations.

“It’s become more bold and more offensively obvious to the general public because we’re seeing it on our screens every day now under the current administration,” she said. “But it’s not new and we got here by tolerating it for too long under past administrations.”

Gustavo Sagrero Álvarez is a reporter with KUOW. This story comes to you from the Northwest News Network, a collaboration between public media organizations in Oregon and Washington.

It is part of OPB’s broader effort to ensure that everyone in our region has access to quality journalism that informs, entertains and enriches their lives. To learn more, visit our journalism partnerships page.

News Source : https://www.opb.org/article/2026/05/08/sexual-abuse-investigations-tacoma-ice-university-of-washington-report/