The Immigration System That We Have Doesn't Really Work

I’m Aidan Perkinson. I’m the Operations Manager for Advocates for Immigrants in Detention Northwest (AIDNW). I’ve been working for Aid Northwest since 2023. I started as a volunteer here at the Welcome Center.

I was looking for something meaningful to do over the summer in between the school years. I went to a talk one of my professors gave on immigration in the US.

She mentioned Aid Northwest [AIDNW] was a local organization helping people who were released from detention, and I thought that sounded like a really great thing to do.

We help people while they’re detained and when they’re released from the Northwest ICE Processing Center in Tacoma, Washington. While people are detained, we have volunteers who do visits and are pen pals to provide emotional support, someone to talk to and listen while they’re detained. We also provide phone funds deposits. Almost all calls from this facility cost money.

We also provide bags of clothing for people who are being deported, with the exact size of clothing they need. We’ll also customize it to the climate they’re going to, and to other requests. If they want dress clothing or work clothing, we can make that happen. We’ve also been sending books and puzzles to build up a library inside (the detention center) and give people a way to pass the time. We’ve sent around 10,000 books in the last three and a half years.

It’s essentially the same as a regular prison. Books have to be paperback; they have to be content appropriate, so there can’t be smut or anything like that in there; and of course, because this is an immigration detention center, not a prison, the biggest need is for books that aren’t in English.

And when people are released, we have our Welcome Center. That’s primarily to make sure everyone who gets released from ICE detention is able to get back to their homes in the US or the next stop on their journey of immigrating to the US.

I also do outreach events for AIDNW, going to churches or community organizations to speak about AIDNW’s work and immigration in the US. I share my work number (253-753-4194) so people can call or text me to get help. We’ve also done interviews like this before. Several news organizations have helped spread the word.

But we’ve also been seeing a lot more people getting released, especially in 2026. In 2024, I think the detained population here dropped down towards 600 at points and we’d see very few people getting released. As the population has increased, a lot more people have been getting out.

We’ve also seen the ways people are getting out change. In the past, a lot of the folks we’d see here were asylum seekers and people who’ve been granted asylum. Now that’s pretty rare. The main way people are getting out is on habeas corpus petitions, which go to the next circuit court here. That’s been a really big change.

The other biggest change is the shift in immigration enforcement, and where that’s happening. In 2023/24 most immigration arrests were occurring at the borders, at ports and points of entry.

Right now, the majority of arrests are happening in the interior of the United States, and as a result of that, we’re seeing a lot more people who have already been living in the Pacific Northwest for years or decades, and a lot fewer people who aren’t quite sure what their next step is.

With asylum seekers, they might have a sponsor somewhere, they might have family somewhere that they’re going to go stay with, but a lot of them don’t. They will need to be connected with housing resources, as well as people who can guide them through the non-detained part of immigrating to the US; applying for a work permit, applying for food benefits and cash benefits, English classes, that sort of thing. There’s much less of a need for that from the people we’re seeing in the Welcome Center now. Most people we see here have a home to go back to already.

I think one big misconception is that everyone in the detention center is a criminal. According to the ICE data from April this year, 800 or so of the about 1100 people here are classified by ICE as non-criminal.

People seek asylum because legally they have a credible fear of being returned to the country they came from. That could be someone who worked for the US military in Afghanistan and is being hunted by the Taliban, or someone who is a blogger in China writing in favor of democracy in Hong Kong, or a religious minority from India who can’t find work and is being threatened. So people in those situations really can’t afford to wait in their country for the asylum process.

If the Taliban are after you, you can’t afford to stay in Afghanistan and wait years to get approval to enter the US. So what people do instead is they come to the US border, however they can. They cross and often turn themselves in right away and ask border officials for asylum. What happens then is they’ll be taken to a detention center while they go through the asylum court process, and a judge decides whether or not to grant their application for asylum.

There’s somewhere around 70,000 people in detention right now, but in the immigration court system there are over 3.3 million cases that are ongoing. I think over 2.2 million of those are asylum cases, and those cases are being seen by 600 judges across the country, so it takes years for people to get through that process. And of course, until you have asylum or a green card, you can’t get a work permit, so you’re just stuck in limbo. The legal process takes an immense amount of time, and that’s really, really difficult for people who aren’t wealthy. How do they get money for food, for housing?

When people are released, usually there’s one of a few things that happens. At least initially, it’s very joyous, especially if there’s family nearby. There’s cheering. Often, people cry, especially when they’re being reunited with family. Other times, people can be withdrawn as a result of the trauma they’ve been experiencing, so you’ll really have to guide them, make sure they know that we’ve got food and beverages here that are free to them. Ask them directly if they need clothing; don’t wait for them to ask us. Even if they don’t have family here, there’s usually really emotional moments when they’re able to call their family and say, “I’m out, I’m free.”

So, of course, for people who don’t know that that’s normal, that’s extremely scary, and we’ll make sure to communicate that as well. We are very used to searching for people in immigration locators. I’ve gotten used to common misspellings of names. Occasionally, family will be searching for a family member who’s been detained and won’t realize that their name’s been misspelled and it won’t come up.

When someone calls about someone who’s just been detained, it depends a little bit on where they are. If they’re in Washington State, we can advise them to call the Washington Immigrant Solidarity Network’s hotline (1-844-724-3737). They have resources that are designed to help people in that moment. We will also check right away to see if that person’s already been booked into a detention center. We’ll let them know of the resources we can offer, like the phone funds and visitation, and also give people advice on searching for a lawyer.

We’re really fortunate in Washington State to have the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project. They are a completely pro bono organization, so people can get legal representation entirely for free, and they do a really phenomenal job.

Another piece of advice that we always give out is that, if you hire an attorney, make sure to look them up on the State Bar Association’s legal directory.

Very often, you’ll see when you look them up, they’re not registered to practice law, or they’ve got a dozen complaints against them in the past two years. Ideally people can catch that before they pay them any money.

I think one thing that’s really important to keep in mind, especially right now, is that immigration has been in the news much more over the last year and a half than I’ve ever seen in my life, but this detention center was opened in 2005 and it has stayed open since then. Immigration detention has been part of the fabric of this country for over two decades now, and apart from who’s being detained and where they’re being detained, and how the immigration judges are handling cases, very little changes with presidential administrations. We’ve seen US citizens detained in the past.

Talking to your elected officials, calling them, writing to them, that’s always a good way to let them know that this is important to you as a voter. Also thinking about when you go to vote for someone, what does this person stand for? What action will they take? What are they willing to do about immigration?

We’re still looking for multilingual volunteers especially; people who are willing to do the visitation. We rely on individual donations. In the past, that was a bit of a hurdle, but as we saw in early 2025, that turned out to be a good thing, because so much of the federal funding that organizations were relying on was completely cut off. We went through that without any impact to our programs, which I think is pretty rare.

What keeps me in this work are the people I meet, seeing firsthand the impact we have and how much of a difference it makes in people’s lives. That’s incredibly motivating.