Title: Children in Immigration Detention: Health and Human Rights
Date: Wednesday, January 29, 2020
Time: 7:00 - 8:30 pm
Location: Thomson Hall, Room 101 (UW Seattle)

Featuring: Dr. Scott Allen and Prof. Angelina Godoy

Dr. Scott Allen is a medical consultant for the Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties at the Department of Homeland Security monitoring medical care in immigration detention facilities.  He became a government whistleblower in 2018 when, with the assistance of Government Accountability Project, he, along with his colleague Dr. Pamela McPherson, raised the alarm to the DHS Inspector General and Congress the risk of grave, imminent harm to children caused by the Trump administration’s expanded use of family detention under its “zero-tolerance” immigration policy. After witnessing substandard and dangerously lax medical care at the ICE facilities they were charged with inspecting, Drs. Allen and MacPherson  stated that they were ethically compelled to “speak out against injustice where authority discriminates against vulnerable populations... To remain silent would mean complicity.” When their warnings failed to reverse detention practices, they escalated their concerns to the press, appearing on 60 Minutes, NPR, CNN, and in the Op-Ed section of the Washington Post. For those efforts, Dr. Allen was co-recipient of the 2019 Ridenhour Prize for Truth-Telling and the 2019 Physicians for Human Rights Award.

Prof. Angelina Godoy is the Helen H. Jackson Endowed Chair in Human Rights and founding Director of the UW Center for Human Rights. Prof. Godoy teaches courses in the Department of Law, Societies & Justice and the Jackson School of International Studies. She is the author of two books published by Stanford University Press. The first, Popular Injustice: Violence, Community, and Law in Latin America (2006), examines the phenomena of vigilante justice in the wake of contemporary crime waves, especially in Guatemala. More recently, she authored Of Medicines and Markets: Intellectual Property and Human Rights in the Free Trade Era (2013), a comparative study of the politics around health and trade in Costa Rica, El Salvador, and Guatemala. She has also written numerous articles on these and other topics for both scholarly and general audiences. Her work at the Center for Human Rights has been featured in many outlets such as the Seattle Times, The New York Review of Books, CNN with Anderson Cooper, and KUOW, to name a few. Professor Godoy is also the proud recipient of the University of Washington’s 2014 Outstanding Public Service Award.

Event is free and open to the public. Contact: uwchr@uw.edu or call 206-685-3435