Johnny Nguyen endured a grueling process to make it to Seattle in 1993. After leaving Vietnam, which was still recovering from the war with the United States nearly two decades later, Nguyen and his parents and siblings spent seven months in an overcrowded refugee camp in the Philippines. Living conditions in the camp were deplorable.
Once his family settled in Seattle, Nguyen learned English through two years of studying in government-funded ESL courses; eventually, he became a certified nursing assistant. He was incarcerated in 2000 and has been in prison ever since.
He spent his time educating himself with library books, teaching himself multiple languages, math, and college-level English in hopes of completing his college degree, which he’d started while studying nursing. For eight years, he used these skills to tutor prisoners taking college classes at Stafford Creek Corrections Center and Washington Corrections Center where he is currently incarcerated.
But for 17 years, Nguyen was denied access to higher education himself—because he’s an immigrant. “Being able to help others while serving my prison sentence was a dream come true. Then I learned that my ICE hold disqualified me from accessing the same college classes I tutored others for,” said Nguyen, who has been given a pseudonym because he fears deportation.
Nguyen has what’s known as an immigration detainer, also called an ICE hold, which is a request made by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement to hold someone in prison or jail beyond their scheduled release date. During that window of time, ICE decides whether it wants to take the person into custody and attempt to deport them.
As of the end of June, Nguyen was one of 545 prisoners in Washington State with ICE holds. After these people have served their prison sentences, they may spend months or even years in an immigration detention center until they are released into the US interior or a final order for deportation is issued, after which they will be sent back to their country of origin. Washington law enforcement agencies are not supposed to honor these requests, but a loophole in state law allows the Department of Corrections to notify ICE before releasing prisoners with immigration detainers.
In fiscal year 2024, ICE issued detainers for nearly 150,000 people held by local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies. During the first few weeks of Donald Trump’s second term, ICE’s use of detainers spiked dramatically.
Washington state prison facilities are often hidden in rural, monolithic communities, behind massive walls, rows of razor wire, and guard towers. Forced labor or solitary confinement is the reality for each prisoner. For those facing deportation, the situation is even more bleak. Of the few rehabilitative programs available, fewer still are accessible to prisoners with immigration detainers.
If incarcerated noncitizens want to get a college degree, as Nguyen longed to do for years, they must do something no other prisoners in the state have to in order to receive that opportunity: They need to pay for it themselves.
State law and departmental policy say that incarcerated people who could be deported after they are released from prison may not enroll in college classes unless they can cover the cost of their education. This restriction effectively bans people who work for as little as $1 per hour from getting a college education unless they can find a charity or other third party to foot the bill.
This law is part of a larger pattern of discrimination faced by noncitizens incarcerated in Washington state prisons, Type Investigations and The Nation found.
Higher-paying jobs are out of reach for some noncitizens because these positions require a GED; Washington’s Department of Corrections (DOC) does not offer GED courses in languages other than English or provide translation services. People facing possible deportation are prevented by state policy from accessing lower custody levels, like work camps and work release, which are essential to prepare prisoners for successful reentry. State law also says that the DOC does not have to come up with reentry plans, individualized documents that help lay out the reintegration process, for prisoners who may be deported.
None of this is the case for incarcerated American citizens who, while navigating the same struggles of prison, can typically access postsecondary education, all custody levels, and the highest-paying jobs available.
One DOC policy explicitly prohibits discrimination on the basis of immigration or citizenship status; another says that the department “will not deny services, benefits, privileges, or opportunities for incarcerated individuals based on the presence of an immigration detainer” unless it is required by law to do so.
Currently and formerly incarcerated people with ICE holds struggle to reconcile these policies with their own experiences.
“There is a very clear and distinct caste system in prison,” said Eric Bacolod, an immigrant from the Philippines who was incarcerated in Washington state for more than 20 years. “As an immigrant with an ICE hold, I felt like I was worse than the bottom of the system. I felt beneath it.”
Washington government officials are aware that educational opportunities in the state’s prisons have helped to reduce recidivism. But that knowledge hasn’t changed the DOC’s draconian approach to incarcerated noncitizens.
Prior departmental policy instructed administrators to deprioritize people for referrals to educational programs on the basis of “deportation and citizenship status,” relegating noncitizens to the “lowest priority” for placement in English as a second language classes (ESL) and vocational skills training. Although the DOC’s education policy no longer includes that language, immigrants still experience barriers to accessing education.
Many prisoners who are not proficient in English would struggle to complete a GED program without first taking an ESL class, as GED courses are only taught in English with no interpretation or translation services. Prisoners can take the GED exam in Spanish, but they would have to prepare for the test without classes.
Every prison in Washington has a GED program, but many do not have ESL classes, which departmental policy says are offered “within available resources.” As of October, only five in 10 state prisons had what the department calls English Language Acquisition (ELA) programs. The second- and third-largest prisons in the state are not offering ELA classes, Type and The Nation found. A DOC spokesperson said that ELA classes are “offered to a significant portion of the population” and that the department has no plans to expand the program to other facilities. The spokesperson also said that staff who teach adult basic education classes are trained to work with students who do not speak English, but those classes are “not tailored as much as an ELA specific class.”
Arnoldo Mendoza, an immigrant from Mexico, said he’s never been able to access ESL classes at any of the six facilities where he’s been held. Washington Corrections Center, where he is currently incarcerated, does not offer these courses.
The lack of ESL access has been detrimental to his quality of life in prison, Mendoza said. He has spent nine years in solitary confinement during his thirteen years of incarceration, he recalled, which he attributed partially to his difficulties communicating with prisoners who do not speak Spanish.
He wishes he could take ESL classes so that he could “fit in” better. He talks mostly to other Mexican prisoners because of the language barrier, and he wants to be able to communicate more with other people. “Nobody understand me,” he said, which is “frustrating.”
Even when they can access ESL courses, noncitizens who want to continue their education at the postsecondary level run headfirst into a state law and a departmental policy that bar prisoners subject to deportation from enrolling in college programs unless they or a third party can cover the costs, and if space is available.
If someone with an immigration detainer wants to get an associate’s degree, the DOC charges them between $448 and close to $9,000, depending on their monthly income. That price tag is prohibitive for many prisoners in a state where incarcerated people are paid as little as $1 an hour. Other incarcerated people do not have to pay any fees to receive their first college degree.
Being incarcerated is tremendously expensive. As is the case in many states, prisoners in Washington are forced to buy food and basic necessities from the commissary, funneling their meager earnings back to the DOC. Someone at Washington Corrections Center who earns a dollar an hour has to work nearly six hours to afford a six-ounce tube of Colgate toothpaste. If minimum-wage workers in Washington were subject to the same system, toothpaste would cost them $95 a tube.
“How can I pay for an expensive education on a wage of pennies per hour?” Bacolod, the immigrant from the Philippines, asked.
Until Washington abolished the death penalty in 2023, people on death row were the only other group of prisoners responsible for funding their own postsecondary education.
For Bacolod, the state’s decision to make college education less accessible for only those two groups was telling.
“The same policy that prohibits my access to education unless I can pay for it only applies to one other group, those on death row,” he said, speaking about the policy in place before 2023.
“They’re saying I’m as good as dead,” Bacolod added, “but if I magically find the money, then we’ll see if we can find the room to spare.”
Nguyen, the Vietnamese refugee, shared a similar sentiment. “I knew that more education would enable me to help more people in more ways,” he said. “It made me sad to know that Washington State didn’t want to invest in me, and thereby resisted investing in the lives of other prisoners.”
Even if a noncitizen is able to come up with the money to pay for college classes, the departmental policy that dictates referrals to postsecondary educational programs says people who are paying for education themselves are the lowest priority for placement.
In 2023, after spending years tutoring people who were taking college courses he could not access himself, Nguyen was able to achieve something he’d dreamed of for 30 years, obtaining a college degree with the help of Fabian’s Fund, a foundation that supports education for incarcerated people.
“Education is the key to a better future,” Nguyen said. “I want to help others succeed, and achieve what I have, whether they stay in the US or are sent back to their country of origin.”
The lack of educational infrastructure for people who are not fluent in English can also exclude some immigrants from certain employment opportunities.
Correctional Industries, a division of the Department of Corrections, operates businesses that run on prison labor. The majority of Correctional Industries workers fall into two classes of employment, Class II and Class III. Class II jobs involve work outside the prison unit such as food production or furniture manufacturing, while Class III jobs are generally within the prison unit and include maintenance or janitorial work. Class II assignments usually pay better than Class III jobs and also offer overtime pay.
To qualify for a Class II placement, prisoners must have a high school diploma or an equivalent certificate, like a GED, or be enrolled in a program to obtain one. There is a way to get an exemption from this requirement, but those requests have to be approved by Correctional Industries. This policy can prevent some immigrants from accessing higher-paid jobs; instead, they may end up working Class III jobs, which do not have an education requirement, making as little as $1 an hour.
Felix Sitthivong, an incarcerated writer and community organizer, recalled a man he knew during his time at Clallam Bay Corrections Center. “DOC wouldn’t allow him to get a higher wage of a few extra cents per hour, because even though he had multiple degrees from China, he didn’t have a US GED,” Sitthivong, who has worked with prisoner-led groups to pressure the DOC to change policies that restrict opportunities for incarcerated immigrants, remembered. He and other activists stepped up, helping the man improve his English and prepare for the GED exam.
Even incarcerated immigrants who meet the education requirement or get an exemption are still shut out of the most lucrative Class II positions—offsite work crews where prisoners can earn as much as $2.85 an hour—because departmental policy bars anyone with an immigration detainer from offsite work.
In addition to generally offering higher wages, some Class II jobs involve skills like carpentry that could be helpful after prison. Meanwhile, a report from 2022 shows that the most common Class III job in all but one of the prisons in the state was custodian.
Jesus Madrigal, who was deported to Mexico after ten years in the Washington state prison system, lives in Ensenada with his wife, Julie. While he was incarcerated, Madrigal worked serving food to other prisoners.
Madrigal, who stopped attending school after sixth grade, tried to access educational and vocational opportunities while he was in prison. “I asked for ESL, school, camp, and reentry classes and tools so many time. Never one time I get anything,” he recalled.
Madrigal’s lack of vocational skills and education mean that the only work available to him is “hard manual labor for low wages,” his wife said. He makes $140 per week as a delivery driver.
If he’d been given the chance, Madrigal said, he would have spent “every second” of his decade in prison on education. He wishes that he could have gained skills that would enable him to find higher-paying work to support his family.
After deportation, formerly incarcerated immigrants like Madrigal may struggle to meet their basic human needs due to difficulties accessing educational programming and vocational training while in prison. They are also carved out of vital opportunities to prepare for reentry.
State law requires the DOC to develop a reentry plan for every person in its custody. These documents are first created soon after a prisoner is sentenced and are meant to facilitate a successful reintegration process. As part of the reentry plan, the DOC is also supposed to connect incarcerated people with resources before they are released to ease the transition.
There is only one group of prisoners for whom the DOC does not have to develop reentry plans: people facing deportation.
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In Washington, incarcerated people can generally prepare to reenter society through transitional custody levels. A few years before their release date, they can be transferred to a work camp, then a “reentry center”—commonly known as work release—and eventually electronic home monitoring. A good-behavior incentive and the final bridge to freedom, these custody levels provide increased responsibility, greater access to training, and jobs that offer skills toward a livable wage in society.
But even though many people with ICE detainers will remain in the US after their cases have been adjudicated, they are not afforded these essential elements of successful reentry. A DOC spokesperson said that prisoners with ICE detainers are not eligible for placement in transitional custody levels because “camps and partial confinement options are insufficiently secure for individuals who will [be] release[d] to the custody of another jurisdiction at the completion of their sentence.” They “still have access to programming, vocational and other opportunities that can help set them up for success after release,” the spokesperson added.
Incarcerated people with immigration detainers now face the additional threat of being deported to so-called third countries after they are released from prison, where they could face untold dangers without family or community support. Johnny Nguyen has several years left on his sentence, but he is afraid of being sent to an unfamiliar country if ICE decides to deport him. His fears are rooted in his memories of the war. “My first memories are in my father’s clinic in our village,” he said, “seeing blown-off limbs and pools of blood. I can still hear the screams of South Vietnamese and American soldiers.”
With educational and reentry programming out of reach or forbidden, incarcerated immigrants feel written off, stuck at the bottom of the caste system and ill-prepared for life outside of prison. From his home in Mexico, Madrigal summed up his predicament: “They made me work long hours, no skill, no education,” he said. “Now look. No future here with no education.”
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