For nearly a year, U.S. Army veteran Garnet Smith lived under the harrowing conditions of the Northwest ICE Processing Center in Tacoma.
According to advocates, Smith was given inedible food, foul drinking water and was subjected to mistreatment, including delayed medical care for a broken arm and an alleged sexual assault during a pat-down.
On Tuesday night, July 21, he was able to return home to his fiancée in Spokane.
“It makes me feel a lot of emotions ... I actually signed up to die for this country," Smith said in a video shared on social media after his release. "And then to be told that I was going to get deported made me feel like, ‘So what did I sign [up for?] — what was I defending?’"
Smith, now 44, came to the U.S. at 17 under a visa in 1998. He became a green card holder the year after, according to a court document. He joined the Army at 17 and was honorably discharged in 2002.
He filed an application for citizenship, which is pending.
About 14 armed ICE officers arrested Smith last October from the Spokane car dealership where he was working and was taken to the detention center in Tacoma, said Aran Myracle, a veteran and advocate with About Face: Veterans Against the War who’s been in contact with Smith.
Under U.S. law, immigrants with legal residency can be placed in deportation proceedings if they are convicted of certain crimes. In Smith’s case, those were three previous domestic violence criminal convictions from about two decades ago, according to a court document.
Smith was released from immigration detention after the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington granted a second habeas court petition on July 20 that attorneys filed on his behalf. They had argued that Smith’s due process rights had been denied and that his detention, which at that point had reached about 10 months, was unlawful.
But his fight is not over.
Smith continues to fight a deportation order to Jamaica, his country of origin. At the same time, advocates like Myracle are calling for accountability and an investigation into the alleged sexual assault.
The Tacoma Police Department closed the investigation into the alleged assault, finding no investigative leads or factors warranting a deeper investigation, spokesperson Shelbie Boyd told RANGE.
GEO Group, the private company the federal government contracts with to run the Tacoma detention center, reportedly investigated the incident and found no wrongdoing, Myracle said.
Neither ICE nor GEO responded to RANGE’s requests for comment.
Myracle said About Face and the Defend Migrants Alliance reported the incident to the Tacoma Police Department in early July.
“Garnet felt like he was really dismissed,” Myracle said of Smith’s interaction with police after the alleged assault. “It was very clear that he was incredibly traumatized … like his whole worldview has been shattered by this experience.”
Smith’s claim is just one of many abuse allegations made by detainees at the Tacoma ICE facility. The University of Washington’s Center for Human Rights has documented more than 229 reports of sexual abuse or assault over a decade at the facility. The study, published earlier this year, detailed how internal investigations ignored key evidence, failed to report crimes to law enforcement and neglected to adopt policies to prevent future assaults.
In addition to Smith’s claims of abuse, Myracle told RANGE that ICE refused to return Smith’s driver’s license and veteran ID when they released him under the rationale that Smith wasn’t “entitled” to the documents because he had an open immigration case. But when Smith’s attorneys asked ICE for the IDs, Myracle said, ICE changed its story, saying Smith must have accidentally dropped the items and they could be returned to him.
The alleged assault
On July 7, after Smith was denied release on bond and as he waited for the court to rule on his second habeas corpus petition, Myracle received a distressing message. Smith told him he’d been sexually harassed by a guard and pleaded from inside the Tacoma facility for Myracle to contact his attorney or police.
Smith’s message read: “They embarrassed me, sexually harassed me, and made me feel so violated … just please help me.”
Myracle said that Smith was headed to the library with members of his unit when they were stopped for a pat-down. A Geo Group officer reportedly aggressively grabbed Smith’s penis and testicles during the inspection, and when Smith told him to stop and informed the captain and others of what had happened, he was taken to be strip-searched.
The Tacoma police officer who responded described Smith as “visibly upset,” according to the police report. The officer also reviewed video of the pat search on site, but noted it was not audible. According to the report, the guard put his hands on Smith’s left leg during the pat down and did an up-and-down sweep at which point Smith suddenly moved and could be seen saying something to the guards before being put in handcuffs and taken away.
The police report obtained by RANGE said that detention center staff patted down Smith and the other men because they were looking for a flash drive that had gone missing. But the report also said Smith wasn’t given a reason for the search — that “someone was hiding something” — until afterward.
In concluding his report, the officer told Smith that the guard who patted him down had done it in a reasonable manner, so there was no probable cause for any crime.
“Police in general are not especially known for handling sexual assault well under the best of conditions, and then when you've got people that society is saying are not worth the same level of protection — like they're in cages and they're being treated as subhuman already — the police are not taking these complaints seriously at all,” Myracle said.
Smith spoke with a doctor in the detention center who told him the incident prompted the filing of a Prison Rape Elimination Act report, Myracle added.
An ongoing problem
Another study from the University of Washington’s Center for Human Rights published in 2025 looked at the Tacoma Police Department’s pattern of neglect when it came to responding to crimes at the detention center, including sexual abuse. In fact, the department only prosecuted two of the 157 reports it received over the course of a decade. The victims in those two cases worked at the detention center.
The study also found that not only did police routinely ignore crimes reported by immigrants in detention, but when they did follow up on those cases, it was through an investigative process that was “so cursory” they didn’t contact the victims at all.
The detention center has also been criticized for other abuses, up to and including inhumane living conditions.
Myracle told RANGE that when Smith went to the detention center medical facility for treatment of a broken hand, the doctor rudely dismissed him. After about a month without treatment and persistent requests for medical attention, Myracle said that Smith was finally given an X-ray, a temporary splint and taken to St. Joseph's a couple of weeks later to get a cast.
“He's [suffered the] entire time he [was] there from a variety of things in addition to the horrible conditions for everybody — like the food, the water” Myracle said. “The lights are on 24 hours a day. There’s never any silence.”
Fighting deportation & detention
On April 2, after about six months into his detention, Smith filed a Habeas Corpus petition to challenge the legality of his detention. About a month later, District Judge Jamal Whitehead ruled that Smith’s detention was “unreasonably prolonged” and ordered ICE to give him a bond hearing, according to the court order.
Then immigration Judge John Odell denied Smith’s release on bond, saying that he was a danger to the community and a flight risk, according to a court document.
Smith challenged this through a second Habeas Corpus petition. Whitehead ruled on July 20 that Smith’s continued detention violated his due process rights and ordered his immediate release, granting Smith’s second petition. Odell’s decision was an “abuse of discretion,” Whitehead wrote and did “not rationally apply the governing legal standard.”
Odell never should have classified Smith a danger or a flight risk, Whitehead ruled, pointing out that eight of the nine factors used to determine the outcome of a bond actually favored Smith.
For example, Whitehead made note of Garnet’s strong ties particularly in Spokane — including his fiancée and five children ranging in age from 5 to 21 years — and his nearly three decades of residency in the U.S.
Though Whitehead noted that Smith’s criminal history included convictions for assault and harassment, most of that record was more than a decade old and not severe enough to deem him a danger to the community.
Whitehead’s ruling noted that Smith’s appeal of the deportation order filed against him is expected to be a lengthy process.
Myracle said Smith was injured in the military and left disabled. He now suffers from chronic pain and mental conditions. If Smith were to be deported, not only would he lose access to Veterans Affairs health care, but he would not be able to get the spinal surgery he needs.
When Smith enlisted, he thought he’d automatically receive citizenship. But that’s not granted automatically and can still be a lengthy administrative process, Myracle said.
“There are thousands and thousands of people who've served who do not have citizenship, many of whom don't realize they don't have citizenship, and all it takes is one mistake and they can be deported,” Myracle added.
Many veterans leave the military with substance use or mental health issues that might lead them to make bad choices, Myracle said. A veteran who holds citizenship and is convicted of the same crime as a noncitizen might face different consequences, like deportation.
“Ultimately, we want to see an end to the policy of detention and deportation of our neighbors, particularly for veterans like Garnet,” Myracle said. “Nobody who served this country and who was willing to die for this country should be put in a cage and then kicked out of the country that they swore an oath to die for.”
