Washington state courts may shield non-white immigrants' status amid Trump fears

Guardian 

The assault took place in March. Ariella and her family were new arrivals to the US, but her husband didn’t know her real reasons for coming: her secret conversion to a religious group that was brutalized in their home country. Ariella had already filed for asylum.

When her husband found out, he screamed that he would kill her and began to rain blows down on her.

Police in Seattle charged her husband with felony harassment and two counts of domestic assault. And that’s when Ariella was confronted with an impossible choice: safety from her husband, or safety from the risks of revealing the particulars of her immigration status in open court.

Ariella is far from alone in facing such a choice. But that could soon change in the state of Washington, where a groundbreaking effort is under way to limit what juries hear about a witness’s immigration status. Prosecutors and immigration rights activists say the information can bias jurors and discourage immigrants, especially the undocumented, from using the legal system.

In June, the state supreme court agreed to consider a unique proposal: a new rule making immigration status inadmissible in court “unless status is an essential fact to prove an element of a criminal offense or to defend against the alleged offense or to show bias or prejudice of a witness”.

The rule, first proposed several years ago, would make Washington the first state in the country to place special limits on the mention of immigration status in criminal cases, and only the second state, after California, to impose similar limits in civil court. After hearing public arguments, the court could adopt, modify or reject the rule as early as September.