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This morning, Seattle City Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck announced legislation to bar new or expanded detention facilities from being built within city limits. At the same time, Seattle Port Commissioner Toshiko Hasegawa announced an order that would bar any expansion of immigration activity on Port land, and a second that provides civil rights education to anyone working on Port property.
Their announcement follows an anti-ICE-filled week. On Tuesday, City Council’s public safety committee passed a bill from Councilmember Maritza Rivera that struck dated language from the Municipal Code requiring city employees to “cooperate with, not hinder” immigration enforcement. On the same day, the Port Commission unanimously passed an order requiring that Port police clearly identify themselves so the public is less likely to confuse them with immigration enforcement. And yesterday, the County took action: County Executive Girmay Zahilay signed an executive order barring ICE from non-public spaces on King County-owned properties (like Mayor Katie Wilson did in Seattle last month), and County Councilmember Teresa Mosqueda introduced a bill to codify his order into law.
None of this can stop ICE from operating in Seattle. But it can impede the agency.
The Detention Moratorium
As of last month, ICE was holding more than 73,000 people in detention across the country—a record high—and they expanded into 104 new detention facilities, almost doubling from the previous year. ICE is not releasing people on bail, so that number will continue to multiply. So, too, will the number of detention facilities. Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill accounted for that. He set aside $45 billion, enough funding to to imprison another 135,000 people in new facilities by 2029, according to the American Immigration Council.
The closest ICE detention facility to Seattle is the Northwest Detention Center (NWDC) in Tacoma. But in December, the federal government posted a pre-solicitation notice from the Department of Homeland Security and ICE, putting local contractors on notice that they were looking to build a facility about the same size as the NWDC, able to detain 1,600 people.
Rinck’s emergency legislation would block the construction of that facility or any other within city limits for the next year, giving City Council time to explore more permanent restrictions on ICE expansion. SeaTac actually beat her to the punch, passing their own detention moratorium this week.
The bill treats the threat of an ICE detention center as a bureaucratic land use issue, arguing that the city needs time to address any “mitigation measures” needed to build a facility in “Seattle’s dense urban environment.”
“We need to be using every tool at our disposal to be really ensuring that we’re not eating this administration’s unconstitutional work and lawless agenda, and even if that means looking to land use as a tool,” Rinck tells The Stranger.
Rinck says she plans to share her bill with the Local Progress network, so other cities can copy her homework.
Rinck’s office says that Council President Joy Hollingsworth has agreed to allow the bill to skip the Land Use Committee, and instead be heard by the full council on Tuesday. Council could pass the bill as soon as February 24.
The Port’s Anti-ICE Agenda
Earlier this week, the Port Commission passed an order that helps make ICE clearly identifiable to the public—requiring that Port police are clearly identifiable, and can’t be confused with immigration enforcement.
Port Commissioner Hasegawa also plans to introduce two orders to regulate how ICE can interact with the Port, both of which will be introduced on February 24. The first order provides Know Your Rights education to anyone that’s working in the airport or other Port property, like the shops and restaurants at SeaTac. Immigration enforcement unavoidably operates in those areas, Hasegawa told The Stranger, and this order gives those workers the best chance to protect themselves and their colleagues.
The second mirrors the orders from Mayor Wilson and County Executive Zahilay: banning immigration enforcement from expanding their use of Port land for their operations. The presence of immigration at the Port is, again, unavoidable, Hasegawa acknowledges, but “the use of Port properties is narrow, and that it has to have an industrial purpose for one of our industries, our industry is not the prison industrial complex,” she says.
The commission could vote on both orders the day they’re introduced, and Hasegawa says she’s confident they’ll pass.
The Ban from County Property
Mosqueda’s bill would lock Zahilay’s executive order into law, blocking ICE from entering (without a warrant) non-public areas of buildings, parking lots, garages, and vacant lots. They also can’t be used as an ICE staging area, or to process detainees. The bill would also require that County Executive Zahilay identify properties that ICE is likely to try to commandeer, and to preemptively plan for better security measures.
Mosqueda also accounted for private land. One whole section of the bill is dedicated to designing a template that reads:
“This property is a Stand Together King County partner. No agent of the federal government, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), may enter these premises for purposes of civil immigration enforcement, absent a valid judicial warrant or court order. This property may not be used for civil immigration enforcement operations, including as a staging area, processing location, or operations base.”
You can also just write that on your door with some printer paper and a Sharpie, as we saw all over Minneapolis in the last few weeks.
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Hannah Murphy Winter
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