Last week, Seattle’s new committee of Federal Administration and Policy Changes met for the first time to discuss both current and potential civil rights impacts of the new Trump administration on the residents of Seattle.
“While I do not intend to stoke fear or play into political theater, our community is being threatened daily, and local government is one of the last lines of defense,” committee chair Alexis Mercedes Rinck said at the beginning of the meeting.
Seattle’s government has been known to act to protect its residents’ rights before, including by passing a package of laws protecting access to abortions and gender affirming care in 2022.
“The city of Seattle has a history of loudly fighting for our rights and values during tumultuous times, and City Council has played a role to lessen pain whenever possible. I hope to work with our current council to continue to fight during such a critical point in American history,” Rinck said.
Immigrants experiencing atmosphere of fear
The meeting hosted two panels covering the topics of LGTBQ, reproductive, immigrant, and workers’ rights.
“These topics were chosen as this committee’s first meeting because individual civil liberties and human rights are under a direct and daily assault,” Rinck said. “Earlier this week, in a joint address to Congress, we repeatedly heard anti-trans and anti-immigrant rhetoric met with cheers from some of the most powerful people in our nation.”
Immigrants are already experiencing the impacts of the new presidential administration. As promised on the campaign trail, Trump is unleashing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents and tasking them with aggressive mass deportation efforts.
“Since January 20, we’ve seen an increase in calls to with immigration enforcement action and detentions across the state, including in Seattle and King County,” Vanessa Reyes from the Washington Immigrant Solidarity Network told councilmembers. “Officers have been seen knocking on doors in apartment complexes and trailer parks, and ICE has been seen driving around in certain neighborhoods, kind of circling around, causing a lot of fear and panic. There have been officers appearing at courthouses, community centers, grocery stores, community colleges. We received reports of ICE appearing in people’s workplaces, including a restaurant in downtown Seattle.”
Reyes said people without any criminal record are being detained and decried the unsafe and unsanitary conditions at the ICE detention facility in Tacoma.
“We’ve been told of community members who are afraid to leave their houses, afraid of sending their children to school, afraid of going to work, people who stopped going to the doctor, food banks,” Reyes said.
The daily lives of many immigrants are being deeply disrupted due to uncertainty and fear.
“We’re going to see expanded criminalization that ties into expanded deportation and expedited removal,” Jenny Mashek, directing attorney with the Northwest Immigrants Rights Project, told councilmembers.
Her colleague, Mozhdeh Oskouian, spoke to The Urbanist about the new federal registration program for non-citizens in the United States. “Of course this requirement, when it goes into effect, will adversely affect all the immigrant community members who are currently undocumented. The risk is especially great for those who have an order of removal.”
Oskouian said the Northwest Immigrants Rights Project is now uncertain about whether their federal funding will continue, which could impact many of their programs, including work with survivors of domestic violence and trafficking, giving information to people who are detained and helping them present their cases, and work with unaccompanied youth. Their organization is also having to focus its limited resources on increased community outreach and help for those at imminent risk of deportation, which means fewer resources for other cases.
“In light of federal policy changes, we’ve heard from community partners about concerns that immigrant workers are increasingly afraid of reporting labor standards and to government agencies and interacting with government,” said Steve Marchese, the director for the Office of Labor Standards (OLS).
The labor standards in Seattle apply regardless of immigration status, a point Marchese deliberately repeated to help defuse the confusion currently circulating in immigrant communities.
Some employers are using the threat as a tool to undermine workers’ rights.
“What’s happening at the federal level has already impacted workers’ willingness to come forward with their labor rights when their labor rights are being grossly violated. Workers are experiencing immigration based intimidation and bad actors are more emboldened than ever to use the threat of deportation as a tactic to stop worker organizing,” said Rigo Valdez from the Martin Luther King, Jr. County Labor Council.
Valdez is also worried about the large impacts on workers if the federal government were to defund Medicaid.
A recent public safety-themed Civic Cocktail hosted by CityClub asked panelists how the City could keep Seattle’s immigrant population safe in this uncertain atmosphere.
“Our relational policing unit is really active in the communities right now to try to mitigate some of those fears. The police department, and we’re messaging this out continually, we don’t take any part in any immigration raids or anything like that.” Seattle Police Department (SPD) Acting Deputy Chief Yvonne Underwood said. “We don’t even ask immigration status at all. We are not the federal government. We do not participate in any of those things. And that status quo for us, that’s our policy, and it has been for a very long time.”
Risks to the LGBTQ+ community and reproductive care
In its first federal impacts meeting, the City Council also heard from a panel of leaders from LGBTQ+ and reproductive care organizations.
“Let’s ground ourselves in the fact that the people who are most impacted by these executive orders and the work of the extreme right in this country are very Black, very Latin. They exist in the South, the Black Belt, where most of our people live, especially Black trans people, especially Latino trans folk, and especially Native trans people,” said Jaelyn Scott, the executive director of The Lavender Rights Project. “Those folks will be the ones coming here seeking care and relief in Seattle.”
Scott warned councilmembers that Black and other people of color who are also transgender will be targeted first.
“This is all being made much worse by the ‘tough on crime’ and ‘tough on homelessness’ narrative that’s being driven by the extreme right, but that’s making moves in our progressive circles,” Scott said. “Our businesses are struggling, our folks are being killed. That’s real, but the solution is not to unwittingly be complicit in the rise of over surveillance and criminalization that will further the aims of project 2025.”
Taylor Farley from Queer Power Alliance underlined the problems of displacement and housing insecurity in LGBTQ+ communities, as well as economic justice.
“We need to maintain and strengthen our local tenant protections, not to roll back what we’ve already put in protection,” Farley said. “We’ve put those protections in because they were needed at the time, and they’re still needed, and they’re going to be needed for the future.”
Sami Alloy, Pro-Choice Washington, spoke about Seattle Children’s Hospital canceling all gender-affirming care appointments for youth. Even though Washington Attorney General Nick Brown sued for a restraining order that was later granted, Alloy said the damage had already been done.
“I heard from at least two families that reported being seriously worried about their child’s suicidality in that week,” Alloy said. “So this strategy of threatening institutions with loss of federal funding and getting existing federal programs has already been used to target the trans community, those perceived to have benefited from DEI programs, immigrants, and many others, and we expect that these same tactics will be used very shortly to dismantle access to abortion care and shutter reproductive health clinics. No matter how protective our state’s laws are, if providers are unable to function, access to care will vanish.”
Planned Parenthood Alliance Advocates’ Washington State Director Courtney Normand agreed, saying a national abortion ban is “a very real threat.” She also cautioned that there needed to be not just an emphasis on reproductive health care rights, but also on access. Normand said 40% of Planned Parenthood patients rely on Medicaid to cover their health care costs.
“For Planned Parenthood and safety net sexual and reproductive health care providers, there has really been like a perfect storm of issues, and it has really created an existential threat to our ability to keep going,” Normand said.
Recent city council policies that could increase risks
A few ordinances recently passed by the City Council are coming under fire for increasing risks to Seattle residents. One of these is the less lethal weapons legislation passed last month in the hopes of facilitating Seattle’s exit from the consent decree.
“The message in the story that constituents received from this action was now Trump’s president, and we have protests happening, so Council’s hunkering down and trying to give these officers more tools to dispel crowds,” Rinck said. “I’m deeply concerned with the message that sends our residents about how we regard their First Amendment rights, their right to assemble, their right to free speech, and their right to, in the realm of free speech, speak out against authoritarianism, and we’ve just given an authoritarian message right back to them.”
Rinck and Councilmember Cathy Moore proposed several amendments to the legislation that would have created higher thresholds for the use of less lethal weapons, such as blast balls. The proposed changes also would have given Council more oversight powers, required mutual aid partners in Seattle to abide by the same rules as SPD, and created a private right of action for Seattleites injured by less lethal weapons used incorrectly. However, none of these amendments won the support of enough councilmember colleagues to pass.
Another recent Council decision falling under renewed scrutiny is the approval of increased surveillance last year, which included CCTV cameras, a new real time crime center, and a major expansion of license plate readers. Both the Community Surveillance Working Group and the Office of Civil Rights expressed concerns in their reports on the impact of these technologies on civil rights. Tee Sannon from the ACLU of Washington had concerns about data privacy around these technologies and warned that they could “cause significant harm to people who stand to be most negatively impacted by being tracked, including those seeking reproductive or gender-affirming healthcare and undocumented immigrants.”
Rinck was not yet serving on the City Council during these key surveillance votes, but has had trouble getting clear answers about the data being stored.
“With having the opportunity to have some of our community leaders come be part of the panels on the select committee, I’m hoping to be able to really spotlight that and have a discussion about the safety and security of data,” Rinck said. “And I hope we can revisit some of those measures this year. Those laws were passed in a different context. Now that we know more about the context that we’re in, I think it’s really worth revisiting again for the safety of our residents.”
Oskouian also voiced concerns about data privacy. “Of course we always have concerns when state agencies or companies retain information that could endanger our immigrant community members. For example, we are unsure that they have taken appropriate safeguards-or any private entity the government contracts with will provide sufficient safety guards.”
Alloy also spoke about the importance of using the best data privacy practices, curtailing surveillance of Seattlites, and not selling license plate reader data out of state.
Nico Quintana, the lead attorney for the Lavender Rights Project, indicated Council’s recent tough-on-crime policies would fall heaviest on queer Black, Indigenous and people of color (BIPOC) folks.
“What we can do is look at the policies that have been passed recently and how that is harming people. Whether or not we want to say it or not, it is, and especially our communities in BIPOC trans communities,” Quintana said. “You can make our community more affirming for people who are houseless, people who are having a mental health crisis, people who are our neighbors, and not criminalize and push out and shame, because that’s going to get people killed.”
Other local impacts
Rinck, who is also chair of the committee that oversees City Light, is concerned about the recent loss of mission critical positions at Bonneville Power, which provides about a third of the Pacific Northwest’s energy. “We’re looking at a reality where we can be facing blackouts. We could be facing huge rate increases just because there’s less power being generated,” Rinck said.
Since January, Bonneville has lost about 14% of its workforce to both firings and retirements.
Meanwhile, the University of Washington (UW), which is the state’s fifth largest employer, is facing problems of its own. Impacts vary widely across colleges and programs, depending on their exposure to National Institute of Health (NIH) funding. While a judge blocked the Trump administration from making large cuts to federal grant funding for research last week, the administration is expected to appeal the decision.
UW announced a hiring freeze and other cost-cutting measures earlier this week.
Uncertainty around federal funding had already led to many consequences before the official freeze. Ellen Graham, a UW PhD student in biostatistics, told The Urbanist that admissions and offers of funding support from the School of Public Health are still on pause. She knows of three research scientists in the Department of Global Health who have been placed on furlough, as well as two graduate students in the Department of Epidemiology who will no longer have their tuition and benefits covered by research assistantships.
“More broadly, the University has unilaterally changed their temporary layoff and furlough policy to make it easier to furlough and layoff academic workers in our union,” Graham said.
Arjun Kumar, a UW PhD student in Molecular & Cellular Biology, told The Urbanist the School of Medicine has a hiring freeze on all non clinical staff. Some first-year biomedical PhD students are having difficulty finding a permanent spot.
“I’m working to bring a new discovery closer to helping cancer patients, and critical funding for this effort has been frozen,” Kumar said. He might have to switch to a different project that is less promising in order to finish his PhD in time.
UW scientists are unsure whether they’ll be able to apply for future NIH grants, and many have had to cancel conference travel plans. Labs are being told to restrict spending as much as possible, which is leading to large experiments being postponed or canceled. Some Principal Investigators have said they can’t take on new graduate students next year, even if those students have already been accepted.
Philip Creamer, a UW postdoctoral student in hematology and oncology, said that some labs may have to resubmit their grants, which could mean they’ll need to cut positions or close altogether.
“Because so many of the academic workers here are international and rely on visas, a great deal of the research population would have to leave the country if positions are cut,” Creamer said.
If the NIH funding cuts proceed as planned, Creamer said that will likely lead to “the wholescale termination of research labs, potentially sparing some labs that perform clinical functions, but likely requiring large cuts in staffing.”
“These cuts will prevent critical research from being performed. Our research is crucial to developing treatments for cancers, Alzheimer’s, diabetes, HIV, and many more,” Graham said. “Cuts to indirect cost rates, freezing NIH funds, and preventing new NIH funds from being dispersed will delay the creation of lifesaving treatments, making the country sicker, poorer, and less ready to respond to emerging threats like bird flu.”
Next steps for Seattle
“We cannot sit idly by as local leaders and do nothing,” Rinck said. “In addition to today’s discussions, my office will be working with community groups on a variety of legislative efforts, including enhancing protections for reproductive and gender affirming health care and helping city employees and community members better understand rights related to immigration status. The people of the city deserve leaders who will fight unapologetically for our values and way of life.”
Several panel members at the first committee meeting had direct asks for the council.
For example, Reyes said the council could support its immigrant and refugee residents “by assessing all city policies and departments for ways in which they can put city residents at greater risks, including what the possible dangers of expanded policing, weapons usage against protesters, and surveillance technologies, and by investment in community deportation defense infrastructure and the overall safety net.”
Most panelists requested that councilmembers defend programs and at-risk communities, both in rhetoric and formal policymaking. Panelists asked for the City to backfill losses of federal funding for abortion and gender-affirming care clinics, provide continued legal defense funding, and prioritize language access programs. They asked for decriminalization of the vulnerable, assistance with housing and economic opportunities, and continued protection for renters.
“For people and leaders that may be reluctant to address these issues, I would just say history will judge whether you stood up when it mattered most, and this is the moment to stand up,” Rinck told The Urbanist. “So we’ll be here standing, even if we’re standing alone.”
Rinck will continue to convene her committee analyzing federal impacts on Seattle, with the next meeting scheduled for Thursday, April 3.
Amy Sundberg is the publisher of Notes from the Emerald City, a weekly newsletter on Seattle politics and policy with a particular focus on public safety, police accountability, and the criminal legal system. She also writes science fiction, fantasy, and horror novels. She is particularly fond of Seattle’s parks, where she can often be found walking her little dog.
