The Stranger

The 2 Line in Seattle Is Just a Simulation, for Now

Charles Mudede — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 15:38:00 -0800

Have you been on the 1 Line this week? If so, you might have seen a little Easter egg on the schedule board: the 2 Line.

On February 14, Sound Transit started running the 2 Line in Seattle, but only between Lynnwood and Chinatown-International District. Its cross-lake connection will commence on March 28. Nevertheless the "practice run" to Chinatown-International District is causing some confusion and, in some cases, consternation. But what's the fuss all about? It's a transitional moment to what might be the biggest public transportation event since the Capitol Hill Station opened nearly a decade ago. And to be honest, all of the busiest stations on L1 are located between Northgate and Westlake. But, yes, it's not really the 2 Line, but the train says it is (I’m what I’m)—so, when riding it, as I did on February 16 and 18, you’re feeling the near future by way of the simulated mood of the 2.

There’s a real benefit for riders with this “practice run”: it really adds an extra train to key stations on the line. Look for yourself: If, say, you leave U District Station (after grabbing a gyro at Cedars of Lebanon) and want to get to Capitol Hill Station (where you will down a quick drink at Post Pike and Cafe), there is now a train running every 3 to 4 minutes. This is the kind of frequency that the riders of Vancouver BC’s automated SkyTrain enjoy.

So, now it goes like this: You enter the station, and as you approach the platform, you see the train is already there and about to close its doors and depart. You think about running–but it’s too late. Its doors close. It begins moving. Before February 14, feeling the whole world was against you when this happened made total sense, because every train on 1 Line had 10 minutes or more on it. But now with 2 Line you can sing to yourself these words, which are popular in African countries like Botswana and in some movie about lions that don’t eat their subjects: “hakuna matata.”

There will be another train in a couple of minutes. So, chill and think about some idea in a book that impressed you. Before that the thought is completed, “whoomp! There it is.” The train to take you to where you want to be.

Slog AM: Woman Killed by Driver in Capitol Hill Identified, Dog Enters Olympic Skiing, We’re Suing Trump Again

Micah Yip — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 08:58:00 -0800

The Stranger's morning news roundup. by Micah Yip

Woman Killed By Driver in Capitol Hill Identified: Her name was Lilliana Moreno. On Monday night, the 27-year-old was crossing East Pike Street when she was hit by a car making a right turn from Bellevue Avenue. She was trapped under the car for 20 minutes and died at the scene.

ICE Arrests: According to the Deportation Data Project, ICE arrested 2,000 people in Washington between late-January and mid-October of last year, a 140 percent increase from the same period in 2024. Roughly 47 percent of those arrested had no criminal history.

Seahawks for Sale: Paul G. Allen’s estate has begun the sale process, the team announced on Instagram. Allen’s will directed his sister/estate chair to sell all his sports holdings and donate the proceeds to “philanthropic efforts.” But don’t worry, the team is unlikely to leave the city.

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8 Skiers Dead, 1 Missing: On Tuesday, a deadly avalanche in California overtook a group of 15 skiers and guides in the Sierra Nevadas near Lake Tahoe. Eight are dead and one is missing. Six were rescued and one was still in the hospital last night. An avalanche warning was issued Tuesday morning. Authorities are investigating the decision to proceed anyway.

College (Re)Bound: After a pandemic-era decline, community college enrollment in Washington has rebounded. New data from the Washington Student Achievement Council shows a 7.5 percent increase in community college enrollment between 2024 and 2025. Four-year universities aren’t so lucky—undergrad enrollment only rose 1 percent last year, and actually declined 7.5 percent among first-term freshmen.

We’re Suing Trump Again: Attorney General Nick Brown and 14 other state attorneys general are suing the federal government for decimating clean energy programs created and funded by Congress. Trump is not supposed to do that!

Weather: It’s COLD! It’ll be mostly cloudy with a high near 40 and there’s a slight chance of rain and snow before 1 p.m. Tonight will also be cloudy with a low of 27.

Underdog: I have very little interest in the Winter Olympics. The only real clip I’ve watched is of this dog crashing a cross-country skiing course to join two skiers crossing the finish line. And really, it’s the only clip I need.

Ex-Prince Arrested: Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor was arrested today on suspicion of misconduct in public office for allegedly sharing confidential documents with Jeffrey Epstein. The former prince was stripped of his titles in October for his association with the convicted sex offender.

Put it On My Card: Actually, don’t—I don’t want to pay extra. Starting March 1, you’ll be charged a 3 percent fee when you use a credit or debit card to pay for a Washington State Ferry fare. Added in the 2025-26 state transportation budget, the new fee is meant to offset the cost of processing card payments. Officials estimate it’ll bring in $7.4 million over the next two years.

Lunar New Year Began Tuesday: Looking to celebrate? Here’s EverOuts’ list of Lunar New Year events around the city.

Ramadan Also Began Tuesday: WBUR’s Here & Now put out this segment yesterday on the importance of the date fruit when breaking the fast, and follows reporter Hana Baba as she shops for Ramadan and talks with other Muslims about the date.

Think You Are the King of the Bus?

Nathalie Graham — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 12:43:00 -0800

I was excited to play. And then I lost. Twice. by Nathalie Graham

People who take the bus are superior to exclusive light railers, who are only cosplaying as serious transit riders. That measly track can be the gateway drug into the vastness of Seattle’s public transportation network. It can only take you two directions today—and a third and fourth when the Cross Lake Connection unites the 2 Line with Seattle proper on March 28. On the bus, you can go anywhere.

At least, this is what I thought of myself. I take the bus frequently and have since I moved here almost 12 years ago. But a new game has humbled me.

Routle is a new daily iteration in the vein of Wordle (for the logophiles) and Worldle (for the geophiles), except it puts transit route knowledge to the test. Made by software engineer and self-described “mysterious train-loving hacker” one-time San Francisco resident River Honer, Routle shows one unlabeled King County Metro (or Sound Transit light rail) route each day. Players only see the route’s shape—there’s no map of Seattle—and have five guesses at which route it is (wrong guesses will appear on the screen). As transit nerds will note, it’s missing a few ferries, doesn’t include rapid ride routes and is limited to the Seattle area. Honer says she didn’t include everything because “Seattle’s bus network is very far reaching.” She’s open to feedback if people think she should expand the routes, but doesn’t want to make the game too hard.

Honer started with San Francisco’s transit routes and recently released versions of the game for us, Portland, and AC Transit in Alameda County, California.

Honer made the Seattle version because she used to spend summers here. She figured it would be a good option for Routle because of our “good number of iconic routes” and we have a population of transit enthusiasts.

I was excited to play. And then I lost. Twice.

It turns out I only know the buses I know, from the four Seattle neighborhoods I’ve lived in.

My husband, a lifelong Seattleite, got yesterday’s Routle (Route 3) in two guesses. Last night, we talked about how many routes in Seattle we knew. We attempted to name where each bus traveled from Route 2 through Route 79. This is hard to do. He paused to complain about the neutering of the 43, which used to run all the way to Ballard, and the 48, which used to reach Rainier Beach.

I sent the game to my mother-in-law, also a lifelong Seattleite. She mused about it. She grew up taking one set of routes, then used another set in young adulthood, and a whole different set as parents. The transit routes we know are extensions of our lives at any point in time.

It’s the same for Routle’s creator, Honer. She used to visit Seattle in the summers. “I remember when the link tunnel was the ‘bus tunnel,’” she reminisced. “I used the 12 and 10 buses to get to my summer job at Pike’s Place Market [sic]. I was also there when the South Lake Union streetcar was opened.”

For me, I knew the University District routes well, but they changed when the light rail came. I remember taking the 45 to Ballard for a first date at the end of freshman year. I learned the 65 when I graduated and had to commute to my first job. Then, it was all Capitol Hill routes. (And others, but I will not be doxing myself, you freaks).

Slog AM: The Government’s Out of Money Again, Two Immigrants Were Released from Tacoma’s Detention Center, and Who Knows, We Might Get Some Snow

Hannah Murphy Winter — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 10:00:00 -0800

The Stranger's morning news roundup. by Hannah Murphy Winter

Good Morning! It’s Presidents Day, which our president is celebrating with an AI-generated Time magazine cover and the quote: “I was the hunted, and now I’m the hunter.” This is probably what George Washington had in mind, right?

The Weather: We had our taste of False Spring, and now we’re back to winter for a bit. Highs in the 40s, lows right around freezing, and we might even get a little snow later in the week.

Some Good News: ICE released Wilmer Toledo-Martinez, a Vancouver, WA man who was mauled by an ICE dog in December, from the Northwest Detention Center. He still has to continue his immigration case, but he’s doing it from home with his wife (who is an American citizen) and three kids.

And He Wasn’t the Only One: Greggy Sorio, a Filipino immigrant who came to the US on a green card, had to lose a part of his foot to infection, bleed out of his rectum for a month, and lose a “dramatic” amount of weight before a judge demanded that he be released from the Northwest ICE Processing facility in Tacoma. Sorio is able to access real medical care now, but he’s still at risk of deportation.

Another Shutdown: In a Valentine’s gift to us all, the Department of Homeland Security technically ran out of funds on Saturday while Dems in Congress try to fight for some limitations on ICE’s funding. Unfortunately, ICE and Border Patrol will barely be affected. And nearly 85 percent of FEMA employees and 95 percent of TSA’s are expected to work without pay through the shutdown.

ICYMI: Last week was a really good week for local anti-ICE legislation. City Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck introduced a moratorium on new detention centers in Seattle, and the County and the Port are blocking immigration agents from using their non-private land. Next up: let’s talk about the CCTV and ALRP cameras.

Trump Bombs 39th Boat: On Saturday, the military bombed another supposed narco-trafficking boat in the Caribbean. This illegal 5-month campaign, theoretically to fight the drug trade, has killed 133 people. This bombing killed three.

Pity the Millionaires: According to the Seattle Times’s Danny Westneat this weekend, taxing the rich is generally a popular and successful proposition. We learned that last week when, it turns out, the tax meant to fund our Social Housing Developer brought in more than double what was projected in its first year. (As Mayor Katie Wilson put it, this city is “filthy rich.”) And we know that the Millionaire Tax currently scooching through the leg is wildly popular. But Dems in the state leg (and Jamie Pedersen, specifically) are still considering a rollback for our Estate Tax to avoid the myth of the Fleeing Rich People.

Sheriff Certification: Right now in our state law, elected sheriffs are required to get certified by the Washington State Criminal Justice Training Commission within a year of taking office. Seems reasonable, right? But right now, if they just… don’t do it, there’s nothing anyone can do about that. The state legislature introduced a bill that would oust sheriffs who aren’t certified. So naturally, Pierce County’s hyperconservative, transphobic Sheriff Keith Swank thinks it’s unfair.

A Headline From Popular Mechanics to Breakup the Doldrums Today: “Jesus Was a Psychedelic Mushroom, a Controversial Theory Suggests. Could It Reshape Christianity Forever?”

Olympic Breakdown: NBC spent the first half of the games talking about American figure skater Ilia “Quad God” Malinin as the new face of the sport and the inevitable gold medalist. And he is the only person who’s ever landed a quad axel in an international competition. But in his final skate in the competition, the 21-year-old fell twice, struggled to deliver any of the quad jumps he’s famous for, and ended up placing eighth in the competition. Watching reporters try to make him explain what happened within minutes of his walking off the ice was brutal, and he handled it with a lot of grace. He told the Athletic that he was feeling overwhelmed when he got onto the ice. “I just felt like all the just traumatic moments of my life really just started flooding my head,” he said. “And there’s just like so many negative thoughts that just flooded into there and I just did not handle them.” We’ll see him again in four years, and by then he’ll surely have figured out how to fight the yips.

The Curlers Are Fighting: Both the men’s and women’s Canadian curling teams were accused of cheating—both for getting too handsy with the stone after they released it. And if you’ve watched curling, you know it’s a very mild-mannered sport (they’ve got brooms for fuck’s sake), but the head of the Men’s curling team threw around enough “fucks” that news reports called the exchange NSFW.

Wanna watch some of the action for yourself? Our local Granite Curling Club is throwing watch parties all weekend.

They Don’t Make ’Em Like They Used to: Naturally, when Olympians medal, they fuckin’ party. And who would take their medal off?? But it turns out, someone cut some corners on this year’s medals, and they’re popping right off their ribbons while the athletes celebrate. “Don’t jump in them. I was jumping in excitement and it broke,” said women’s downhill ski gold medalist Breezy Johnson. “I’m sure somebody will fix it. It’s not crazy broken but a little broken.”

Fun Olympics Fact: There’s a move in ice dancing called a twizzle. You’re welcome.

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Eddie Lin's District 2 Is Racially Diverse

Charles Mudede — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 15:00:00 -0800

The former assistant attorney for the Seattle City Attorney’s Office easily won The Stranger's endorsement. His big message? Seattle needs more housing, and from all sectors: private, parastatal, social. But is he too soft on cops? by Charles Mudede

I enter Cal Anderson Park. It’s 10:15 a.m. The sky is bright blue with long and high clouds. The sun is low. And a seagull stands on top of the city’s best fountain. What’s on its mind? On the concrete rim that circles the fountain’s pooled water, someone wrote with a spray can: “Death to AmeriKKK!” Now that’s on my mind. US fascism.

Unbeknownst to me, Councilmember Eddie Lin is also in the park, also near the fountain. In November 2025, he won District 2’s special election by nearly 40 points. On December 2, he was sworn in. Today, we are meeting at The Stranger’s office for a quick check-in. How is it going so far? Is he working on his promises? Is the job harder than he expected? That sort of thing. While talking on the phone about some community matter, Lin spots me. Does he also notice the contemplative seagull on the fountain or the anti-fascist graffiti?

At 10:35, we are in The Stranger’s conference room. It has a view of the rainbow crosswalk next to the Wildrose and, in the distance, two towers that will soon have the repurposed corpse of a Boeing 747 near the ground floors between them. I was introduced to Eddie Lin in this conference room in June of 2025 for the SECB endorsement meeting for the primaries. The former assistant attorney for the Seattle City Attorney’s Office easily won our endorsement. His big message? Seattle needs more housing, and from all sectors: private, parastatal, social.

“I saw you in the park,” Lin says to me as he places his phone on the conference table. “Funny you should bring that up,” I say. “I was thinking about facism in the US while crossing the park. And [you] being not only a person of color but the one who represents the most diverse district in Seattle, I want to begin by talking about ICE. When they come, they are coming for us. Is there really anything that can be done?” I also live in District 2.

Lin explains that he and Erika Evans, the new city attorney, are looking at the options closely and working with immigrant professionals and activists to prepare and protect all of the members of the community, many of whom are from Somalia, from what’s happening in Minneapolis. But, I say, ICE still just breaks the law. They break into homes without warrants. We saw this happen to an American citizen, ChongLy Thao. ICE just disregarded the law. Treated the Hmong American with no record like a criminal. Trump has made it loud and clear that this agency operates outside of conventional law. They can use excessive force and even act as if they can kill people with impunity. How can Seattle prepare for a federal organization that’s operating like a street gang?

After a moment's thought, Lin puts on his lawyer hat and says it like it is: “There are a couple things for me. One: There are certain crimes committed [by ICE agents] that are not just federal crimes. They're also state crimes. Murder is a state crime that does not [in Washington] have a statute of limitation. And it can't be pardoned by the president, and so, you know, I think, these federal agents need to be worried about that. The president is trying to send this message that he will protect them and pardon them. He can't pardon a state crime. So, he's going to be out of office someday. [And] Republicans will not be in control forever. They can't protect these people forever. So, I think we need to make these agents understand this. Yes, the statute of limitations for excessive force is something like five years. Yes, I would like it to be longer. But that is the way I’m looking at it. You are not protected from state crimes.”

When I ask about how things have been since he took office, he brightens a little and explains that, to be honest, not much has happened. He was sworn in. He made the transition, and he is now settling in. Then I ask about his top priority: affordable housing. Any new developments in that direction?

He is honest. Not much has happened in the immediate sense because housing is always a long-term commitment. “Even if we change zoning rules,” he says, “it’s still going to take years to see the results. The kind of housing crisis we are in now was caused many years ago. … But we still have to deal with the homeless crisis. That has to be done right now. … So, I support things like the tiny home villages or [other forms of] transitional housing. I'm supportive of [Mayor Katie Wilson’s] focus on that and want to do what I can to support her. Whether it's with resources, finding locations, or permitting, or land-use issues. But I think the whole city should be a part of transitional housing. Not just South Seattle.”

I bring up the fact that, though he’s considered a progressive, some think he is a touch soft on cops. He seems a little surprised by this, but it was mentioned in The Stranger’s 2025 primary endorsement. In response, Lin brings up that he, along with Alexis Mercedes Rinck and Rob Saka, voted against the police guild contract because it was woefully inadequate when it came to police accountability. Lin leaves it at that. Action counts more than words.

Local Lawmakers Are Finally Moving Against ICE

Hannah Murphy Winter — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 09:12:00 -0800

Impeding ICE with the combined powers of the city, county and the port. by Hannah Murphy Winter

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.

Slog AM: SPD's May Day USA Fuck Up, EPA Won't Regulate Greenhouse Gases Anymore, Michigan Town Must Slaughter Park Deer

Nathalie Graham — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 08:27:00 -0800

The Stranger's morning news roundup. by Nathalie Graham

Protect and Serve? Last summer's May Day USA event, the right-wing Christian extremist event held in Cal Anderson, was a clusterfuck largely because of the Seattle Police Department's biases against the people of this city, a new report found. SPD apparently didn't see what the big deal was about holding an anti-LGBT rally in the park—they "weren't familiar with the neighborhood's history," according to PubliCola. They viewed May Day USA as a "church group" and the counterprotesters as "antifa." They entered the event with a "anticipatory defensiveness" toward the counterprotesters—who they started referring to as "transtifa" after hearing May Day USA security use the term. SPD—which is largely made up of people who do not live in Seattle—also shared information with May Day USA security. This big mess of bias and animosity toward the people SPD is supposed to protect caused an aggressive police response and 23 arrests of counterprotesters.

Impeached: The Federal Way City Council voted 4-3 to remove Martin Moore from his post as council president. Moore posted on his official Facebook page in support of the anti-ICE student walkouts. The rest of the council did not like this. Despite public commenters speaking largely in favor of Moore's actions at a meeting Tuesday, the council sided against him. He'll still stay on council, but he's lost his presidential role.

The Weather: Say goodbye to dry skies. The rain is back. In case you're wondering if we'll get any more wintery weather, the Seattle Times has the answer: There is no hope for Seattle snow this year.

Well, what about ICE? In his first executive order, King County Executive Girmay Zahilay banned Immigration and Customs Enforcement from doing anything on nonpublic county-owned land. This includes "parking lots, vacant lots, buildings, and garages and prevents them from being used for staging areas, processing or operations bases." The executive order won't stop ICE if those gooners have a judicial warrant. Zahilay's order also directs $2 million to immigrant communities for "emergency food, housing, and legal aid" and steers the King County Sheriff's Department to make a plan for dealing with ICE, including how to identify undercover agents and how to respond if ICE and the public get into conflict.

Hey, get off of there! A person in Spokane hitched a ride on an ambulance, clinging to the back of the emergency vehicle on eastbound Interstate 90. That's not the suggested way to get to the hospital.

The EPA Is Done Regulating Greenhouse Gases: Hahaha. We are so boned. On Thursday, Donald Trump repealed the bedrock scientific finding that greenhouse gases endanger human life, thus ending our government's capacity to legally control pollution. This sweeping move means the Environmental Protection Agency can no longer regulate emissions of carbon dioxide, methane, and other greenhouse gases. It's a rejection of science and an absolutely dismal backslide as the US faces the realities of climate change: more intense storms, wildfires, droughts, and natural disasters. This, of course, is only good for "billionaire polluters," reports The Guardian.

"Jayapal Pramila Search History": Attorney General Pam Bondi had a piece of paper titled "Jayapal Pramila Search History" detailing the un-redacted Epstein files Washington state Rep. Pramila Jayapal accessed in her review of the documents. This outraged House members since it showcased the Department of Justice's alleged betrayal of the separation of powers. The DOJ confirmed it is keeping tabs on what searches lawmakers are doing in the disgusting pit that is the trove of Epstein files."It is an outrage that [the justice department] is tracking members’ investigative steps,” said Rep. Jamie Raskin. He plans to open an inquiry into this "abuse of power."

Antitrust Dust Up: Gail Slater, the head of the Justice Department's antitrust unit, announced her resignation. This shake-up comes as the DOJ is set to deal with corporate mergers like the tug-of-war battle between Netflix and Paramount Skydance over ownership of Warner Bros. Discovery. Slater's deputy in the antitrust unit also left this week.

DHS Shutdown Imminent: With Democrats saying they won't approve more funding for DHS, funding for the department is expected to run out on Saturday. Democrats are holding out until Republicans agree to implement more stringent restrictions on ICE. Agencies under DHS like ICE and TSA could be affected. Will the Gestappo work for free?

Honoring the Dead Is Politics: Ukrainian skeleton racer Vladyslav Heraskevych was disqualified from the Winter Olympics because he insisted on wearing a helmet honoring the athletes killed during Russia's war in Ukraine. His tribute apparently violated the Olympics' athlete expression guidelines. "I believe I am right in this case," Heraskevych told NBC News. "For me to back down is betraying [the people pictured on the helmet]."

Ukrainian skeleton slider withdrawn from Olympics after insisting on wearing helmet honoring dead athletes killed in Ukraine https://cnn.it/3ZtrjXN

[image or embed]
— CNN (@cnn.com) February 12, 2026 at 12:47 AM

Blood Moon on the Rise: A big, red Blood Moon—which is not just a fun way of saying having your period—will gush all over Washington night skies on March 3.

Oh Deer: The Michigan town of Iron Mountain has a deer problem. One of its parks has had a deer enclosure for 75 years. This is an odd choice since wild deer are prevalent. It's not like these people are lacking access to deer. Anyway, the enclosure is in dire need of upgrades. Like, $22,000 in one-time fixes and $16,000 in annual upkeep. The city council voted to close the pen. But, what to do with the deer? They are inbred, stupid, and diseased. They cannot be freed. So, they must be shot and killed. The people do not like this. Can't they save the deer? Probably not.

Good for Them: The Winter Olympic village ran out of condoms in three days. More are on the way.

A Long Read for Your Friday: You liked that Atlantic deep dive on Attorney General Pam Bondi? Then you'll love this Wall Street Journal story about what craven ghouls Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and her advisor Corey Lewandowski are. A tidbit: Noem fired a US Coast Guard pilot after he left her blanket on a plane, but reinstated him when she realized there was no one else to fly her home. Plus, Lewandowski has been really trying to get someone to issue him a gun.

Happy Almost Valentine's Day: Here is a date idea. If you're looking for gifts, or a gesture, I recommend heading to Salmonberry Goods Green Grocer in Crown Heights and buying some of their handmade Valentine's Day pastries. Also, buy a bouquet while you're there.

A Song for All You Lovers:

The Legislature Is Ready to Tax The Rich

Nathalie Graham — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 15:18:00 -0800

The millionaire's tax seems good, but is it great? by Nathalie Graham

Who will weep for the millionaires?

A 9.9 percent tax on annual earnings upward of $1 million could become reality in Washington state. A Senate bill is up for a full vote as soon as next week, and its companion in the House is still in committee. If either bill reaches Gov. Bob Ferguson’s desk with enough tax relief for small businesses and low-income households, he’s likely to sign it. With his pen stroke, we’ll join the ranks of futuristic societies such as New Jersey and Minnesota that have achieved the impossible: taxing income, perhaps fairly.

This is a good thing. The state needs new revenue. Over the next two years, we’ll have a $2 billion budget deficit. Across the next four years, we’re seeing double that. If the Leg hadn’t passed the biggest tax increase in state history and cut spending (even in areas they really shouldn’t have, like behavioral health, higher education, and healthcare) last session, we’d be dealing with a $16 billion deficit. When people complain that our ass tax code is the second most regressive in the nation behind Florida (a state that cannot decide if disease is bad), this is why that matters. We don’t have enough money for the basics and are still in a hole.

The millionaire’s tax will help dig us out. Democrats project it to siphon $3.5 billion from Scrooge McDuck-esque pools of money each year. The state will use that cashflow to expand the eligibility criteria for a low-income tax credit (basically, a sales tax rebate), fund public defenders (we’ve got a shortage), and extra padding for the scrawny general fund. It also cuts taxes on hygiene products, much to the amusement of esteemed doofus Danny Westneat. But is it enough?

With President Trump picking our state pocket book, maybe not. His Big Beautiful Bill, HR-1, will cut at least $3 billion in federal funds annually starting next year ($3.5 billion - $3 billion = goddamn it). And the millionaire’s tax won’t begin to offset that until 2029, the year we see our first payments.

The millionaire’s tax also comes with sweet savings for the Business Community—a juicy $600 million we’d otherwise collect. Similar to the Seattle Shield Tax passed last year, the millionaire’s tax would exempt thousands of small businesses from paying state Business & Occupation (B&O) taxes. To appease big business, the bill ends a B&O surcharge a year earlier than planned, unspooling work the Legislature did last session. A lot of people are not happy about this. But, we might not have been able to get a millionaire’s tax without this penance.

Sen. Jamie Pedersen (D-Seattle), sponsor of the Senate bill, says the millionaires tax is our only option.

“It’s the proposal in front of us that we actually can have the votes to get out of the legislature,” he says. Plus, it’s broadly supported by 60 percent of voters, according to public opinion pollsters GBAO and DHM Research (which conducted polling for The Stranger last year). Their enthusiasm could make all the difference when the referendum enthusiasts, hedge fund millionaire Brian Heywood and anti-tax goblin Tim Eyman, come begging for signatures.

The people aren’t as jazzed about the business-friendly cuts. Pedersen says they’re “necessary” to dissuade big business from going to war with the bill. Last session, the People for an Affordable Washington PAC, which was made up of businesses not people, accumulated nearly $2.7 million to warp public opinion on new taxes. Behind the scenes, the businesses were “girding for battle” last session and preparing “to take the legislature’s tax increases to the ballot.” As he put it, “some deal" stopped them from doing that.

For years, Pedersen has sponsored or co-sponsored bills for progressive taxation—solutions that give Washington another revenue source other than sales taxes, business taxes, or property taxes. Pedersen has attempted to get some version of an income tax passed for years. The partial capital gains tax, which passed in 2021 was the closest he’s gotten. Last year, he sponsored bills for a wealth tax and a payroll tax, and they died tragically from a lack of votes. It’ll be the same fate for other progressive revenue taxes proposed this year, Pedersen says, pointing to Rep. Shaun Scott’s proposed state payroll tax, the Well Washington Fund. Pedersen, who shares a district with Scott, did not support the bill, modeled after Seattle’s JumpStart tax, because “it’s politically not feasible in the legislature” right now.

Scott, who must have wronged the Pedersens in a past life, says that’s “too bad, because people of our district deserve leaders who believe in collaboration.” He signed onto the House version of Pedersen’s bill, even though he didn’t like the B&O cuts, and he saw other shortcomings.

“Senator Pedersen’s income tax bill would barely skim the reductions we’ll be seeing to K–12 schools, housing, healthcare, and higher education,” says Scott.

He says the Well Washington Fund would prevent cuts to those essential services while making big companies pay their fare share and begin to fill the budget holes in 2027, two years before the millionaire’s tax kicks in.

“If Senate Majority Leader Pedersen had chosen to engage in the discussion around [the payroll tax bill] he would know that the Employment Security Department (ESD) has confirmed that my payroll tax could start being assessed by 2027, perhaps as soon as late 2026,” Scott wrote in an email.

“That is not true,” says Pedersen. “He either has not interacted with the agency or he’s not representing that correctly.”

Except it is true. The ESD confirmed Scott’s payroll tax could be up and running by August 2027.

As it stands now, the payroll tax is stalling out, but as Eli Goss from the Budget and Policy center says, bills aren’t truly dead until the session is over. The millionaires tax, meanwhile, is moving to the full Senate next week. The millionaires are unhappy. The Republicans are bristling. Tim Eyman keeps sending emails with AI images of mud-splattered pooches to represent the “Godless dirty dog Democrats.”

Pedersen isn’t counting it as a win yet. Not until it passes the legislature, survives the inevitable referendum campaign and Supreme Court challenge. “Those are the three big gates to pass through, before we can actually start to make a significant change in the second worst tax system in the country,” he says.

Slog AM: ICE Out of MN, Seattle Hosts Big-Ass Parade, Bondi Snubs Epstein Survivors

Micah Yip — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 09:20:00 -0800

The Stranger's morning news roundup. by Micah Yip

Thank Fuck: After two months of federal officers terrorizing, brutalizing, arresting, and killing people in Minneapolis, the Trump administration will end its “largest immigration enforcement operation ever,” border czar Tom Homan announced today. Homan touted the whole operation as a win that leaves Minnesota safer, “less of a sanctuary state for criminals.” A win? After two months of arresting more than 4,000 people, killing Alex Pretti and Renee Good, causing mass protests? The surge leaves Minnesota shaken, not safer. And though that operation is ending, immigration enforcement will continue, Homan pledged.

A Big-Ass Parade: I don’t give a fuck about football. But I have to say, the Seahawks’ massive party downtown yesterday sounded pretty sick. The team was paraded down Fourth Avenue in big military transport trucks, starting near Lumen Field and ending near the Space Needle, as an estimated 750,000 to 1 million cheered them on. People of all ages came from all over the state, with some claiming spots on the street the night before.

We Posted Some Rad Photos on Our Instagram Yesterday: Check ‘em out.

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A post shared by The Stranger 🗞 (@thestrangerseattle)

DwTF (Down With the Fence): Remember when the city fenced off Seven Hills Park in September due to homeless encampments? That park will finally reopen on February 26, park department officials said at a community meeting Tuesday night. There are plans for a new sign, “human and hound fitness installations” (which sound suspiciously furry-coded), and a little facelift, fixing infrastructure and trimming trees. Why they couldn’t do that while keeping the space open is a mystery. It’s not like the fence kept people out, meeting attendees said.

Gallup Gallops Away: From tracking presidential approval ratings, that is. Gallup announced yesterday that after 88 years, it will no longer measure presidential approval. The switch comes as President Donald Trump continues throwing temper tantrums over any media outlet/poll/person/anything that’s less than fawning, reality be damned (Trump’s Gallup approval rating fell to 36 percent in December). Still, Gallup insisted its decision was “solely based on Gallup’s research goals and priorities.” It sucks though — the Gallup Presidential Approval Rating is one of the most cited measurements of public opinion on presidents since Harry Truman was in office, The Guardian reported.

Gallup Has Scaled Back for Trump Before: In 2017, Gallup went from daily to weekly presidential approval tracking. A year later, they went down to monthly.

If you saw today's headline that Gallup will stop measuring presidential approval, they did the same thing in 2018. They do it whenever Trump is president.

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— Brandon Friedman (@brandonfriedman.bsky.social) February 11, 2026 at 11:27 AM

Two Actors Died: James Van Der Beek, known for his roles in Dawson’s Creek and Varsity Blues, died yesterday morning after battling stage 3 colorectal cancer. He was 48. Bud Cort, known for starring in Harold and Maude, also died yesterday after a long illness. He was 77.

Weather: Mostly cloudy with a high of 53. The sun will slowly break through as the day progresses. Tonight, temps will drop to a low of 43. There’s a 30 percent chance of rain.

Pam Bondi’s Testimony: Attorney General Pam Bondi hurled insults and dodged questions at yesterday’s House Judiciary hearing on her mishandling of the Epstein files. The stand out moment was when Washington Rep. Pramila Jayapal asked Epstein’s victims in the audience to stand and raise their hands if they had not been able to get an appointment with the DOJ. All of them did.

This photo of Attorney General Pam Bondi looking down after the Epstein survivors in the room were asked to raise their hands if the current Justice Department has failed to speak with them is some fine photojournalism.

AP Photo by Tom Brenner.

Story: www.mississippifreepress.org/bondi-clashe...

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— Ashton Pittman (@ashtonpittman.bsky.social) February 12, 2026 at 8:11 AM

What I Learned About Bondi from The Atlantic’s New Article: (1) Earlier in life, she was allegedly once so kindhearted she earned the nickname “Pambi,” like “Bambi.” (2) Foreshadowing her transformation from Pambi to MAGA ghoul, she once refused to return a dog she adopted to its rightful family, even after the four-year-old grandson begged her to. She instead hired a lawyer and accused the family of abusing the dog. (3) She has called reporters crying and begging them not to publish stories about her. There’s a lot more you should read.

This is some genuinely psycho shit...

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— brian pillion (@anaphoristand.bsky.social) February 11, 2026 at 12:02 PM

Amtrak Death: An Amtrak train on route from Portland to Seattle struck and killed a person south of Tukwila at about 9 p.m. Wednesday evening. Nobody on the train was injured.

Jaahnavi Kandula: The city will pay a $29 million settlement to the family of Jaahnavi Kandula, the 23-year-old graduate student from India struck and killed by a speeding Seattle officer Kevin Dave at a South Lake Union crosswalk in 2023. Dave was going 50 miles over the speed limit. He was cited for negligent driving, paid a $5,000 fine, and subsequently fired from the department, but was never criminally charged. The Seattle Times has the story.

False Alarm: Or should I say “False Package”? Yesterday, the 1 Line’s Lynnwood City Center Station closed around 5 p.m. while authorities responded to a report of a “suspicious package.” Riders were asked to leave the station and the King County Sheriff’s Office dispatched its K-9 bomb detection unit to the scene. But they didn’t find anything, and the station reopened about an hour later.

To the woman I saw belting “Pink Pony Club” on a Lime scooter late Sunday night in Capitol Hill, this one’s for you:

Social Housing, Coming Soon to a Neighborhood Near You

Micah Yip — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 16:45:00 -0800

After three years, two ballot measures and Tuesday’s City Council vote, Seattle is one step closer to being a more affordable city. by Micah Yip

After three years, two ballot measures and Tuesday’s City Council vote, Seattle is one step closer to being a more affordable city.

On Tuesday night, House Our Neighbors hosted an event featuring Mayor Katie Wilson, announcing the organization will be receiving $115 million through a voter-approved tax to build and buy buildings for affordable public housing. Rent is tied to the resident’s income. And because the buildings are mixed income, wealthier residents subsidize the cost. Earlier that day, City Council voted to turn on the tap, unanimously passing the interlocal agreement for the collection and disbursement of the funds between the city and the Seattle Social Housing Developer (SSHD).

“There is a lot of wealth in the city, and we continue to have one of the most regressive tax systems in the country, in the state,” said Wilson. “And it is very gratifying to know that we’re going to be able to use a little bit of that wealth and put it to work building housing.”

February must be a lucky month for housing in Seattle. In February 2023, Seattle voters passed I-135, which basically asked Seattle voters, “Hey, do you want us to form a social housing developer?” and Seattle said “yes.”

Then, in February last year, the city presented voters with two options to fund social housing: Prop 1A, a 5 percent tax on companies for each employee making more than $1 million per year; or Prop 1B, which wouldn’t create a new tax, but siphon $10 million per year from the Jumpstart payroll tax for only five years. Seattle passed Prop 1A.

SSHD’s interim CEO Tiffani McCoy announced that an estimated 170 companies in the city are subject to the tax, $115 million in the 2025 fiscal year—a figure far greater than the original estimate of $50 million.

Social housing is a new concept in Seattle, deviating from our profit-driven housing market that’s widely inaccessible for low- and middle-income people. Rents are meant to remain permanently affordable, with a target goal of around 30 percent of a person’s income. And it’s been successfully implemented in places like Vienna, Austria, Finland and Singapore. In the United States, only Seattle and Montgomery County, Maryland have taken the leap.

“Our main objective isn’t profit and we’re not determined by the markets that other, private landlords are,” SSHD spokesperson Lilly Fowler told The Stranger.

Maybe you’re wondering if you can be one of those hundreds benefitting from social housing this year. You could be, if you make anywhere up to 120 percent of the area’s median income (AMI). Fowler says they estimate the first building will open in about six months. You can register to stay updated here.

“In a moment when housing costs continue to rise and displacement pressures remain real, social housing is going to give us a tool that can match the scale of the problem,” Wilson said.

Correction: This article has been updated since publication. We incorrectly stated the Seattle Social Housing Developer hosted the event, when it was House Our Neighbors. We also stated that the city had collected $115 million in the last month of 2025. It had begun collecting funds from the 2025 tax year last month (January 2026). We also inaccurately stated that rent for these buildings would be capped at 30 percent. The target is around 30 percent of a tenant's income, but it's not legally mandated. We regret the errors.

Slog AM: Ten are Dead After Mass Shooting in Canada, the Trump Administration Can’t Make Up Its Mind About the El Paso Airport, and It’s Super Bowl Parade Day in Seattle

Megan Seling — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 10:01:00 -0800

The Stranger's morning news roundup. by Megan Seling

Today, Seattle Celebrates: It’s parade day for the Seattle Seahawks, who defeated the New England Patriots 29–13 in Sunday’s Bad Bunny Bowl. The morning begins with a trophy ceremony at Lumen Field at 10 a.m., and the parade will start at Fourth Avenue and Washington Street at 11 a.m. Officials say it should take approximately two hours for the parade to make its way down Fourth Avenue to Cedar Street. SPD is expecting about a million people, and they started closing roads at 6:30 a.m. It’s gonna be nuts. Either rush down there now and embrace madness, or avoid the area completely. There is no in between. Just stay off the pergola!

Mass Shooting in Canada: Ten people are dead, and more than 25 are wounded after a shooting at a small school in northern British Columbia. Police say the alleged shooter died by suicide. Two of the victims were found at a home believed to be connected to the incident. It’s the deadliest mass shooting in Canada since a shooter killed 13 people in Nova Scotia in 2020, and, as AP reports, “Canada’s government has responded to previous mass shootings with gun control measures, including a recently broadened ban on all guns it considers assault weapons.”

Meanwhile, in America: According to massshootingtracker.site, which is a real website, there have already been 45 mass shootings in the US this year (we’re on day 42), with a total of 62 people killed and 137 wounded. Your thoughts and prayers are bullshit.

Trump Administration Shuts Down El Paso Airport: Or not. Hard to say! On Tuesday night, Real World Boston star and the Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy claimed Mexican cartel drones breached US airspace, so he grounded all flights for 10 days. This morning, though, the Federal Aviation Administration rescinded that order and said the shutdown was “prompted by the Defense Department’s use of new counter-drone technology.” America: We’re doing a great job!

Tax the Rich! Hundreds of union members rallied at the Capitol in Olympia yesterday to demand that local lawmakers pass the millionaires tax, which “calls for a 9.9% tax on Washington residents making more than $1 million a year beginning in 2028.” Why wait until 2028? Tax those fuckers now, I say! Unfortunately, I am not in charge. Our own Nathalie Graham will have more about this Senate bill later at the stranger dot com. Stay tuned.

In Other Lawmaker News: Gov. Bob Ferguson is working with state lawmakers to add "mental health safeguards to AI chatbots.” The policy would “require companion chatbots to notify users they are interacting with AI and not a human at the beginning of the interaction and every three hours,” according to the Seattle Times. But why just every three hours? Make the robots say it every 30 minutes! Every three minutes, even! In fact, melt the robots! Burn OpenAI to the ground! Hack the planet! I have had too much coffee!

If You’re Wondering Why People Turn to Robots for Help: It’s because our city (our state, our country, our world) is terrible at offering people meaningful mental health support when they reach out for help, and a new report on King County’s lack of mental health referrals proves it. The King County sheriff’s 911 center has zero standard procedures to help people in crisis, and apparently don't refer them to the 988 suicide hotline either. Instead, they just send officers and hope it works out?

Strange Case Gets Stranger: Last night, police announced that they detained a person of interest in Rio Rico, Arizona, in connection with Nancy Guthrie’s disappearance. This morning, that person was released. Nancy, the 84-year-old mother of Today host Savannah Guthrie, has been missing for more than a week, and for several days, Savannah and her siblings have been releasing videos to Nancy’s believed captors, who allegedly asked for $6 million in Bitcoin.

And Stranger Still: Kash Patel and the Go Get ‘Em Kids released video footage yesterday of a masked person captured on a doorbell camera outside Nancy Guthrie’s home on the same night she went missing. According to one expert CNN interviewed, this person’s behavior is “impressive,” and they clearly did a “certain amount of planning.” What? Are we watching the same video? Dude looks like a bumbling idiot, rolling up to the house with a gun holstered directly above his crotch like someone said, “Put this on,” and he was like, “Okay, yeah, because I have definitely worn a gun before. I will just point it directly at my dick.” Then, guy was so ill-prepared for the presence of a very common doorbell camera that he paused to grab some weeds from the garden and attempted to fashion them into some kind of curtain, all the while staring directly into the camera lens at close range. And you want me to believe this is the same brilliant criminal mind capable of kidnapping the 84-year-old mother of a high-profile journalist and leading the FBI on a nationwide goose chase for more than a week? Sure, Jan.

Speaking of Kidnappings: ICE is still at it! Locals in Minneapolis shared this scene after the fact.

This is the aftermath of an ICE kidnapping a few blocks from my home in St. Paul—an hour ago. A quiet street full of broken glass and at least three wrecked cars. The target of the kidnapping was taken away by ambulance. He was on a stretcher and covered by a sheet, though a cop said he was alive.

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— Andrew Karre (@andrewkarre.bsky.social) February 11, 2026 at 8:46 AM

In Local Film News: Yesterday, The Stranger reported that the Boeing IMAX theater (the biggest IMAX theater in the state) is expected to be sold to the Space Needle Corporation. The theater is closed for now for a “brief renovation focused on improving the concessions and arrival experiences, scheduled to end in May.”

And now, I leave you with some of my favorite things to happen at the Olympics so far:

🥌 Commentators constantly referring to the US mixed doubles curling teammates as Girl Cory and Boy Korey. (Congrats on the silver, buddies!)

🏒 The US women’s hockey team allowing their opponents exactly one goal in four games, including a 5–0 victory over Team Canada. Even better, it’s the Torrent players who are leading the team in points! Hilary Knight has two goals and three assists, Alex Carpenter has three goals and two assists, and Hannah Bilka has three goals and one assist. (Britta Curl has zero goals, which is what she deserves, because she’s a transphobic asshole.)

😭 Ilia Malinin skating to the sound of his own voice in the ultimate masturbatory figure skating performance, which I actually hated very much but had a lot of fun laughing at. Just some of the lines the 21-year-old recites during his program: “The only true wisdom / Is in knowing you know nothing.” “You are something / But not nothing.” lol ok quad god

Rivera Introduces Bill to Protect Immigration Information

Micah Yip — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 17:05:00 -0800

Unfortunately, nothing in government is simple. While police are regulated under state law, local law, and department policy, there’s still a conflict between city code and state law Rivera’s bill does not address. by Micah Yip

Councilmember Maritza Rivera has done something right.

This morning, the Public Safety Committee passed her bill that protects immigrants from our own municipal code. It strikes language that says city employees (including police) must “cooperate with, not hinder” federal immigration enforcement, and adds a section clarifying that they are not to share personal information with federal immigration agencies, either.

Yay! Thanks, Rivera!

Unfortunately, nothing in government is that simple. While police are regulated under state law, local law, and department policy, there’s still a conflict between city code and state law Rivera’s bill does not address.

Let’s start with the language repeal. Rivera’s bill removes that “cooperation” line, which originated in 1986 from an initiative passed by Seattle voters (what the hell, ’80s Seattle voters!). Excellent first step. Rivera’s bill also creates a new section in the Seattle Municipal Code (SMC) blocking city employees and officers from sharing personal information—like someone’s address, phone number or social media handle—for immigration enforcement, except if required by a court order. Good second step.

Both changes align city code with state laws like the 2019 Keep Washington Working (KWW) Act and the 2020 Courts Open to All (COTA) Act, which place information collection and sharing restrictions on local law enforcement, judges, court personnel and prosecutors. The bill also aligns the city code with the city code. In 2003, a “don’t ask” policy was added to the SMC—city employees can’t ask about someone’s immigration status.

Except officers if they have “reasonable suspicion” that (1) a person has been previously deported, (2) that person is again in the United States and (3) they’ve committed or are committing a felony.

SPD has its own policies separate from, but governed by, city and state law. According to Council Central Staff, the department has “chosen to enact a policy” for immigration situations that is “quite a bit narrower and does not contemplate any of the criteria” described in current city or state law. Even though there is a discrepancy, SPD tells its officers, “Just don’t ask.”

It’s unclear enough that Councilmember Eddie Lin abstained.

“I don’t want to hold up the important bill and good work that you brought forward, Councilmember Rivera,” he said. “But it just seems like there’s still a bit of confusion, at least in my mind.”

Rivera acknowledged the shortfalls. She said KWW likely overrides the SMC code, but said they’d need to do further legal analysis before amending that section. She was adamant—passionate, even—that the bill should still be passed.

“One doesn’t preclude the other, so we can move this bill forward,” Rivera said. “[We can] take this what I deem to be an important step, all while then having the conversations about what else.”

The bill passed, with Rivera, Committee Chair Bob Kettle and Vice Chair Rob Saka voting yes. Councilmember Debora Juarez was absent. It’ll go before the full City Council at the February 17 meeting.

Editor’s Note: A previous version of this article stated that SPD policies undermine Rivera’s bill. The language of SPD policy, the Seattle Municipal Code, and Washington State Law conflict, but SPD policy will be expected to conform to changes in the municipal code.

Pacific Science Center’s Boeing IMAX Theater to Be Sold to Space Needle

Chase Hutchinson — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 15:45:00 -0800

The Boeing IMAX theater, the biggest IMAX theatre in the state, has been closed since Feb. 1 and will be sold to a new owner: the Space Needle Corporation, the Pacific Science Center confirmed in an email Tuesday.

“PacSci will not resume operations in that theater,” the spokesperson said. “Once the transaction concludes, we anticipate that the buyer will make some renovations and reopen the theater as an IMAX experience later this spring.”

The question of what that “IMAX experience” entails will now be top of mind for Seattle movie lovers. Many consider the Boeing IMAX to be one of the best places to go see the biggest releases of the year, but staff who spoke to The Stranger are concerned that this new buyer isn’t interested in screening first-run releases of Hollywood films, like Christopher Nolan’s upcoming The Odyssey. A spokesperson for PacSci said they will be showing Nolan’s film at their smaller theater, the PACCAR, but deferred questions about the future of film programming at the Boeing IMAX to the Space Needle Corporation.

In a statement shared with The Seattle Times, Space Needle CEO Ron Sevart said “we’re excited to partner with Pacific Science Center in continuing the availability of two IMAX theaters on the Seattle Center Campus” and that it will continue to operate as a movie theater following a "brief renovation focused on improving the concessions and arrival experiences, scheduled to end in May." However, he didn’t specify what movies or programming will be shown there, only saying “we haven’t explored any use other than as an IMAX theater.”

“While continued operation of the Boeing IMAX Theater is our short-term focus, we can’t wait to explore other partnership opportunities that support the future of Pacific Science Center and the Seattle Center,” Sevart said in a release.

Also speaking to the Times, PacSci President and CEO Will Daugherty said, “the economics of operating a movie theater have become increasingly challenging. It made sense for PacSci to include the Boeing IMAX Theater in this transaction.”

Can our movie theaters catch a break already? SIFF ended its lease at the Egyptian last year, the Varsity Theatre closed just last month, and the Grand Illusion is still looking for a new home. However, the Boeing IMAX is something different. It’s the region’s “only true IMAX,” as the theater’s website once referred to it, with a 1.42:1 aspect ratio AKA a massive screen. When Ryan Coogler’s stellar vampire horror Sinners swept the nation last year, it was one of only a handful of places in the country where you could see the film as the filmmaker intended. (Having seen the film, I can’t overstate how much of an impact this makes.)

Now, it’s an open question whether they’ll be able to experience anything like that again anytime soon at the Boeing IMAX. As for the impact the sale could have on employees, a spokesperson for PacSci said “we have not yet determined the impact on PacSci staffing.”

Editor's Note: A previous version of this story said that the sale was final. Since publication, the Pacific Science Center has clarified that the sale has not yet gone through, but is expected to.

ICE Says They Will Play “Key Part of Overall Security Apparatus” of World Cup

Vivian McCall — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 13:25:00 -0800

Hey, we’re hosting the World Cup, and not far from the immigrant rich Chinatown-International District. And since this is the “World” Cup, tens of thousands of people from around the world will be here. That's a problem! by Vivian McCall

While defending Trump’s mass deportation program before Congress today, ICE’s acting director Todd Lyons told Rep. Nellie Pou of New Jersey that the agency would be a “key part of the overall security apparatus” of the FIFA World Cup this year.

Hey, we’re hosting the World Cup, and not far from the immigrant rich Chinatown-International District. And since this is the “World” Cup, the world will be here.

That’s a problem. Not only for us, but for Los Angeles, San Francisco, Boston, Philadelphia, Pou’s East Rutherford, New Jersey, and all the other host cities that’ve promised to protect their immigrants from this violent, unpopular agency.

I asked Mayor Katie Wilson’s office if A) this is the first they’ve heard of this B) whether the Department of Homeland Security, ICE, Customs and Border Protection, or the Trump Administration informed the city of its “security apparatus” C) if they suspected this would happen, given ICE’s vague security role at the Winter Olympics and D) what it can do to protect Seattle if ICE does come here for the World Cup.

The office did not return my request for comment.

Lyons didn’t pull this plan out of thin air. Last summer, Border Patrol posted and then deleted a statement on Facebook saying that they would be “suited and booted ready to provide security for the first round of games.” And yesterday, radio station KTTH wrote that Seattle will “be protected by a unified, multi-agency security operation” as it prepares to host the matches.

“What you have when you have U.S. government agencies thinking about the defense and the security of U.S. national security and citizens is pulling together our top resources and the most experienced folks from the U.S. government who have worked on these major events,” Mignon Houston, the deputy spokesperson for the U.S. Department of State, told conservative radio host Jason Rantz.

Slog AM: The Seahawks Won, Bad Bunny Won More, and Trump Had a Terrible, No Good Sunday

Hannah Murphy Winter — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 09:47:00 -0800

The Stranger's morning news roundup. by Hannah Murphy Winter

The Seahawks Won Benito Bowl LX: They did it. On Sunday, for the second time in the franchise’s 50-year history, Seattle won the Super Bowl. They beat the New England Patriots 29-13 and got to have their redemption arc after losing to the Pats in 2015. Get ready for the parade downtown on Wednesday! Not a football fan? Hometown pride not enough for you? Let me offer you this: Thanks to the Seahawks, Trump had a bad day on Sunday. He wanted the Pats to win so badly.

Benito Also Won the Benito Bowl: Thanks to Trump’s hissy fit about having a Spanish-language performer for the halftime show, Bad Bunny’s performance was always going to be political, and holy shit did he kill it. The entire performance was a love letter to Puerto Rico. The only English he spoke in the whole show was to say “God Bless America,” before listing all of the countries on the American continent. And when he appeared on stage with the Puerto Rican flag, it was the one with the light blue triangle—the independence flag. And on top of that, it was an impeccable performance. The set was a series of vignettes—including Benito giving a 5-year-old Latino boy his Grammy and an actual fucking wedding—and it was without a doubt the most lush, joyful performance I’ve seen on the Super Bowl stage. Watch it in full here.

Meanwhile, at the “All-American Halftime Show”: Because watching a Puerto Rican perform might make conservatives’ dicks fall off, TurningPointUSA hosted an “alternative” to the Super Bowl halftime show on YouTube. Apparently, about 2 million people streamed the pre-taped TPUSA fundraiser on YouTube, filling the live chat with American Flag emojis while Kid Rock, Brantley Gilbert, Lee Brice, and Gabby Barrett performed. Pete Hegseth threw a football. And that’s about all that happened.

Ring Tries to Pup-Wash Surveillance: In their 30-second Super Bowl ad, Ring cameras highlighted “Search Party,” a way to trigger all of your neighbors’ cameras to look for a dog if it’s gone missing. Sweet, right? But the system could have just as easily been called “Manhunt.” As USA Today put it, it’s The Dark Night brought to life. “Indeed, the Ring camera technology that uses AI to track multiple cameras in a vicinity to locate a lost dog is basically the same function that Wayne used to hack people's cell phones to create a high-frequency generator receiver to pin down the location for Gotham City's Clown Prince of Crime.”

Weather: Looks like the weather gods are smiling upon the Super Bowl parade. We’ll likely have some rain today, but Tuesday through Thursday should be sunny and in the 50s.

Got a spare $5 mil? Bill Gates isn’t selling Xanadu 2.0 (his megamansion) in Medina, but he is shedding one of his bonus houses around it. For a man worth more than $100 billion, selling a multi-million-dollar house is sort of like selling books to a used book store for the rest of us. For the low, low price of $4.8 million, you can be Bill Gates’s neighbor. But considering how many times his name has shown up in the Epstein files (namely for trying to sneak STI medication to his wife after he caught something from “Russian girls”), that might be bringing the price down a couple mil.

Speaking of Epstein and Microsoft Execs: It looks like Nathan Myhrvold, the chief tech officer for Microsoft from 1986 to 2000, did some time on Jeffrey’s island. He also emailed Epstein about how hard it is to “FedEx pussy,” and Epstein offered to “leave” a girl for Myhrvold at his lab.

The DOJ’s Hiring: But no one wants the job. Chad Mizelle, a former chief of staff to US Attorney General Pam Bondi, posted on the porn site formerly known as Twitter that “if you are a lawyer, are interested in being an AUSA, and support President Trump and anti-crime agenda,” you should slide into his DMs. Once a coveted position for lawyers around the country, the application questionnaires now include questions like: “How would you help advance the president’s executive orders and policy priorities in this role?” And prioritizing loyalists has meant that they’re hiring shittier lawyers. I’m sure Nick Brown doesn’t mind.

Here's that Ring #SuperBowl commercial: pic.twitter.com/1gAxIJATdz
— philip lewis (@Phil_Lewis_) February 9, 2026

Two Million Souls: According to a recent study, after almost four years of fighting, the death toll in the Ukraine War is nearing 2 million. Two-thirds of those deaths are Russian, who lost about 35,000 troops a month in 2025.

Here’s a Dystopian Headline for You: “Chatbots Make Terrible Doctors, Study Finds.” Apparently, ChatGPT and other LLMs could theoretically get into medical school, but diagnosing real humans is a whole other matter. Sometimes the chatbots generated information that was just wrong—fixating on elements of the patient’s descriptions that were irrelevant, providing a partial US phone number, or telling them to call the Australian emergency number. “In an extreme case, two users sent very similar messages describing symptoms of a subarachnoid hemorrhage but were given opposite advice,” the study’s authors wrote. “One user was told to lie down in a dark room, and the other user was given the correct recommendation to seek emergency care.” I know insurance is hell, but go to the doctor.

Biiiiig Hug: It’s been an unusually warm winter, even in Spokane, so when a deer was spotted stranded on the ice on top of Loon Lake, it was never going to be an easy rescue. Firefighter Gavin Gallagher scooched out to the center of the ice, lassoed her neck, and bearhugged her to keep her secure while the folks on land reeled them in. Rudely, she didn’t say thank you. “She ran off as, as expected,” one of the rescuers said, “to do deer things.”

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News We Didn’t Know We Needed: 404 Media published a roundup of studies about sex in space. Key lesson: Don’t make babies in space.

Because there’s no such thing as too much Bad Bunny today:

Remembering the 1919 Seattle General Strike

Conor Kelley — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 13:21:00 -0800

It’s time. by Conor Kelley

Today marks the 107th anniversary of the 1919 Seattle General Strike, a five-day work stoppage protesting low wages and rampant union-busting by wealthy corporation owners. Sound familiar?

The strike began in the union shipyards and spread to the entire city. Shipbuilders were furious when shipyard owners, rich off World War I profits, offered a pay increase only to “skilled” workers in an attempt to divide their union. A citywide poll found a strike was very popular. It was on. Of Seattle’s 315,000 residents, 65,000 (20 percent) hit the streets. During the work stoppage, Seattleites took care of the city and one another, collecting garbage and opening food halls. But it was nothing like business as usual. Shops closed. Streetcars stopped.

A participant recalled, “Nothing moved but the tide.”

Seattle's mayor, the coward Ole Hanson, quickly deputized thousands of bootlickers into the police force and called in federal troops from Camp Lewis to try to crush the strike. Strikers laughed off days of empty threats from Hanson, but were unsure what to do next. Slowly, they lost faith and began to break off. By February 11, the strike was over, and somewhat inexplicably, Hanson was labeled a hero by national press. He resigned shortly after to focus on grifting, writing a book on the dangers of organized labor, embarking on a nationwide speaking tour, and even making a failed bid for the Republican presidential nomination. Then he moved to California and lost all his money in the Great Depression. Whoops!

The strike was popular. It was big and sustained. So why did it fizzle out? The strikers had no clear demands.

The recent nationwide general strikes are different. Last month, protestors clearly demanded ICE out of our communities, justice for Renée Good and Alex Pretti, the defunding of ICE, and for companies to refuse ICE entry into their workplaces.

Those demands remain unmet.

As Faye Guenther, president of UFCW 3000, said on KUOW’s recent segment on the current general strikes: “There can be no more ‘business as usual’ when the federal government turns on its own people.”

It’s time.

Slog AM: Oregon's Attorney Crisis, Gov. Bob Ferguson Meets with NBA, Olympic Penis Acid Scandal?

Nathalie Graham — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 09:30:00 -0800

The Stranger's morning news roundup. by Nathalie Graham

Tacoma Detention Facility Sued: Three Black men detained at Northwest ICE Processing Center are suing the facility's owner, GEO Group. They claim guards "engaged in sexual assault, violent beatings and retaliation" and that the Tacoma Police Department deferred abuse complaints to GEO Group, allowing the company to investigate itself, according to KING5. A 2025 report from the University of Washington's Center for Human Rights affirms the claims about TPD. According to that data, out of 150 reports of abuse at the facility, only two led to prosecutions. But in both cases, the alleged victims were GEO group employees.

Waterfall for Sale, Heftily Used: The owner of Oregon's iconic Abiqua Falls plans to auction it off . A private buyer could restrict public use of the waterfall and that state isn’t in the market for more land.

Public defenders needed: Oregon is so short on public defenders that 1,400 criminal cases may need to be dismissed, ruled the Oregon Supreme Court. The accused simply have no one to represent them. Should the state scrounge up the lawyers, the dismissed cases could be refiled.

A Date with Destiny: Gov. Bob Ferguson had an "introductory Zoom meeting” with NBA commissioner Adam Silver yesterday. Could the Sonics be coming home? The Zoom took place almost exactly a year after Bruce Harrell did that stupid fucking basketball gag where he proved he did not achieve the one thing tacked onto his vision board: bringing the Sonics back. Well, that, and we aren’t One Seattle yet.

Speaking of Sports: There's a big game this weekend. The Seattle Seahawks vs. the New England Patriots. A re-do of that dreaded 2015 showdown. We just need to figure one thing out: Who's bringing the dip to the Super Bowl party?

Athletes Abound: It's Winter Olympics time, baby. Time to remember how much you love to watch ice dancing. The opening ceremonies are today! If you watch them live on Peacock, that'll be at 11am PST. You can watch the official NBC broadcast on delay at 5pm.

Dicking Around: Size doesn't matter... unless you're an Olympic ski jumper. One way to get ahead in the sport is to have a bigger dong. It’s science: If you're toting a larger package, you get a larger suit. With a bigger suit, there's less drag and more lift. There’s no hard evidence yet, but supposedly to juice their suit sizes, some ski jumpers have been injecting hyaluronic acid into their junk. The World Anti-Doping Agency says this is not allowed. They're firm on this and are investigating.

Times article has an incredible illustration

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— honeybakedsam.bsky.social (@honeybakedsam.bsky.social) February 5, 2026 at 11:45 AM

Hey, That's Good: King County reported a 35 percent decline in shots fired incidents between 2024 and 2025. We also saw a 22 percent reduction in shooting deaths—58 people died and 177 survived.

You'll really be saying "wow" after you hear who's running for Congress in Texas. It's Vince "ShamWow" Shlomi, the infomercial star who hawked super absorbent pads to handle spills and messes. Now, he's got his eye on "soaking up the swamp." Don't get it twisted, Shlomi is an anti-woke warrior whose slogan is "Make America Grow Some Balls Again." His campaign promises to "slap chop the nuts out of the 'woke,' making less blue-haired commies and more red-blooded Americans." I miss Billy Mayes.

DHS Shutdown Nears: Congress’ stopgap deal to fund the Department of Homeland Security lapses on February 14. So they’ll have to do what they do worst: reach another deal. Democrats, who are still busy putting up missing posters for their spinal cords, have said they refuse to authorize more spending toward DHS without new regulations on the agency. You’d think immigration agents killing Renee Good and Alex Pretti would’ve been a step too far. Republicans have already rejected demands to ban ICE agents from wearing masks, to have them display identification, and to have them obtain warrants before they arrest people. All bottom of the barrel stuff.

Heavy is the head that wears the sad ugly crown: The Louvre thieves dropped Empress Eugénie of France’s crown as they made their escape last fall. It got all fucked up. Now, the Louvre is looking for someone to restore it to its former glory. Napoleon III, who commissioned the crown for his wife, would be so sad.

The crown of Empress Eugénie was one of nine invaluable royal ornaments snatched by burglars during the Louvre heist in October, but the thieves dropped it on the sidewalk before making their escape. The Louvre announced it will soon invite restorers to submit proposals for the crown’s repair.

[image or embed]
— The New York Times (@nytimes.com) February 5, 2026 at 2:50 PM

92-year-old Driver Kills Three People in LA: A 92-year-old driver hit a cyclist and then crashed into the front of 99 Ranch Market in Westwood, trapping people under her car. Three people died. All of them had been in the store's bakery section. Two people were taken to the hospital. Four sustained less serious injury.

Weird: Nancy Guthrie, mom to Today Show anchor Savannah Guthrie, was likely kidnapped last weekend. As of Thursday, authorities have no leads. They found blood on Guthrie’s porch, but a DNA test found it was hers. Guthrie is 84, has a pacemaker, and could die without access to her heart medication. Authorities say they have verified a ransom note from the alleged kidnapper demanding the Guthrie family fork over money in exchange for Nancy's return.

Yoo-hoo, renters! Mayor Katie Wilson wants to hear from you to make your life better. Take the renter’s survey. The landlords are quaking in their big, home-owning boots.

The weather: Partly sunny with highs reaching toward 60.

Sounds good, right? Wrong. This mild winter has led to the third-thinnest snowpack in 40 years. For the last three years, Washington's less-than-ideal snowpack levels led to drought. Three years of drought was unprecedented, but, as the Seattle Times reports, we're headed toward a fourth. While there's still hope for more winter weather, climatologists aren't optimistic about where the current trends are heading. In other words, don't listen to that hack groundhog.

A song for your Friday: Some are calling Sunday the "Benito Bowl" because of the Bad Bunny half-time show (Benito is his real name). I have high hopes. Remember this banger?

No to Swimsuit, Yes to Lawsuit

Daniel Renfrow — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 15:00:00 -0800

It’s the middle of winter, and peeling off the layers of Patagonia to go skinny-dipping is the last thing any self-respecting Seattleite has on their mind. But nudists, and occasionally naked queer people, rejoice! There’s a new party in the legal fight over Denny Blaine Park, Seattle’s most beloved clothing-optional beach, and they have nothing to do with a prudish wealthy neighbor of the park doing whatever the opposite of sexting is with the mayor.

In early January, Friends of Denny Blaine (FoDB), a group formed in 2023 to represent beachgoers after that neighbor, Stuart Sloan, anonymously donated $1 million to build a playground on the grassy shelf overlooking the rocky shore and its many … moons, incorporated as a nonprofit. And on January 20, FoDB put its new nonprofit status to use by filing as an intervening party in a lawsuit against the city to shut down the park from arch-enemy Denny Blaine Park for All, the ironically-named coalition of wealthy neighbors that did not provide comment.

Denny Blaine Park for All claimed in-hand masturbation and nudity were out of hand. While beachgoers say neighbors were exaggerating, a judge was convinced and ordered the city to come up with a solution. To satisfy him, it erected a butt-ugly anti-masturbation fence (a wrinkled tarp strapped to a chainlink fence).

The court granted FoDB motion to intervene, making the nonprofit a formal party in the case, empowered to appeal court rulings, submit evidence, and fight directly for their cause.

“This is public land, and a lot of what people are asking for is that they just close the park,” says Jesse Swirl, one of FoDB’s elected co-leads. “I think that what happens with public land should be defined by the people who use it and care for it and keep it alive every day. When those decisions are made without us, then the best decisions aren’t being made. To be inclusive, we have to include all voices, not just the city and one party.”

On February 13, the judge could decide to resolve the suit without moving toward a full trial. Swirl didn’t say what they thought may happen, or what legal steps FoDB might take. But firm Perkins Coie is representing them pro bono. Perkins Coie did not return our requests for comment.

Swirl hopes the city tears down the wall he sees as an eyesore and hazard—someone could be hurt or harassed behind it, away from friendly eyes. If the court rules that some sort of partition must remain, FoDB hopes it can be replaced with sustainable foliage, more like a community fig leaf than steel underwear.

“We just want to make sure that our community is safe, and protected. And where the fence lies, I just don't see how that can happen.”

But if worse comes to worse, perhaps beachgoers can just spend this summer gumming the wall. (And no, that's not a euphemism.)

Jill Busby Is the Northwest Film Forum’s New Executive Director

Chase Hutchinson — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 15:00:00 -0800

Jill Busby wants to restore the film nonprofit to the bustling cultural center it once was. by Chase Hutchinson

Jill Busby, the interim executive director at Northwest Film Forum (NWFF), is dropping the “interim” from her title and stepping into the role full-time. She wants to restore the film nonprofit to the bustling cultural center it once was.

She’ll be the fourth executive director to try in the last decade. Busby, a multidisciplinary writer and artist, says her “brain began to tingle with possibilities” shortly after she took over from previous executive director Derek Edamura, who stepped down last October.

“I felt ready to step up in this moment especially after seeing us through so many hard moments and recovery points,” Busby says in an interview with The Stranger. “I don’t ever want to see us in a situation again, even in chaotic times, where we have to lose someone because we aren’t in a sustainable moment.”

The hard moment she’s referring to came in 2024, when the organization laid off nearly half of its staff to keep its programming from tumbling off the edge of a sheer financial cliff. What type of programming? Year round, NWFF teaches filmmaking workshops and screens the type of unique films you won’t see anywhere else, such as the fascinating The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo, a strikingly shot queer drama set in 1980s Chile that made a splash at Cannes, which opens this week.

It’s tough out there for independent theaters and film orgs, and NWFF isn’t the only one struggling. The magnitudes-larger SIFF, with its three theaters and annual film festival, has laid off round after round of employees in the last year and left the beloved Egyptian to dust while attempting to make their marquee purchase of the SIFF Cinema Downtown (formerly known as the Cinerama) work.

Busby seemed optimistic that the worst was behind NWFF. Grants and enthusiastic donors have come through, and audiences are returning to its theaters. Busby specifically shouted out her org’s partnership with the volunteer-run Seattle Film Society. On the last Thursday of the month, the group hosts “Locals Only” at NWFF, a showcase of local films, such as in January when they screened shorts by James Andrews, Bryon Donaldson, Nicole Olson, and Derek Nunn.

Providing that space is essential to making NWFF a hub like it used to be, Busby says. It was at NWFF that the late, great director Lynn Shelton saw the French auteur Claire Denis, who made her first movie at 40, in 2003, and realized there was still time for her to make movies, too. Think about that—without NWFF, we might not have Humpday, Your Sister's Sister, Outside In, or Sword of Trust. We might not have Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight, either. He screened some of his earliest work, including Medicine for Melancholy, at the forum.

“For me, it’s the perfect embodiment of what an independent film organization can do to empower a filmmaking community,” Jenkins said in 2009. “You can go and see movies that you wouldn’t normally get to see because they don’t screen at your local multiplex, but also, in the same building, I have access to equipment or you can learn how to make the same kind of films that you see on those same screens.”

The forum’s still connected to the talents it nurtured. Busby intends to lean on board members like Megan Griffiths, the longtime local filmmaker and SIFF staple, who brought in actor/director Jay Duplass to collaborate on the session “How to Make Movies in the Apocalypse” last year.

Busby also wants to hear from us. The forum is launching a free, community-curated festival this year. Anyone who donates $50 or more can nominate any film that’s graced its screens in its more than 30-year history.

“In such hard times, people really do rediscover how much community is important to them,” Busby says. “I think we will see more and more people return to that third space, that hub, and we’ll be there.”

But aren’t they always saying the children are our future? Busby wants to grow, and diversify, NWFF’s youth summer camps. SIFF cut its youth summer camps this year. It’s a gap NWFF can fill, but not completely. Fill a balloon too much, too fast, and it pops. It takes serious money to expand programming, the kind only grants and rich donors can provide. Busby first wants to rebuild, rehiring positions cut in the dark days of 2024 (by the end of next month, she expects to hire one part-time and one full-time position) and spending grant funds on a new development director.

“You can’t grow before you have found a way to be sustainable. Staying small for as long as we have to,” Busby says. “We have remained strong and we’re not doing more than what we can actually do.”

Big Voter, Huh?

The Stranger Election Information Board — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 11:00:00 -0800

Well, Did You Know There’s an Election Happening Right Now?

by The Stranger Election Information Board

Only real ones know about the King Conservation District (KCD) election. Which is a shame. It isn’t some dusty, obscure, do-nothing entity; the KCD has an operating budget of around $10 million, mined from a property tax just like everything else around here.

Like Captain Planet in the form of a bureaucratic entity, the KCD Board of Supervisors crunchily throws that money toward the earth and our bodies, working to improve water quality, soil health, the tree canopy and fire prevention. Unlike Captain Planet, they do not show up to work in a crop top, panties and knee-high boots. But they could if they wanted to—nobody is paying attention.

That’s a bummer, because we get to choose them. And it could not be easier. It’s an online election. The KCD doesn’t love this. They’d prefer a paper ballot, but paper costs money. Who’s going to fork up the cash? You don’t even know who these people are.

Thus, it is up to your local blogs to inform. And then you know, vote, and then blissfully forget the KCD for another four years. Repeat ad nauseum.

Except, this KCD election is slightly different. In 2024, the KCD, a five-member board in charge of the whole county, split itself into five districts to reduce costs and increase geographic diversity.

So we vote for each position? Wrong, dumbass, we obviously only vote for three of them, the Washington State Conservation Commission appoints the other two. What part of reducing costs and increasing geographic diversity do you not understand?

This year, two of them are safe. Lucky voters in KCD District 3—Seattle, Vashon Island (they are allowed to vote, vaccination rates have improved), and parts of Tukwila and Renton—will choose their supervisor. Before you say “where is Stranger Election Control Board on this?”; “Who is going to think for me?”; or complain it is no longer the 1990s, the 2000s, or the 2010s, the SECB doesn’t endorse in this race. Speculate why in the comments below.

Here are the candidate statements.

Vote. The election closes February 10.

Slog AM: Homan Pulls Out, Anti-Trans Hate Crime Trial, Harris Returns?

Micah Yip — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 09:55:00 -0800

The Stranger's morning news roundup. by Micah Yip

Pullout Game Weak: Border Czar Tom Homan is withdrawing a quarter of the immigration officers in Minnesota in exchange for immigrants in the state’s jails. Roughly 2,000 agents and officers will continue to Surge the Metro.

Big Brother: The Washington State Senate passed a bill to regulate automated license plate readers yesterday. Cops use ALPRs like those made by the company Flock Safety to grab plate numbers from passing vehicles, data they sometimes share with feds hunting immigrants and abortion seekers. A University of Washington report last year found that at least eight local law enforcement agencies shared their ALPR data with Border Patrol. The House will take up the bill later this month.

The FloodGates Open: The latest Epstein drop included a curious email ol’ Jeff sent to himself about computer man Bill Gates. The email implied Gates contracted an STI from Epstein’s “Russian girls,” and had asked Epstein for antibiotics for his then wife Melinda French Gates, in case he passed it on to her. Gates denied this Wednesday. The day before, his now ex-wife French Gates told NPR the email stirred up “very, very painful times in [her] marriage.”

Shooting Victims Identified: We now know the names of the high schoolers shot and killed in South Seattle last Friday: Traveiah Houfmuse, 17, and Malik Stewart, 18. Police haven’t made any arrests. Houfmuse and Stewart were shot standing at a bus stop near South Shore K-8 and Rainier Beach High School.

Hate Crime Trial: Andre Karlow is in court for allegedly beating a trans woman in the University District last March with a group of other men, bruising the victim and breaking her teeth. Another trans woman Karlow attacked while at her Sound Transit job in 2024 will testify against him today.

This Group Beatings Was Part of a Pattern: As Vivian reported last year, the Seattle area saw a spate of men in groups viciously attacking trans women. The county’s bias crimes prosecutor told Vivian at the time: “I don’t have any other category, I don’t have any other protected status, I don’t have any other marginalized group that is being attacked in this pattern, in this egregious way where a group joins in.”

Weather: The day started very Twilight, but the lifting fog has shifted the vibe to a sunny 10 Things I Hate About You, with a high near 60.

Kamala Harris Faked Me Out: Former Vice President Kamala Harris posted this cryptic clip yesterday:

pic.twitter.com/SuJgYZ64XV
— Kamala HQ (@KamalaHQ) February 4, 2026

I thought she was going to announce her campaign for California governor or something. I was wrong. Under the updated handle, a new video of Harris was posted, where she announced the account will now be a “new Gen-Z led progressive content hub.” …That’s it? Harris flubs the election, disappears for a year, and comes back with new social handles and “content”?

Welcome to Headquarters, the new Gen-Z led progressive content hub. pic.twitter.com/7EQyz3DFpd
— HQ (@headquarters_67) February 5, 2026

Oops: Washington’s decision to tax digital ads, IT, temp staffing, and live presentations is screwing over the K-12 schools that depend on them. Highline School District alone is facing a $500,000 loss tied to one special education staff contract. The Leg is working on a solution to either partially or fully exempt schools.

Can You People Do Anything?: The spineless Democrats backed off their promise to unmask ICE. At a press conference yesterday, House and Senate Minority Leaders Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer said agents could wear masks in "extraordinary and unusual circumstances.” What those are we do not know. They’ll lay out their formal demands today.

Annoying: Republicans in Olympia held a hate-filled “listening session” on the two conservative ballot initiatives to ban trans girls from school sports and hand over kids’ school counseling records in the name of parent’s rights. Those who spoke shared Republican-friendly, hateful views.

Florida Man Campaigns for Governor on Tinder: Florida Republican gubernatorial candidate James Fishback is “[meeting] young female voters where they are,” on Tinder. He claims to have matched with 2,000 potential voters before Tinder banned him, which was, of course, “ELECTION INTERFERENCE!”

I’ve joined @Tinder to meet young female voters where they are, and share my plan to make it easier for them to get married, buy a home, and raise a family. pic.twitter.com/9y2VgP7is2
— James Fishback (@j_fishback) February 2, 2026

Here’s Some Music:

Pullout Politics

Megan Burbank — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 11:00:00 -0800

Fertility tracking is part of a slate of high-risk, low-reward family planning methods that have lately taken on a new sheen in the eyes of the federal government. After shutting down the department that supervises federal family planning funding and setting the conditions to erode abortion and pregnancy care nationwide, the Trump administration is now evangelizing a single type of birth control: fertility awareness methods, which include everything from cycle-tracking to digital apps. by Megan Burbank

Earlier this year, a company called Natural Cycles introduced their new wristband. For just $129.99, the wristband would sync with their app and offer the wearer “digital birth control,” tracking people’s fertility based on their body temperature and cycle.

Sound too good to be true? It was. The app, and the animating principle behind it—quit hormonal birth control! there’s a better, easier way!—is part of a slate of high-risk, low-reward family planning methods that have lately taken on a new sheen in the eyes of the federal government. After shutting down the department that supervises federal family planning funding and setting the conditions to erode abortion and pregnancy care nationwide, the Trump administration is now evangelizing a single type of birth control: fertility awareness methods, which include everything from cycle-tracking to digital apps.

Cycle-tracking has been around for a long time, largely for people trying to conceive. If you’re struggling to get pregnant, doctors might encourage you to track the window in your menstrual cycle when you’re most likely to be fertile. But as birth control, fertility awareness is much more likely than other methods to result in unintended pregnancy, and that may be precisely the point: Given the right wing’s pronatalist agenda and ongoing obsession with the birth rate, a birth control method that doesn’t work is a feature, not a bug.

Right-wing activists—most recently in the New York Times—claim that fertility awareness methods are a reasonable alternative to gold-standard birth control methods like the IUD or the subdermal implant, because, as one proponent put it, women “don’t need to put these extra chemicals and devices into their bodies to figure out what’s going on. They can do it in a natural way.”

This is, in a medical sense, terrible advice. “Fertility awareness” refers to several approaches that require users to do things like monitor their body temperature and cervical mucus thickness to estimate when their most fertile windows are, and to avoid sex during those times or use a barrier method like condoms. When used with barrier methods, says Sarah Prager, professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Washington, this can work. But for most people, fertility tracking is “difficult and impractical,” she says.

Because fertility awareness methods rely on accurate cycle tracking, says Prager, and “if somebody has irregular cycles, these methods can’t be used.” Available research also suggests that fertility awareness methods just don’t work as well as other forms of birth control.

All birth control methods have two rates of failure: one with typical use (how most people use the method), and one with perfect use (how the Pleasures to Have in Class do). For some set-it-and-forget-it methods, like IUDs or the subdermal implant, these numbers are virtually identical: It’s hard to take your birth control incorrectly when it’s embedded in your bicep tissue. Fertility awareness methods, on the other hand, have the biggest gap between perfect and typical use, and, by their sheer complexity, provide users many chances for things to go sideways. Prager puts it this way: “They’re just not reliable when used by the majority of people, because most people cannot use them reliably.”

Fertility awareness methods work so poorly that they’ve been a source of scandal even in the politically secular Femtech world. In 2018, Olivia Sudjic chronicled at the Guardian her experience using Natural Cycles, which touted itself as 93 percent effective with typical use. Despite following the instructions, Sudjic was one of many users who ended up pregnant. She had an abortion, realizing much too late that “the ideal Cycler is a narrow, rather old-fashioned category of person”—someone in a committed relationship, with a stable routine that allows for assiduous cycle-tracking: “Shift-workers, world-travellers, the sickly, the stressed, insomniacs and sluts be advised.”

Even some proponents of fertility awareness methods acknowledge this tension. Samantha Kopy, a fertility awareness method instructor quoted extensively in the New York Times piece, said these methods are challenging to use “if you have pretty flippant reasons for avoiding pregnancy—just like, ‘Oh, we kind of want to travel,’ or, ‘We’d like to save for a better car.’”

But even setting aside the judgment in this statement (any reason to not want to get pregnant is a good one), it seems the difficulty is the point. After all, Kopy’s class is organized by Whole Mission, a religious family planning organization whose managing director is a moral theology teacher at a Catholic high school. Not someone I’d turn to as an authority on reproductive health.

As it so often does, in pushing fertility awareness methods, the right is also exploiting very real concerns within reproductive health care: frustration with the side effects of birth control. If you’re a sexually active person with the capacity to get pregnant, by the time you’re on the off-ramp from your fertile years, you will likely have spent an enormous chunk of your life with some combination of a rod in your arm, a cheerfully named IUD in your uterus, an alarm on your phone reminding you to take your teeny-tiny pink pill, a shot in your lower back, a NuvaRing in your refrigerator, a box of condoms under your bed, or something else entirely.

Reliable, long-acting birth control is a miracle of modern medicine, but the burden of Not Getting Pregnant can be a maximalist odyssey, one that makes you feel like you’re living in thrall to the whims of your own reproductive system. It’s natural to look for an out to the Groundhog Day rigamarole that is having a uterus and not wanting a baby to show up in it. But it won’t come from an agenda that’s designed to fail.

After all, no one tastes the rainbow of synthetic progesterone because they want to “figure out what’s going on” or understand the beauty of their fertility. They do it for two reasons: because it’s medically indicated or because they don’t want to get pregnant.

The good news is that unlike most of the modalities pushed by MAHA grifters like Olivia Nuzzi’s sexting buddy, hormonal birth control has been rigorously studied, and is safe and effective. That’s the signal Prager hopes her patients will hear within the noise of medical misinformation.

Studies have examined the overall mortality rates for people with uteruses, comparing people who’ve never used hormonal birth control and people who’ve used it. “Mortality is actually lower for people who have ever used hormonal contraception,” says Prager. This is likely because of the major health risks that come with every pregnancy, whether wanted or not.

The scientific truth is that it’s always much safer to be on birth control than to be pregnant—especially in a country with wide health disparities and increasingly fewer pregnancy care providers as the fallout of losing Roe carries on. No amount of fearmongering about birth control can change that.

Julie Kang Is Running for City Council District 5

Micah Yip — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 11:00:00 -0800

Immigrant and advocate Julie Kang thinks she's the best City Council candidate for Seattle's "neglected child," District 5. But can she make up her mind on how she'd handle surveillance, homelessness and policing? by Micah Yip

Julie Kang slid a small plastic bag across the table at the downtown library coffee shop. It was an ICE alert kit containing a whistle and a short pamphlet, the kind she helps assemble with Common Power every Friday.

“It’s one thing to share information,” she says. “But I really think it’s important for us to be leaders and not just be bystanders.”

Kang, a Korean American immigrant and the cochair of the King County Immigrant and Refugee Commission, is running for Seattle City Council District 5, which stretches from the bay west of Broadview to Lake Washington on the east, with I-5 running down the middle, and hasn’t had an elected representative since Cathy Moore resigned last year, one year into her term. Longtime District 5 councilmember Debora Juarez stepped in to take Moore’s place. Just when we thought she was gone for good.

Where Kang fits in on the spectrum of Juarez and Moore isn’t totally clear. She’s never held elected office before. She’s resting on the laurels of her decades of education work, advocacy, and community organizing, as well as her lived experience and “take action” spirit—that all makes her the best candidate to lead what she called the “neglected child” district.

But it didn’t seem like she could make up her mind. In our interview, Kang saw both sides so often I couldn’t always tell where she stood on surveillance cameras, homelessness, and law enforcement. She insisted councilmembers must take in all sides, all data, and all stories before making a decision. Really, Kang, all sides?

So far, two other people have filed in this race: Silas James, an unknown, and Nilu Jenks, who ran for the position in 2023 and is Kang’s biggest competition so far. But Kang’s betting her behind-the-scenes civic work will matter more than Jenks’s name recognition.

To go from community organizer to councilmember, Kang will have to adapt and work hard. She’s no stranger to either.

Kang and her mother came to the US from Korea when she was 7 years old. They were poor. Her mother made ends meet making computer chips on assembly lines in Los Angeles. They never left the city, but hopped from apartment to apartment 23 times in 11 years.

In college, Kang became her family’s breadwinner. She entered a career in education—first as a paraeducator, then as a classroom teacher. She was 20.

“I couldn’t get a glass of wine or a beer, but I was given 32 children to teach Spanish,” she jokes.

Kang kept learning. She earned a masters in education, a doctorate in philosophy. Most recently, she held directorial roles at Seattle University and the University of Washington. And she’s had her fingers in lots of advocacy pies like leading the Korean American Coalition of Washington or being on the King County Citizens’ Election Oversight Committee.

She’s smart and determined, but does that mean she’d be good on the city council? Great question.

Kang’s priorities are what you’d expect: more housing, better transit, public safety, community engagement, and protection against ICE. That’s all well and good if she can back it up.

For instance, Kang wants to figure out how to manage the intersection of homelessness, public safety, and small business ownership, that familiar throuple from hell. So, when it comes to something like the tent city in Lake City, Kang says she supports it, but she’s also weighing the perspectives of small business owners who don’t want unhoused folks outside their storefronts.

“I think humans, our unhoused neighbors, have to be the center of decision-making,” Kang says. “But I am working out who is working in the best interest of unhoused and small business owners.” She didn’t know how she’d manage that.

Kang says she’s excited about the recent expansion of the Community Assisted Response and Engagement (CARE) Department, the city’s alternative public safety response. She says homeless people shouldn’t be swept without the city connecting them to resources and a place to go, which the city already often does.

Her other worries include empty storefronts in North Seattle and grocery stores packing up and leaving the area a food desert. She’s floated ideas like small-business rental vouchers to help retailers with startup costs. She believes mixed-use development, with stores on the ground floor and housing above, should be easier to build.

That housing? She wants more of it. “As an immigrant, we aspire to have secure housing, and that’s what we should aim for for everyone,” Kang says. “We all should have a roof over our head and not worry about, ‘Do we have to move next year because my rent is going to increase?’” She didn’t have a plan to manage that, either.

But housing is nothing without solid transit infrastructure. District 5 doesn’t have that, she says. The district has two light rail stations—Northgate and 148th Street—and a third planned station at 130th Street. But neither side of the district has an easy route to get to them; she’s led walking groups to test them. Parking is limited. Bus routes don’t line up.

“How can we not get rid of bus lines, but add to the bus lines, so we can all get there?” she asks. She doesn’t yet have an answer.

On the topic of Aurora Avenue—mainly the Seattle Police Department’s CCTV surveillance program—Kang has opinions, but is cautious, again, of both sides. The CCTV is a growing concern among Seattleites, immigrant rights organizations, and public officials who know the Feds could subpoena the data for immigration enforcement. Kang agrees: expanding data collection at a moment when ICE is unleashing terror across the US isn’t safe.

“At this point, I’m not interested in collecting data for it to be available or forcibly handed over. I’m not,” Kang says firmly.

But she also won’t dismiss the concerns of small business owners who say the cameras make the streets feel safer.

“People wanted it, so I think at the same time, we do have to consider the input and desires of our constituents,” she says.

It’s a similar story for her on SOAP and SODA, the “Stay Out of Areas of Prostitution” and “Stay Out of Drug Areas” zones put forward by Republican City Attorney Ann Davison. Kang says she was hesitant when council first passed the zones in 2024, and still leans toward opposing them. But then again, she says that as a councilmember, she’d have to consider other perspectives and data that might conflict with her opinion. That includes “positive” data, like from the Chinatown International District, where SOAP/SODA have been implemented as well.

If Kang becomes a councilmember, constituents can expect her to collect data, see all sides, and consider the “sociopolitical context” ad nauseum before making a decision. Expect to hear from the dais, “I think XYZ, but at the same time, XYZ” a lot. Expecting her to take a hard stance, however, could take time. For now, she insists she’s a “doer.”

Remembering Judith Arcana

Megan Burbank — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 08:00:00 -0800

Portland’s own underground abortionist-turned-poet was a legend. She was also my friend. by Megan Burbank

This story was originally published in our sister paper, Portland Mercury.

In 2017, Judith Arcana sent a postcard to the old Mercury offices in Old Town/Chinatown. I was the arts editor at the time—it was my first real journalism job—and after many stories covering local theater (I still think about the plays I saw at Shaking the Tree) and books (a reading at Powell’s followed by a strong martini at Pepe le Moko was a typical after-work routine), I had written a feature on the newly-formed Northwest Abortion Access Fund. After Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2023, NWAAF would become a frequently cited source in coverage across the country. But at the time, most newsrooms were not covering the issue of abortion access particularly well. Reaching out to an abortion fund for comment on anything was rare.

So Judith noticed when someone did. “BIG CHEER!,” she wrote in her missive. “HUZZAH!—and all like that—Great work on the NWAAF—Thank you. Jeanie’s right: FREE ABORTION ON DEMAND.”

Judith had been part of Chicago’s underground abortion service known as Jane—never the Jane Collective, she told me later. That was a journalist’s language, never hers. As one of the Janes, she had helped facilitate 11,000 abortions in Chicago in the years before Roe v. Wade and was even arrested for it. Though she wasn’t directly involved in NWAAF’s work, the abortion fund carried on the legacy of the Janes, connecting people seeking abortions with funding and compassion when state-level policies stood in the way—a dynamic that long preceded the gutting of Roe.

The story of the Janes was made into movies and books, but Judith was, before everything else, a teacher. In Portland, she was known as a writer and a poet. She was someone who could be described as a feminist icon, but she was also approachable and generous, a friend to many.

We didn’t meet in person until years after she sent me that postcard, when I wrote a profile on her for a Seattle-based outlet. I had left the Mercury to work for The Seattle Times, and after years of general assignment reporting that left me feeling scattered and unfocused, I returned to the subject I knew best: abortion policy.

The first time I called Judith for the story, I could tell she didn’t really want to speak to yet another journalist. But the more we talked, the more we got along. Sometimes you meet someone and you just have a feeling that they’ll be important in your life. Anne of Green Gables called them kindred spirits. Though she was already on the edge of her 80s, and I was barely in my 30s when we met, Judith was a kindred spirit. She connected me with other Janes for the story—fascinating, generous women who had been brave in ways that made them the subjects of movies and books. They had survived ordeals in jail and illegal abortions in underground economies, and recounted those experiences to me in full, horrifying detail, but also shared their personal obsessions and pleasures. I talked with one of them about my reality TV fixation; she recommended the Discovery Channel’s Alaskan Bush People.

I met Judith in person for the first time at Case Study Coffee on NE Alberta. We sat in the upstairs space at a long table, and talked until closing time, then outside on a bench. It was not a warm day, but the business at hand was too important not to keep talking about it. My phone battery died, my fingers cramped in the cold as I took notes, and I knew that as long as Judith wanted to talk, I would want to listen.

After the story came out, we became friends, or perhaps that’s what we’d always been. I would let her know whenever I was coming to Portland, and she would email me ahead of time if she had a reading in Seattle. In the meantime we corresponded regularly.

When you meet someone already nearly 80, you know your time with them will likely be limited, but her death in December still surprised me. I think it surprised me because she and the other Janes were so sharp in their intellect and sense of justice as to seem ageless, but of course they were not.

The last time I saw Judith was in July. She’d recently moved, and I met her at Coffeehouse-Five on N Killingsworth. It was a much nicer day than the one years ago, when we’d sat outside in the wintry dark. We found a different bench, under the trees in the sunshine at Portland Community College. It was one of those perfect Portland days, when the sky is slightly golden—more golden than it is in Seattle, an atmospheric quirk I have never quite understood—and we talked about the current political situation, which we were both following with dismay. Judith was the kind of person who didn’t buy into false hope. When you said something was bad, she would agree, and in that clarity, you would feel held. It was awful, but you were in the struggle with Judith. That was a good place to be.

And the fight could also be beautiful. As we sat together on the bright-green lawn, the sprinklers kicking into high gear, Judith showed me pictures on her phone of the Great Columbia Crossing 10k walk she had taken 10 years prior. The organized walk takes place every year, starting from Dismal Nitch in Washington state, then taking the 101 and crossing the entire impossible span of the Astoria-Megler Bridge, the behemoth of engineering that runs four miles across the Columbia. The bridge was the highlight of Judith’s walk, and she talked about it excitedly. We talked about going together the next time the walk was held. “People say we cross a bridge to get to the other side / and that’s true, though there’s more– / on the bridge one day, we walked through the sky,” Judith wrote in a poem about that day she sent via email when I’d come home.

When I heard of Judith’s passing, I looked back through our correspondence. We had written each other after our visit in July, but she had never responded to my final email. When I read my last email to her, I think I understood why. I was surprised by my own message. After some griping about managing a public media newsroom while the president defunded PBS, I said I hoped to see her again next time I was in town, then signed off like this: “Thinking fondly of your walk thru the sky, Megan.”

I didn’t know it at the time, but this is how I will remember Judith forever. It is the final memory and image she, a poet, would leave me with—that of a slightly younger Judith, on that compelling walk, feeling free in her body, marveling at the world around her, a world shaped by her own bravery and moral clarity, showing all of us what is possible.

Easy Street Records Owner Defends, Then Apologizes for, Sympathetic ICE Comments

Audrey Vann — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 16:30:00 -0800

As Easy Street Records owner Matt Vaughan has demonstrated, posting is almost always a mistake. by Audrey Vann

It really didn’t have to go down like this. On Friday, the long-running West Seattle record shop and cafe, Easy Street Records, posted on Instagram that it’d donate 10 percent of its sales through the weekend to the Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota. This was the store’s way to support Friday’s sort-of “general strike” without cutting staff hours. All day, they’d be blasting song requests from their outdoor speakers. Suggestions poured in: “Know Your Rights” by the Clash, “What’s Going On” by Marvin Gaye, and “Imagine” by John Lennon.

Then, an hour later, Easy Street liked (accidentally, says the shop’s president Matt Vaughan) and un-liked a lovely screed, bringing it to the top of the comments section:

“ICE is doing God's work. Ain't nobody above the law, and that includes immigration law. Abolishing ICE is a radicalized notion; if people truly wanted change, they'd ask for a reform but abolishing a federal law enforcement agency is pure lunacy. Because of such a fundamental disagreement I will never participate in idiotic calls to boycott nothing. And in spirit of good neighborlyness [sic], here's my song request: Led Zepellin [sic], Immigrant Song.”

People wanted to know why Easy Street liked the comment. Easy Street could’ve said anything, and chose wrong.

“Dude chose Immigrant Song,” wrote Vaughan. “C’mon! He’s trying. Obviously the guy has some decent thoughts…at least has good music taste. I may not agree w what he says, but I’ll fight like hell for him to express his opinion.”

People did not like that. Vaughan doubled down. “We agree w him saying ‘nobody is above the law,’ we agree w his song choice, we appreciate the engagement. It seems the guy is trying to come to grips w things, we can support that even if we don’t agree.”

By “we,” Vaughan must have meant “I,” because he’s “in charge of social media and replying,” says an anonymous Easy Street employee who wanted to keep their job. Vaughan confirmed they were his comments. “Our social media person had the day off,” he wrote in an email to The Stranger. He apologized for speaking for his entire staff of sales clerks and music buyers, whose pithy reels of music recommendations have made them the faces of his account.

Though in the moment, Vaughan kept digging: “I imagine there are some decent ICE agents out there, if u are a quality human being...gotta be a tough job. Clearly we don’t agree w how it’s been managed…and the optics are awful.” The comment has been deleted. But the screenshots are alive, well, and on Reddit.

Realizing his mistake, Vaughan commented that “It takes 20 years (or 58) to build a reputation…and 5 minutes to lose it. I very much understand that notion.”

In an email to The Stranger, Vaughan said he hadn’t seen the bit about ICE doing “God’s work” when he was liking song requests, and had made a mistake by “not reading the whole thing.” (Close readers will note the comment began: “ICE is doing God’s work.”)

“I agreed with the reply the guy saying ‘nobody is above the law,’” Vaughan continues, “I thought he was referring to Trump and the administration, everyone.” He acknowledged that upon reading it again, he can see how it could be referring to “protesters who aren't above the law.”

“This was inappropriate given the circumstances in recent weeks and the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. I am terribly sorry to my staff and any customers who feel let down. This was all on me.”

It’s unclear whether Vaughan’s real-time responses and ever-changing explanations for the comments (the apology on Instagram continues to be edited) are a reflection of a man trying to learn from his mistakes or a business owner trying desperately to get back in good graces with his customers. Patrons of Easy Street Records, at least in the online sphere, appear to be split. “This is how you handle a mistake,” one commenter writes. “Performative apology,” another says.

Either way, Vaughan’s employees are bearing the brunt of his thumbs.

“We have received angry calls and people in-store voicing their opinion on Matt's comments,” says an employee. “On behalf of the staff, I just want to reiterate that his comments on Friday were not ours.”

Before you seek retribution on Easy Street with a nasty phone call, remember the last time your boss did something stupid, and you took the hit. My advice to Vaughan: put down the phone. My advice to you: Take your business elsewhere if you please, but leave the workers alone.

Editor's Note: This story has been edited since its publication. The original article stated that Vaughan had continued to edit his apology. The nature of Vaughan's edits to his apology are unclear.

Last Month This Month

The Stranger's Slog AM™️ Specialists — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 14:00:00 -0800

The Stranger's monthly news roundup. by The Stranger's Slog AM™️ Specialists

Last Month This Month is a recap of all the previous month's news, featuring headlines from Slog AM. Find it in every issue of The Stranger! Subscribe to our daily Slog AM newsletter here.

***

The country seems to be waking up to the obvious fact that Donald Trump is a fascist, their government is dangerous and unlawful, and the tantamount act of resistance isn’t simply voting. Even The Atlantic, a magazine for the worst people in your social studies class, admitted the “f-word” was apt.

* * *

To jolt us out of our holiday stupor, Trump kidnapped the president of Venezuela on a nighttime raid and literally admitted it was for oil. Presidents usually say it’s for democracy or something! Once we were all emptied of visions of sugar plums, on January 7, ICE agent Jonathan Ross shot Renée Nicole Good in the face three times.

* * *

The day after, ICE shot two people in Portland. Then, on January 24, Border Patrol Agents executed Veterans Affairs nurse Alex Pretti in the street for the capital crime of filming them. Reading the room accurately, Kommandant Greg Bovino continued to dress like a Nazi through it all. Until he lost his job. But he may dress like a Nazi at home, too. Maybe we should’ve taken that New Year’s Eve tragedy at the Crans-Montana ski resort in Switzerland—40 people died in a sparkler-set fire—as a grim portent for the year to come.

* * *

That, or the up to 30,000 people killed in Iran during mass protests. Or the Israel-Palestine ceasefire, where fire has not ceased. So yeah, 2026 is 20-sucking-shit.

* * *

We started on such a hopeful note. On New Year’s Day, Zohran Mamdani became mayor of New York City. He’s the first Muslim and South Asian person to do so and the youngest in a century. And the hottest one, but we didn’t need to tell you that. Mamdani has already started making childcare free for New Yorkers. He’s also getting shots so he can accommodate all the pussy he’s getting (his wife wants to get a cat, he’s allergic). Oh, and in our second fiddle city (maybe a viola—instrument of losers), Katie Wilson took power.

* * *

Wilson’s done a really good job of making the Seahawks go to the Super Bowl (which Bruce Harrell never did), and not sweeping homeless people from Ballard, a favorite pastime of our former mayor(s). She’s also found a new hobby: firing department heads. It must be addictive. Goodbye, former leaders of the Department of Neighborhoods, Parks, Office of Economic Development, Office of Arts & Culture, Seattle City Light, and a long list that would honestly bore you. (We are aware of the literacy rates.) But, yeah, quite the shakeup before the mettle-testing World Cup.

* * *

Speaking of the coming-together-of-nations, Trump hates the concept. His whole thing is take, take, take, and Greenland is his latest kink. Whatever denials you hear, he’s willing to invade the semiautonomous Danish territory for its precious minerals. Coupled with his lust for Venezuela’s oil, Trump is playing a fucked-up game of Settlers of Catan. Except this is not a game for virgins, and we’re offering shit trades to our best friend, Canada. For all this, the man obviously deserves the Nobel Peace Prize. Thank God María Corina Machado, the opposition party leader in Venezuela, gave him hers. Sadly, it’s non-transferable.

* * *

On the home front, the QAnon Shaman is running for governor of Arizona. He doesn’t support Trump anymore because he won’t release the Epstein files, aka The Adventures of Jeff and Donald.

* * *

Dilbert creator Scott Adams died, still supporting Donald Trump. He will rot in unfunny eternity. Possibly Christian heaven, if Jesus is a Dilbert fan. Unlikely. Jesus is a Cathy man. Ack!!

* * *

The United States is taking a short break from killing foreign children to focus on killing our own. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (soon to be rechristened the Centers for Disease Preservation?) cut the child vaccination schedule by more than half because… autism?

* * *

Because trans kids have it too good, hedge fund millionaire Brian Greetingspenis Heywood wants to bring them down a peg, or get rid of them entirely, whichever the electorate will let him do. This November, Washington will decide if we should un-amend his “Parents’ Bill of Rights”—a law that allows parents to read their kids’ counseling records—and whether or not we should ban trans girls from sports. Yes, all dozens of them.

* * *

Some good news, locally! Notorious dick and President of the Seattle Police Officers’ Guild Mike Solan announced on his terrible podcast that he isn’t runningfor reelection. Not that his replacement will be someone we’d like to get a beer with, but we’ll revel in his vanishing from public life.

* * *

Things remain quite phallic at the Seattle Police Department. The boys in blue—emphasis on the “boys” part—are far from achieving their goal of having a recruit class that’s 30 percent women by 2030. Only 10 percent of SPD’s 165 new hires this year were ladies. This department is not for the girls.

* * *

It’s a bad time to be a ferry, or a ferrylover (FL). The state’s ferry system is up shit’s creek without a paddle. As of late January, only 15 of the state’s 21 ferries could sail. Those remaining keep falling apart and hitting logs. Things are so dire, a local shipyard is pitching a crazy idea: revamping old-ass, decommissioned ferries to do the work. We could do a Dunkirk?

* * *

Meanwhile, it is really sunny here. Should we be concerned? Probably. Fortunately, we’re not going to know it’s too late until we’re dead. The EPA, at the direction of Trump, won’t calculate the health benefits of air free of ozone and fire particulates. This step is brought to you by greed, for the change will make it easier for coal power plants, oil refineries, steel mills, and other industrial facilities to operate unimpeded by the trivial concern of human life.

* * *

We should honor our dead. Like, the Varsity Theater in the University District. And the Crocodile, which isn’t dead, but is bankrupt and up for sale. In better arts and culture news, Scarecrow Video bought their building on Roosevelt Way, and the Vera Project announced plans to open a new all-ages space in Georgetown in early 2027.

* * *

We don’t even have Sears to ease the pain. There are only five stores left in the country, and none of them are long for this world. The store that once sold the American Dream in a mail-order catalog will be sold for parts.

* * *

If only we could all learn to self-soothe like an Austrian cow has. Veronika’s scratching stick, developed in a 13-year life of leisure, is the first documented instance of a cow using tools. Cows are farting idiots, so this is significant from an evolutionary perspective. Will Veronika & Co. become the new master race? She is Austrian.

* * *

At least she’s not going to be taking anyone’s job. Why? There aren’t any. Trump’s Department of Labor reported that employers only added 50,000 jobs in December, a dismal cherry on top of a dismal year for job growth.

Slog AM: Everyone Protested ICE This Weekend, Liam Ramos Is Home, and the Department of Homeland Security Is Afraid of Memes

Hannah Murphy Winter — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 09:43:00 -0800

The Stranger's morning news roundup. by Hannah Murphy Winter

Good Morning and Happy Groundhog Day! Phil saw his shadow this morning, so the fates have promised us another six weeks of winter. Which makes sense. It’s February.

ICE Out: From New York to Kansas City to Portland to Seattle, everyone hit the streets this weekend. The marches came out of an amorphous social media call for a “general strike” on Friday, but after spending the entirety of January watching ICE brutalize Minnesota on the screens in our pockets, people needed to shout about it. In Seattle, we had a critical mass bike ride, and three separate rallies held by tech workers, healthcare workers, and educators. It all came together to mean thousands of people were in the streets telling ICE to fuck off.

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Best News All Week: Five-year-old Liam Ramos is home. After immigration agents took the Ecuadorian preschooler and his dad from Minneapolis more than a week ago and shipped them 1,300 miles to an ICE detention center in Texas, a judge ordered their release this weekend. His written decision is brief, scathing, and sassy. “The case has its genesis in the ill-conceived and incompetently-implemented government pursuit of daily deportation quotas, apparently even if it requires traumatizing children,” US District Judge Fred Biery wrote. “Apparent also is the government's ignorance of an American historical document called the Declaration of Independence. Thirty-three-year-old Thomas Jefferson enumerated grievances against a would-be authoritarian king over our nascent nation…We the People are hearing echos of that history.” He then goes on to cite “that pesky inconvenience called the Fourth Amendment.” Read the full text below.

ProPublica Does the Government’s Job: For the last week, the government has protected the identities of the two agents who shot Alex Pretti 10 times while he was pinned on the ground. ProPublica’s editors said, in their much more diplomatic way, that that’s bullshit. According to the investigative outlet, which identified them based on government documents, the two men are Border Patrol agent Jesus Ochoa and Customs and Border Protection officer Raymundo Gutierrez. They are both from South Texas, and neither are new recruits—Ochoa joined in 2018 and Gutierrez in 2014.

A note from our editors:

[image or embed]
— ProPublica (@propublica.org) February 1, 2026 at 1:10 PM

Speaking of the Government’s Job: We’re back in a partial government shutdown. Dems finally refused to fund ICE, which means, as of this weekend, we’re working with the backup generators. On Friday, the Senate did pass a two-week patch to fund DHS and give Republicans time to offer an alternative that doesn’t fund Trump’s personal secret police, but its future in the House is uncertain. Fortunately, this shutdown won’t impact essential services like SNAP benefits, but this spending bill does include FEMA and TSA.

Trump Doesn’t Want You at His Arts Center Anyway: Nobody wants to perform at the Kennedy Center after Trump gutted its board and scribbled his name on the side of it, so he’s closing it down for two years for "renovations." He’s closing it on July 4, the country’s 250th birthday, presumably so he doesn’t have to remember another date. And he says he’ll make it “new and spectacular.” Tell that to the East Wing.

He Did Not Have Sexual Relations With That Plane Broker: Like every other filthy rich person you’ve ever heard of, the former Seahawks quarterback’s name cropped up in the Epstein files, apparently trying to buy one of his planes. Wilson hopped on the porn generator formerly known as Twitter to set the record straight: “NOPE!!! ABSOLUTELY NOT! Not TODAY satan!,” he wrote. “Some Random plane broker tried to sell me a plane. I had no idea whose plane and never bought the plane. Never talked nor Never met the man. Thank God!!!”

Beware the Memes! There’s a massive winter storm getting ready to wallop most of the US, which means most of our roadways are going to be covered in warning signs. But the DHS has asked FEMA to pretty please avoid the word “ice” in their warning, because they just can’t handle the memes. They’ve asked FEMA to use “freezing rain” instead. Snowflakes.

Would Ya Lookit That: The Grammys still happen in an autocracy. A lot happened at the award show last night, I think, but I really only want to talk about Chappell Roan’s nipples.

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In Non-Nipple Related News: Bad Bunny won Album of the Year last night for Debí Tirar Más Fotos, the first all-Spanish album to win the award. In front of a crowd full of musicians wearing “ICE OUT” pins, he was the first to actually say the thing out loud. “Before I say thanks to God, I’m going to say ICE out,” he said. “We’re not savage, we’re not animals, we’re not aliens. We are humans, and we are Americans.”

What’s it like outside? We’ve got soft weather today. Standard drizzle. Highs in the 50s. Lows in the mid 40s. Like Punxatawney Phil said, it’s still winter.

Bus Stop Shooting: Four Seattle schools are starting late this morning after two teenagers were killed at a Rainier Valley bus stop on Friday, right after school let out. The kids haven’t been identified by the coroner’s office yet, but about 100 friends and loved ones gathered at a vigil at the bus stop on Saturday. “He didn’t deserve this,” said one of the victims’s moms. “He was a great kid. He’s my only child, and he’s gone.” SPD thinks the shooting was targeted, and doesn’t believe that the community at large is in danger, but they have increased patrols in the area.

Evictions Are Up, Again: They’ve been climbing up consistently since the pandemic, and 2025 was no different. Both Washington State and King County recorded more evictions last year than they ever have before. Almost half of renters in Washington pay more than 30 percent of their income on rent, which means they’re often just one setback away from an eviction notice. And with the rise in corporate landlords, they’re less likely to negotiate with tenants who are behind on rent.

A Few Suggestions to Take That Edge Off: In San Francisco, if you make $230,000 or less, childcare is now free. And if you make up to $310,000, you still have access to a 50 percent subsidy. And in Massachusetts, Governor Maura Healy announced her plan to ban medical debt from being reported to credit agencies. Alright, Mayor Wilson, you’re up!

I’m not saying we made this happen, but…: In December’s complaints issue, The Stranger’s Nathalie Graham put her foot down. “Around the world, transit riders are waving their phones or gently tapping their credit cards to enter the glorious universe of a bus, a train, a ferry. In some parts of China, people pay for transit with their palms. Meanwhile, in Seattle, we are stuck in the past,” she wrote. Not anymore! The RapidRide G Line is soft-launching a Tap-to-Pay system on Monday. Riders can use debit cards, credit cards, or their phones to pay the $3 fare. The program should expand to the rest of the system by the end of the month, but don’t worry, your ORCA card won’t have to retire anytime soon. It’s still the system’s “preferred” payment method.

A Song for Your Monday: Sometimes you want your morning to sound like the beginning of a jolly adventure. Haruomi Hosono will always deliver on that.

Minneapolis and the Rise of Care Activism

Charles Mudede — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 16:00:00 -0800

What ICE has done is actually strengthen, rather weaken, the bonds between urban dwellers. by Charles Mudede

The current cycle of protests in Minneapolis has been accompanied by a type of resistance that I call care activism. This is not just about assisting protestors on the frontline but also helping those who've been harmed or kidnapped by ICE. In this form, care activism is practiced by providing “rent, food, diapers, and animal support” for people whose lives have been disrupted by an ICE raid or who are scared to leave their homes. And many of these people are actually documented, as with the case of the 5-year-old boy, Liam Ramos, who, with his father, was taken into custody by ICE, despite the fact that both entered the country legally, and the parent had no criminal record.

Thanks to the Kavanaugh stop, you only need to be brown or have a funny accent to be detained by ICE. Protests are surely important during this time of trouble, but for those who are exposed to legalized racism, what matters most is care activism. And it seems the people of Minneapolis, and other cities, have, through self-organization, met this challenge as best as they can.

"Let Minnesota Fuel You"

Important message from Imani B.

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— Key (@keykeymonet.bsky.social) January 23, 2026 at 2:45 PM

But what made the spontaneous networks of care activism even possible? One explanation can be found if we understand the kind of modern city in which we live. This is no easy task. But we can begin with a line from a poetic novel, Bones, by the late and great Zimbabwean writer Chenjerai Hove: “If the city is so frightening as you say… why are so many people living there?” Let’s keep these words in mind as we turn to this passage from T.S. Eliot’s conservative play The Rock:

“When the Stranger says: 'What is the meaning of this city?

Do you huddle close together because you love each other?'

What will you answer? 'We all dwell together to make money from each other?' or 'This is a community?'”

What Hove and Eliot capture is the paradox at the heart of the modern city. And by modern, I mean the kind of city that emerged in 17th-century Europe and, over the past four centuries, has become global. The cities of today are closely connected with the Amsterdam or London of that founding century, but are almost completely disconnected from those of antiquity: Rome, Alexandria, Timbuktu, and so on.

What connects all modern urban centers is their very nature. The pomerium, the sacred boundary of the ancient city, has been replaced by the market. Modernity is primarily about making money (industrial production, finance, consumer consumption). True, the market found a home in premodern cities, but rarely was it central to the life of the polis. Aristotle, for example, only devotes one chapter in the 500 pages of his book Politics to oikonomia (household management) and barely a page to what he contemptuously calls chrematistics, the unnatural massing of wealth. A modern examination of the polis would look mad if it excluded or made little mention of chrematistics, because that is what a modern city mainly does. To answer T.S. Eliot, that’s precisely why we come together. To make money. Don’t doubt it for even a minute. But there turns out to be another and maybe even deeper side to the modern metropolis. Markets are only possible because we are highly, even spectacularly, social animals. Remove this innate capacity to cooperate at very large scales and often with strangers, and we are no better than Hobbesian wolves. This is the great paradox of the modern city: an economic system that prioritizes individuals (the bellum omnium contra omnes of capitalism) and yet depends on human sociality, or species-being, for its realization and reproduction.

Now for a little theory. In socialist economics, there are two key concepts: contradictions and paradoxes. The former is associated with traditional Marxism, the latter with post-Keynesianism. To better understand a city that’s at once about community and generating profits, we need to abandon the concept of contradictions. It is too strict, teleological, and Hegelian. Meaning, contradictions are dialectical: thesis (what dominates), antithesis (what opposes what dominates), and synthesis (the resolution of the antagonism). Paradoxes, on the other hand, are not as tight or predictable as contradictions. For example, in post-Keynesian economics, there’s what’s called the paradox of thrift. This concept explains the fact that saving or hoarding money actually hurts capitalist accumulation on a macro level. The system’s performance is improved by circulating money, and hampered when large amounts of it are parked in bank accounts. And yet, capitalist ideology praises misers and even frugality to the high heavens.

The modern city is a paradox in this sense. The top ten metropolitan areas, including Seattle’s, generate an astonishing 90 percent of the US GDP, and 88 percent of its employment. The modern economy would collapse without them. Without this kind of economic power, you don’t have an Idaho, or a Wyoming, or a Montana. You don’t have a billionaire class. Yet cities are now under violent attack from the GOP, the party that represents the ruling class, because they’re too blue, because they have policies that are supposed to protect the rights of immigrants, and so on. Yet ICE has only one mission: make the lives of city people miserable. This is the paradox of all American paradoxes and it has seemingly backfired.

ICE is now facing resistance from the deeper city, from the community, from networks of care, from nurses, one of whom it killed. Adam Serwer of the the Atlantic writes:

“The federal surge into Minneapolis reflects a series of mistaken MAGA assumptions. The first is the belief that diverse communities aren’t possible. ... ‘Social bonds form among people who have something in common,’ Vance said in a speech last July. ‘If you stop importing millions of foreigners into the country, you allow social cohesion to form naturally.’ Vance’s remarks are the antithesis to the neighborism of the Twin Cities. … A second MAGA assumption is that the left is insincere in its values, and that principles of inclusion and unity are superficial forms of virtue signaling.”

What ICE has done is actually strengthen, rather weaken, the bonds between urban dwellers. Indeed, the social meaning of the city, which, as Serwer points out, is still massively underrepresented in state and national politics, has become more pronounced. This is not to say modern cities are perfect. We have a heap of racial, housing, and gender issues to work through. But many of these problems come from the market of the modern city. What we are seeing now (in Chicago, Los Angeles, Portland, Minneapolis), and what must continue, even with the firing of Border Patrol chief Gregory Bovino after the broad-daylight execution of Alex Pretti, is the movement toward the stabilization of urban fellow feeling and, eventually, its expansion into state and national politics. The Dems, in a word, are failing our cities. Now is the time to change that.

What Are You Going to Do During This Weekend’s Protests?

Megan Seling — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 13:30:00 -0800

I don’t know what to do. It’s getting increasingly difficult to push through the noise and focus on anything that feels worthwhile in the fight against the Trump administration’s relentless attacks. Each day is a new nightmare; each nightmare requires a battle plan. It feels hopeless. I have a feeling I'm not alone. by Megan Seling

I don’t know what to do. Maybe you don’t either.

It’s getting increasingly difficult to push through the noise and focus on anything that feels worthwhile in the fight against the Trump administration’s relentless attacks. Each day is a new nightmare; each nightmare requires a battle plan. It feels hopeless.

Even when I manage to pull myself together—or, at least, feel like I have—a rush of panic makes me come undone. Am I helping in the right way? What is the right way? Will this make any difference at all? We have to do something. People are literally dying. But we can’t afford to fuck this up! And so I sit. I stare. I cross-stitch a little bit, but doomscroll and watch shitty TV more, and I continue thinking about what to do instead of doing anything at all.

I have a feeling that I’m not alone.

It feels worse this week, today, while being inundated with messages about a general strike, a nationwide shutdown, a day for no work, no school no shopping. Because it’s adding to the confusion, not directing it.

The only directive—largely from scattered social media posts—is “ICE out,” “no work, no school, no shopping” in solidarity with Minnesota as they continue to protest the killings of Renée Good and Alex Pretti. Sounds easy enough, but without a unified goal, the questions that result in inaction swirl back up. Am I helping in the right way? What is the right way? Will this make any difference at all? For the past 72 hours, my social media feeds, text threads, and Slack conversations boil down to one question: What are we doing? We’re all that gif of John Travolta in Pulp Fiction where he’s looking around and wondering what the fuck is going on.

My skepticism is, in part, because we can’t trust activism that appears to start and mostly spread on social media. Remember #BlackoutTuesday in 2020, after Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd? The call to action evolved into people posting black squares on their Instagram and Facebook accounts. Something like 28 million people participated, which was more than 8 percent of the American population at the time. But without demands, and without sustained action, it’s just a flash in the pan that we all use as a punchline

And we shouldn’t trust faceless calls to action that encourage participants to hand over personal information, no questions asked. Even more so now that our administration basically brags about how it uses surveillance tech to monitor people’s social media activity and cross-reference it with personal information to target whoever it is they feel needs to be eradicated today.

Successful general strikes have union backing. They have demands. They have a reputable organization behind them that can build on its momentum. Small versions of that have bubbled up: Members of UAW Local 4121—which includes about 4,000 student employees at the UW—will gather at the University of Washington at noon. (Pretti, an ICU nurse, was a member of the AFGE Local 3669 union.) Seattle’s Troublemakers and MLK Labor Union are organizing a rally at the Downtown Target to “send a message to the company that they must stop enabling ICE’s terror campaign.” Target, which is headquartered in Minneapolis, has been quiet ever since Greg Bovino and other US Border Patrol agents arrested two Target employees at work in a Richfield, MN store earlier this month. (Target also rolled back its DEI programs in 2025, resulting in a boycott that appears to have impacted sales, for what it’s worth.)

Efforts have bled over into Saturday, too. Seattle educators are organizing an Ice Out of Seattle rally at Seattle Central Community College at East Pike and Broadway at 1 pm, which has been endorsed by the Washington Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers, among others. Both events are being backed by 50501.

Last year, after the nationwide protests in April, Kendall Turner published the Stranger article, “How Does a Protest Make Change?” She wrote, “almost no protest movement that has mobilized 3.5 percent of a population has failed to achieve its goals.” She added that “research suggests successful protests share four characteristics: worthiness, unity, numbers, and commitment.”

Actions can’t have any of those characteristics if the conversation around it is ultimately coming down to people asking, “So what do we do?” And it doesn’t help that what appears to be the main website behind the movement is giving psyop. But it’s also giving us an opportunity. It’s giving people permission to take time, in a moment when most days are full of nothing but internally screaming someone! has to do something! until they fall asleep. And that’s the first step.

Today’s “general strike” might be infuriatingly directionless. But it’s 2026. And today, the fight can be what you make it. So make today about doing something.

Dozens of restaurants across the city are remaining open and donating a portion (or all!) of their proceeds to Minneapolis businesses and immigration organizations. Go get a donut, go eat a taco, drink some really good coffee.
Read up on what the Washington Immigrant Solidarity Network, La Resistencia, and National Day Laborer Organizing Network are doing—they work every day to track and free people detained by ICE here in the Pacific Northwest. (In fact, NDLON is hosting a virtual workshop on Friday at 5 pm for people interested in their Adopt a Day Labor Corner program.)
Cancel Spotify. Cancel Amazon Prime. Support an indie art shop and make a really funny sign or batch of stickers and stick them all over town.
Make a plan to go to one of the union-supported events on Saturday, too. The rain is supposed to clear by the afternoon.

Whether you’re working or not, going to school or not, participating in the economy or not, today can be a day that you think about how you want to participate in this downfall of democracy. Because it’s not a matter of whether or not you participate, it’s a matter of how. You’re in it, babe. It’s happening. Your actions—and inactions—are on record.

Today, do the thing you’ve been too debilitated by overthinking to do. Just don’t do nothing.

Protests! Get Your Protests Here!

Nathalie Graham — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 11:35:00 -0800

The demands are simple: Get Target to denounce ICE, those chuds terrorizing and murdering people in Target’s hometown, and to stop allowing them to operate in their stores. Shouldn’t the company do something? Money is power and Target is the fourth largest employer in Minnesota. Hot deals can offer a company only so much protection. by Nathalie Graham

On Friday at 1:30pm, MLK Labor and Troublemakers Community will gather outside the downtown Seattle Target to protest the Minneapolis-based brand’s ties with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. It’s a direct action on a day of loose, unfocused, pat-on-the-back politics.

This Friday afternoon, join us at 🎯, Seattle!

For the why's and demands: www.instagram.com/p/DUE7_KGkfrF/

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— Troublemakers (@troublemakers.bsky.social) January 28, 2026 at 6:18 PM

These targeted Target protests have sprung up around the country. Seven people were detained while protesting outside the store in Chicago’s West Loop. People in Philadelphia (home of Democracy and cheesesteak) and Emeryville, California (home of Pixar and Peet’s Coffee) have gathered to yell at their local Targets. Across the Twin Cities, protesters are staging sit-ins at 17 Targets where they will surely be subjected to a lot of Taylor Swift music played on loop. Many say this is like being auditorily waterboarded.

The protests are the cherry on top of a bad year for the big box store. Nearly a year ago, people began boycotting Target for rolling back its diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. Sales dropped.

So, if you are participating in Friday’s amorphous national general strike and don’t know what to do with yourself, join the masses at the downtown Target. The organizers emphasized that it will be peaceful. No broken windows here.

If that’s not your cup of tea, you can join a slew of anti-ICE actions on Saturday between noon and 1pm. The teachers will be gathering at Seattle Central College, the tech workers will rally at the Cal Anderson Park fountain, and the hospital workers will hold it down at Harborview Medical Center.

Slog AM: Feds Arrest Don Lemon, Seattle to Pay $30 Million in CHOP Death, Who Is Going to See Melania?

Nathalie Graham — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 08:45:00 -0800

The Stranger's morning news roundup. by Nathalie Graham

Don Lemon Arrested: Federal agents arrested journalist Don Lemon in Los Angeles on Thursday where he was covering the Grammy Awards. Lemon's crime? The feds believe Lemon was “connected” to the anti-immigration protest that disrupted a Minnesota church service because a pastor at the church has a little sidegig—leading the local ICE field office . The protest happened almost two weeks ago. A magistrate judge previously rejected the case brought against Lemon by the Department of Justice due to insufficient evidence. Lemon says he was simply doing journalism. The DOJ claims Lemon was trespassing and his presence at the church interruption "may have impeded... churchgoers’ constitutional rights to express their religion." Constitutional rights for me but not for thee, hm? Independent journalist Georgia Fort, who filmed the church demonstration, was also arrested. Aside from journalists, feds arrested two other people involved in the church demonstration. Cool First Amendment we've got here. Strong. Sound. Unbiased.

The Feds Showed Up at Fort’s Door:

Georgia Fort, an independent journalist and vice president of the Minnesota NABJ chapter, was also arrested by federal agents this morning

I was sent this video of agents at her door:

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— Phil Lewis (@phillewis.bsky.social) January 30, 2026 at 6:58 AM

$30 Million for CHOP Death: The City of Seattle must pay $30.5 million in damages to the father of Antonio Mays Jr., the teenager shot and killed inside 2020's autonomous Capitol Hill Organized Protest. A King County jury found the city was negligent in its response to Mays' shooting and that negligence caused his death.

Wilson Preps for ICE: Mayor Katie Wilson laid out several actions to get Seattle and its residents ready in the event of an ICE surge. Her orders include barring federal “civil immigration enforcement activities” on Seattle property, directing the Seattle Police Department to investigate and verify reports of ICE activity, doling out $4 million to immigrants support organizations, and creating a community hotline. She hasn't said anything about those pesky police CCTV cameras, though.

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A post shared by Mayor Katie B. Wilson (@mayorofseattle)

The Weather: It's going to rain.

Measles, Shmeasles: That's the attitude some of you have about vaccinating your little gremlins. Snohomish County just reported three more measles cases, bringing the county's total cases this month to six. The most recent case involves an unvaccinated twerp who went to a church service while infected.

Congrats: Washington state now has a population of 8 million people. Between 2024 and 2025, the Evergreen State added more than 73,000 people—ranking our state sixth for population growth—and pushed us over that sweet, sweet, 8 million line.

Today's the Day We've All Been Waiting for: The Melania documentary is coming out! Amazon spent $40 million for the rights and then spent $35 million marketing the movie about Melania Trump in the days leading up to her husband's second inauguration. The director is Brett Ratner. This is his first film since he disappeared after six women accused him of sexual assault back in 2017. Disaster has already struck. The first screening of Melania in the United Kingdom was cancelled because distributors allegedly forgot to send the film. That's okay, people can just read the erotic parody Melania Devourer of Men which is currently topping Amazon charts.

Not Melania Fans? That aforementioned $35 million Amazon-funded ad campaign paid for a bunch of Melania posters at Los Angeles bus stops. The bus-going public in Tinseltown did not appreciate this. They scribbled Hitler mustaches on the Melania on the Melania poster, writing "Eva Braun" around her head, the name of Hitler's wife. Others gave their local Melania posters devil horns or left a note that the film's subject was in the Epstein files. Fearing more unsanctioned art by this city of artists, LA Metro, which has buses plastered in Melania ads as well, opted to relocate the buses to different routes away from hot graffiti zones.

Eva 'Melania' Braun

...being in a position to know and nevertheless shunning knowledge creates direct responsibility for the consequences...

- Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich -

Inglourious Basterds - The Verdikt
(Dopo La Condanna) Ennio Morricone 🎼

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— Nicky Schwenzer (@nickyschwenzer.bsky.social) January 29, 2026 at 2:07 AM

Boston, You Could Earn $50: Someone is supposedly paying people to see Melania in Boston. It's on Craigslist, so it's probably real.

Federal Reserve Gets New Dad: Donald Trump nominated former Federal Reserve governor and outspoken critic Kevin Warsh to run the whole thing. Warsh will replace Jerome Powell as the chair of the Fed. This could be good for Trump who was beefing with Powell who wouldn't cut rates. In the past, Warsh has echoed Trump's frustrations about the Fed's resistance to cutting interest rates. The financial tea leaves (the strength of the dollar) seemed to approve of Warsh.

No Death Penalty for Luigi: A federal judge ruled that prosecutors won't be able to seek the death penalty in their case against 27-year-old Luigi Mangione who is accused of killing UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. The judge dismissed two counts against Magnione, “including murder through use of a firearm… and a weapons charge,” according to The Guardian. Mangione still faces two federal stalking charges and the possibility of life in prison without parole.

Can You Be Addicted to Hair Transplant Consultations? My child, you can be addicted to anything.

A Long Read: Remember when that army helicopter crashed into a passenger plane in D.C.? Here's what went down in that cockpit.

Waymo Hits Kid: A Waymo robotaxi struck a child near a Santa Monica, California elementary school. The kid is okay and only suffered minor injuries. Waymo has started a probe into the incident to see what went wrong. I have an idea: No one was driving the car.

Downhill Doozy: Olympics-bound skier Lindsay Vonn, 41, crashed in the final World Cup downhill in Crans-Montana, Switzerland due to bad conditions (snow everywhere). The decorated Olympian came out of the crash clutching her knee. She was airlifted from the slopes via helicopter. She is due to compete in the Milano Cortina Olympics that start next week. Crans-Montana has seen far worse this month.

A Song for Your Friday: You've probably heard this by now. The tradition of protest music lives on. Bruce Springsteen has carried that torch for decades. He cannot snuff it out yet.

Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that a King County judge found the city negligent in the Antonio Mays trial. This was a jury trial, and a jury found the city negligent. We regret the error.

Slog AM: Liam Conejo Ramos is Sick, State Senators Vote to Lower BAC Limit, 12saquah Returns

Micah Yip — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 10:00:00 -0800

The Stranger's morning news roundup. by Micah Yip

Liam Conejo Ramos, the five-year-old taken by ICE in Minneapolis, is sick behind bars, according to his school’s superintendent. Liam reportedly is vomiting, feverish, experiencing stomach pain, and doesn’t want to eat, his mother told the superintendent. All this is due to the abysmal conditions and bug-infested food at the South Texas Family Residential Center, where Liam is being held with his father, Adrian Alexander Conejo Arias. The father and son entered the country legally.

Mask Off: Law enforcement officers in Washington state may soon have to show their faces while performing public duties. Yesterday, a bill banning face coverings for on-duty officers advanced out of the state Senate. The Democrat-backed substitute Senate Bill 5855 is meant to unmask masked federal agents in Washington state. Federal authority takes precedence over states. Enforcing the law could be difficult, possibly rendering it useless, reports the Seattle Times.

Want to Support Minneapolis Protests? These 30+ Seattle businesses are donating their proceeds to support restaurants in Minneapolis participating in a nationwide economic blackout tomorrow to protest ICE.

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Trump Insults Denmark, Part Infinity: On Tuesday, the U.S. Embassy in Denmark removed the 44 Danish flags placed in planters outside the building meant to honor 44 Danish soldiers killed in Afghanistan (about 9,500 Danish troops were sent to Afghanistan). Danish veterans placed them there after President Trump, fixated on taking control of the semiautonomous Danish territory of Greenland, said in a recent interview that the US “never needed” the country’s help. A State Department spokesperson claims there was no ill intent—just regular, post-demonstration maintenance.

Weather: It’s kinda rainy, pretty gray, about 50 degrees…what more is there to know?

Buzzed: The state might lower its legal blood alcohol concentration limit for Washington drivers from 0.08% to 0.05%. Yesterday, the state Senate passed SB5067—the result of a years-long effort by Democratic Senator John Lovick, a former state trooper and county sheriff. If the House passes the bill, Washington would lower the threshold on July 1. The only other state with such a low legal limit is Utah, but from a global perspective, 0.05% isn’t low at all. Last year, The Stranger conducted a semi-scientific experiment using alcohol and Mario Kart 64 to test the difference between the current limit and Lovick’s limit.

A vacant lot in West Seattle could become a “religious-controlled emergency transitional housing site.” A proposal submitted to the city on January 16 includes space for 20 tiny homes and parking for up to 72 recreational vehicles. The Low Income Housing Institute would operate the site. District 1 Councilmember Rob Saka says it’ll be a “common-sense solution to help bring people indoors.” A formal permit application needs to be filed before any actual change happens.

12saquah: That’s what Issaquah Mayor Mark Mullet has officially renamed the city 12saquah—a nod to “the 12s” nickname for Seahawks fans—to honor the Seahawks return to the Superbowl. Issaquah changed its name to 12saquah in 2015, the last time the Seahawks went to the Super Bowl.

The Broadview Six: The six protesters who blocked an ICE vehicle outside an immigration processing facility last fall were charged with federal conspiracy during Operation Midway Blitz, the massive ICE operation in Chicago. Yesterday, their attorneys argued to keep evidence in their case public, against prosecutors' proposed protective order that would limit access to discovery materials. The defense argued that growing national scrutiny of ICE warrants the materials to be public, and that secrecy makes little sense in a case centered on protest, policing and free speech. The judge ordered the Department of Homeland Security to preserve five days of surveillance footage from the Broadview ICE facility surrounding the protest. The case is headed to trial this spring.

Tech So Bad Even Techies Are Worried: Amazon has been dumping billions of dollars into its artificial intelligence infrastructure. Worker advocacy group Amazon Employees for Climate Justice issued an open letter to the company, saying employees are worried that the company’s push for energy-guzzling AI push is detrimental to its goal of reaching net-zero carbon emissions by 2040. “The AI race is widening this gap,” read the letter.

This song has been stuck in my girlfriend’s head, which means it’s been stuck in my head, which means I must pass it on to you. Sorry or you’re welcome.

Slog AM: A Tacoma Children's Hospital Is Closing Their Gender Clinic, Amazon Is Closing Their Grocery Stores, and the Department of Homeland Security Will Investigate Their Own Shooting

Megan Seling — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 09:48:00 -0800

The Stranger's morning news roundup. by Megan Seling

Good morning. It rained. That was nice. But the news is still terrible. So I’m going to try something a little different for today’s Slog AM. For every dose of bad news I deliver, I will also provide a bit of ✨good news✨. I simply cannot continue living in this waterfall of tragedy and chaos. It’s all about balance. Let’s begin.

DOJ to Investigate Themselves: Trump says there’s a “big investigation” underway for the shooting of Alex Pretti. But it’s not what you think. Unless you think Trump is a lying, immoral piece of shit. Then it’s exactly what you think. The Justice Department has decided they don’t need an independent civil rights investigation into the fatal shooting of Pretti. Instead, they’re gonna have the Department of Homeland Security investigate their own guys. Sounds totally fair and legit and not at all fucking corrupt as hell.

✨In the Land of Good News: In August, a cat named Filou escaped from a camper while his vacationing owners had stopped for fuel in Catalonia. Kitty, no! Patrick and Evelyne Sire searched for Filou for weeks and even involved the Spanish police, but they eventually had to return home to France, heartbroken. Then, weeks ago, five months after Filou went missing, a woman spotted an exhausted cat just 500 meters from the couple's home. It was Filou! Vox says, “She had traveled 250 kilometers on foot, crossing mountains, rivers and a state border between two countries to return home.” Look at her delightfully grumpy face. Quick! Sufjan Stevens, write an album about her journey!

Parce qu'on a besoin de belles histoires :

Perdu en Espagne, Filou le chat a parcouru 250km en 4 mois pour retrouver sa maison. Bravo Filou !

www.leparisien.fr/herault-34/q...

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— Chloé Woitier (@chloew.bsky.social) January 17, 2026 at 1:11 PM

Local Gender Clinic Shutting Down: Yesterday, the Seattle Times reported that Mary Bridge Children’s Hospital in Tacoma plans to shut down its gender clinic. In a memo to staff, hospital leaders explained that “recent developments at the federal level” threaten to halt Medicaid and Medicare payments if it continues to offer gender-affirming health services to minors. Stranger News Editor Vivian McCall reported in September that the clinic axed its waitlist and stopped providing medical care for new patients due to “changing federal expectations,” but said they would continue providing hormones and puberty blockers to trans kids already receiving them. The gender clinic's closure will leave 320 young people, more than half of whom are under 18, without care.

✨ Supporting Trans Youth Is Delicious: It’s Girl Scout cookie time! And if you’re looking for a cookie hook-up, independent journalist Erin Reed has a list of trans and non-binary Girl Scouts you can support here. They ship the snacks right to your door! I am eating a new “rocky road ice cream inspired” Exploremores as I type. It’s pretty good! The chocolate cookie is crispy and crumbly, almost like a shortbread, and the filling has a nice almond flavor. But the Samoas will always be my favorite. Fuck Trump, buy cookies!

This Is Normal, Right? The US is going to “conduct military exercises” in the Middle East in the coming days. Trump has told Iranian leaders that if they don’t stop killing protesters and come to the negotiating table, “the next attack will be far worse” than when the US blew up those Iranian nuclear facilities last year. According to CNN, 5,800 protestors have been killed so far and the US-based Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA) said an additional 17,091 deaths are still under review.

✨Something to Look Forward To: No, it doesn’t change the impending war and horror of thousands of dead protestors, but Lucy Daucus is playing some shows in the Pacific Northwest in May. She’ll be at Mount Baker Theatre in Bellingham on May 10 and Vancouver, BC on May 12. Is there anything more romantic than fleeing the country to sing-scream along to “Night Shift”? I think not.

Amazon Cuts 16,000 Jobs: The Seattle Times is calling it a “historic wave of layoffs.” The company cut 14,000 jobs in October, blaming a parfait of corporate buzzwords: “reducing layers, increasing ownership, and removing bureaucracy” in their corporate structure. No word yet on how many of these cuts are employees in Seattle. In other news, Jeff Bezos has become the third-richest man in the world again, reclaiming the spot from Sergey Brin. Isn’t it so fun to watch those guys battle it out? Which one will violate labor laws and human rights in order to squeak out a billion more bucks? You never know with those wild 'n' crazy guys.

✨ Dicks for Dimes: To celebrate their 72nd anniversary, Dick’s Drive-In is hawking $0.19 burgers at select locations all week long. Today, you can grab a Dick for less than a quarter at the Queen Anne and Lake City locations. With his $250 billion, Bezos could buy 1.3 TRILLION BURGERS! Just kidding. One per customer, please.

Amazon’s Shutting Down Stores, Too: Amazon announced yesterday that it will close all Amazon Go and Amazon Fresh locations, including 11 stores in Seattle. Many stores will close as early as this Sunday, February 1. Some locations will eventually reopen as Whole Foods, but the company didn’t say how many. Charles Mudede called it in 2024. The closures will leave some serious grocery gaps in the city. The Amazon Fresh on 23rd Avenue, for example, built on the old Red Apple lot, is one of the only full-service grocery stores in the Central District. In semi-related news, it’s not just your imagination: Groceries are getting more expensive in Seattle at a concerning rate.

✨ Fresh Bucks Expands Programming: More than 4,500 households on the Fresh Bucks program waitlist have been enrolled in the program, and as of January 1, low-income households now get $60 a month (up from $40).

Government Shutdown Update: We’re days away from another partial government shutdown. Last week, the House passed the funding bill that would give more money to homeland security, including ICE and Customs and Border Protection. But that was before federal officers shot Alex Pretti, who was the second US citizen killed by federal officers in Minneapolis this month. Now, Dems are feeling even ickier about giving more money to ICE, and they’re demanding that the DHS funding be stripped from the bill. The Republicans are like, “No way, we don’t care that federal officers are gunning down Americans, it’s totally fine, we love it actually, more money plz.” If they don’t advance the measure by Friday, the shutdown will begin at 12:01 EST Saturday morning.

✨National Shutdown Update: Speaking of shutdowns, General Strike US is organizing a national shutdown on January 30. No work, no school, no shopping. If striking isn’t an option, consider calling the seven dum-dum Dems in the House who voted to push that Department of Homeland Security funding through. One of them is Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, from right here in Washington! WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK, MARIE?!

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When Rhetoric Becomes Reality: Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar, a Somali immigrant who is constantly being verbally attacked by Trump on social media because racism was physically attacked during a town hall in Minneapolis yesterday when a man in the front row charged at her and sprayed her with a liquid that smelled like vinegar. A security guard tackled the man, and he was arrested. Officials haven’t said what the liquid was, and Omar continued the event, posting on social media later that she was fine and “this small agitator isn’t going to intimidate me from doing my work. I don’t let bullies win.” On Monday, Trump posted on Truth Social about Omar, accusing her of “deflecting from your failures with lies and conspiracy theories about me” and said that the Justice Department is “looking into” her for “fraud,” but really because—say it with me—racism.

✨Put Your Morals Where Your Mouth Is: Graham Granger, a performing arts student, was arrested for criminal mischief after eating an art exhibit at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. The exhibit was a collection of 160 Polaroid pictures that artist Nick Dwyer created with the help of AI. Police say he destroyed about 57 images. Granger said he did it because “AI chews up and spits out art made by other people.” According to The Nation, a witness said “he was tearing them up and just shoving them in as fast as he could. Like when you see people in a hot-dog eating contest.” I don’t know if this truly counts as good news, but I find the whole debacle to be downright delightful.

Let the Record Show: On Monday, a judge ruled that the Seattle Police Department has “routinely” violated Washington’s Public Records Act by “grouping” public records requests and therefore unofficially limiting the number of requests a person or an outlet can submit at a time. According to Publicola, the SPD has been “refusing to work on more than one public disclosure request by the same requester at a time” for years, so last year the Seattle Times sued ‘em. Journalists suing cops is my love language.

Also My Love Language: Gwar covering “Pink Pony Club.” This video has brought me so much joy in recent days. What Gwar song will you cover, Chapell? May I suggest “Pussy Planet” from America Must Be Destroyed? Just an idea.

State Sen. Jesse Salomon Wants to Bring Ibogaine Therapy to Washington

Nathalie Graham — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 11:00:00 -0800

State Sen. Jesse Salomon, Washington's mushrooms legislator, wants to broaden the state's psychedelic horizons with Ibogaine therapy, a drug that supposedly acts as an almost miracle balm for psychic pain. But do we know how it works? by Nathalie Graham

I met up with Sen. Jesse Salomon (D-Shoreline) to talk about drugs.

We sat at a back table in Cafe Aroma, a Shoreline coffee shop that got busted in 2024 for hosting a bondage event without the proper licenses. On his bicep, a tattoo of an ancient scroll with a Biblical verse peeked out of the sleeve of Salomon’s Trophy Husband T-shirt. Across the street was Landmark’s Crest Cinema Center, where I’d just seen the new Knives Out movie. I told him this. “What’s Knives Out?” Salomon asked. He did not know of movies, only hallucinogens.

For the last four years, Salomon has introduced legislation in Olympia to try to regulate and open access to psilocybin, the psychedelic compound in magic mushrooms. The closest he’s gotten to progress is his 2023 bill that put $2 million toward a University of Washington study on the therapeutic application of shrooms.

The results should be published in about a year, according to Dr. Nathan Sackett, who is running the trial at UW. “These clinical trials are painfully slow,” he says. “I hope that it'll at least provide some evidence for some folks… and hopefully that'll move the needle ever so slightly in terms of future funding and future research around efficacy and safety long-term.”

At least, that’s what Salomon’s banking on. And maybe it’ll help with his new bill in the legislature to give medical professionals the power to prescribe psilocybin.

When Salomon reached out for an interview, I assumed it was about this latest psilocybin bill, so I suggested we microdose shrooms at the Pacific Science Center’s laser dome during their Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon show. Salomon said no. I suggested we could do the K-Pop Demon Hunters showing instead? Still, no. Salomon doesn’t microdose.

So, we met for a standard, ropeless interview at the cafe. Except it still wasn’t what I expected. Salomon didn’t talk about psilocybin much, he wanted to talk about ibogaine.

Ibogaine, a psychoactive compound found in an African rainforest shrub, is having a moment across the political spectrum. The reason? Some believe the drug might be a panacea—especially for addiction, traumatic brain injuries, post-traumatic stress, and depression. Two 2024 studies—one conducted at Stanford University and another published in the journal Nature—showed that veterans who used ibogaine saw leaps and bounds of improvement in their PTSD and traumatic brain injuries. But no matter how promising ibogaine may seem, this early research is far from conclusive. The trials were small-scale and not placebo-controlled. Much of the data is anecdotal.

Still, the ibogaine hype has caught on. Liberals see a potential game changer in how we treat mental health and addiction; Republicans envision a new way to suture the mental lacerations of war. But it’s not legal here. Salomon wants to change the limitations on ibogaine. And he almost did back before ibogaine was cool.

In 2024, Salomon worked with Sen. Kevin Van De Wege (D-Sequim) to propose an amendment to add $250,000 to the state’s supplemental budget for ibogaine-assisted therapy research. Their attempts to increase that amount or conduct additional studies are, like this psilocybin pursuit, stalled. But with that initial money, Dr. Sackett conducted an observational study on the drug in Mexico, where he observed the treatments at an ibogaine clinic “to better understand the safety profile and the clinical outcomes.” The results should be published later this year.

However, conservatives are the ones most enamored with ibogaine right now. The drug’s biggest supporter is none other than former Texas governor Rick Perry, who cofounded Americans for Ibogaine, the largest ibogaine advocacy group in the country, after serving as energy secretary during President Donald Trump’s first term. In June, his successor, Texas governor Greg Abbott, signed over $50 million in public funds toward ibogaine research, in large part due to the size of Texas’s veteran population.

Republican operative Rex Elsass, one of the most powerful men in conservative politics, is a fan of the drug. So is Texas congressman and former Navy Seal Morgan Luttrell. Boxer Conor McGregor said he was visited by a vision of Jesus when he did ibogaine at a clinic in Mexico. Notably, ibogaine did not cure Hunter Biden’s drug and alcohol addictions in 2014 (or solve his laptop problems, which ibogaine cannot do).

Mexico is the spot for ibogaine clinics, according to Dr. Eduardo Ramirez Juárez, the clinical director at Beond, an ibogaine facility in Cancún. “It’s because Mexico is the best,” Juárez says. He laughs. “No, it’s because ibogaine is in a legal gray area here.” It is neither legal nor illegal, and it’s not regulated. So, clinics like Juárez’s have sprouted up. Veterans and people with substance use disorders are flocking there to try this seemingly magic medicine, sometimes as a last resort.

Salomon doesn’t have PTSD, or a TBI, or a substance-use disorder, he simply wanted to be more perceptive. So Salomon spent seven medically supervised days at Beond. The clinic administered two doses of ibogaine: a macro “flood” dose at a medical facility, and a second, smaller dose poolside several days later, where he was surrounded by veterans and depressed and anxious people in search of relief. A lot of people who’ve tried it, have found just that.

Do We Even Know How This Works?

Juárez, who went to medical school and then spent most of his career doing emergency medicine on cruise ships and oil rigs, believes the drug is therapeutic because he’s seen the results. “You can see it as a master key that opens different doors in your brain but mainly will act in the cortex and mesolimbic area,” he explains. The cerebral cortex is the “gray matter” of the brain, the outer layer housing everything responsible for who we are and how we act: attention span, perception, awareness, consciousness, memory, thought, and language. The mesolimbic area is the reward pathway, dopamine-releasing neurons that regulate motivation and desire. Pleasurable by definition, but hell when knocked out of whack.

Once ibogaine has reached those areas, according to Juárez, it stops the release of glutamate and dopamine for at least a couple of hours and at most a couple of days. It has a regulating effect, he says, that’s particularly helpful for addicts and people with mental health conditions.

Ibogaine also releases proteins that fix broken connections in the brain, acting as construction crew for those with traumatic brain injuries. However, it can be a wrecking crew, too. If administered without magnesium, ibogaine can cause arrhythmia, so the heart beats irregularly. Sometimes that causes cardiac arrest. As of 2021, the drug has killed at least 33 people worldwide, according to public data.

But these clinics say they know the risk. They screen patients for heart conditions, administer magnesium, and have staff cardiologists. Safely done, the experience can be spiritual and psychedelic, magical and life changing, Juárez says. But he’s just one guy.

“I'll tell you the truth about Ibogaine,” says Dr. David Edward Olson, director of the Institute for Psychedelics and Neurotherapeutics at University of California Davis. “We really have no idea how it works.”

Olson, who researches the drug, believes “there’s a lot of promise” in ibogaine, but “most of the information that we have is from anecdotal reports and some open, labeled clinical trials,” he says.

Olson was the lead author on a UC Davis study about synthesizing ibogaine into a drug that mitigates the heart-stopping risks of the substance in its raw form. He said a lot of people took the Stanford study as proof that ibogaine is more effective than other treatments for TBI and substance abuse. But that data is simply “not sufficient” to draw such a broad conclusion. And there are still many questions.

“With classic psychedelics, we have a pretty good idea of how they work,” Olson says. “We know the receptors, we know the pathways, but ibogaine is a bit more mysterious. We don't even really know the optimal doses for Ibogaine.”

What we do know, Juárez says, is that ibogaine has an impact on mesolimbic circuitry, the parts of the brain involved in reward. “And it does seem to produce long-lasting effects,” Olson says. That’s a sign of “neuroplasticity,” or brain repair. “It's as simple as, a synapse is broken, you give someone the drug, that synapse that was broken gets reconstituted,” Olson says. “And so that's how a drug like ibogaine might produce these rapid and sustained therapeutic effects, especially for something like traumatic brain injury.”

Salomon’s Big Mexican Trip

At Beond, Salomon was paired with a professional trip sitter, a coach to prepare him for the intense psychedelic experience. He was a veteran, “buff as hell,” with a buzz cut and tattoos, says Salomon.

A “pretty standard military guy, like, not a hippie,” he says. Ibogaine was the man’s last resort, Salomon says. “He was like, ‘It was this or a casket. I was at the end of my rope.’”

His name was Jon Stevens, a Marine Corps special operations veteran who served for 13 years. Near the end of his military career, something shifted, tossing him into “a pit of despair” at the bottom of which he felt “completely dead inside.” Then there was the pain.

“On the way out, I got injured,” Stevens explains, speaking at the fast clip of a military man. During a parachute training jump gone wrong, he broke his pelvis, fractured his hip, and shattered an eye socket. Back in civilian life, he reached for pills and alcohol to ease the physical and psychological pain. He sought out every treatment the VA had to offer.

“I was a candidate for two brain clinics in the United States after the military,” Stevens says. “They told me all my problems weren't just PTSD. I had brain damage, but there really wasn't anything they could do for me.” Their treatment? Stick to a high-fat diet. Read. Do puzzles.

Nothing changed until he tried ibogaine.

“It took down the prison walls I built around myself, the reasons why I can't do things or why I'm not successful, and also reminded me who I was,” Stevens says. “It made me like myself again.”

Stevens had plans to become a nurse practitioner, which he ditched to become an ibogaine coach. He started out coaching veterans. In the last year, working with a nonprofit called Beond Service, Stevens helped bring 15 cohorts of veterans and first responders—around 100 people—down to the Beond for ibogaine treatment.

“Ibogaine is a beautiful medicine,” Stevens says.

Salomon saw the beauty for himself in a room with two other patients. As he lay in a hospital bed hooked up to monitors, medical professionals gave Salomon a pill of ibogaine. The flavor was nearly indescribable, bitter and closest to diesel fuel, Salomon says.

A cardiologist came in every hour to check his heart; a nurse stayed by his side for the entire 10-hour trip. A curated playlist of mostly trance, EDM, and “What a Wonderful World” by Louie Armstrong drowned out the beeping, droning hospital equipment. To “go deeper” into himself, he wore the sunglasses provided by the clinic.

People on ibogaine often report experiencing a “life review,” as if the drug is laying their whole life out before them. Salomon didn’t experience that. He threw up “like 15 times,” and grieved his mother’s death.

“She had been killed in a car accident years ago.” Salomon says, his voice catching. “I had to organize the funeral and be strong for that whole process. And I had never really thought about it, and then, in such a therapeutic environment, it just came out.”

Salomon came back from Mexico ready to reignite the ibogaine conversation he started.

The Money? What Money?

It really is just a conversation.

“I haven’t been able to get any traction in the legislature,” he says. Within Washington’s pinched purse of a budget, Salomon didn’t see a penny of funding, but smelled a coming check.

Over the next 15 years, the state will receive $105.6 million from Purdue Pharma, which settled after states sued the company for causing the opiate crisis by pushing its drug oxycontin. Another $16 million will be coming our way from other drugmakers. Most of the funds received so far are spoken for. But Salomon wants ibogaine to get a slice of future payouts

“It's not for everybody, and it doesn't need to be, but it does need to be an option,” Salomon says. This year, though, the only drug he’s pushing in the legislature is psilocybin. He’s the shroom guy, after all, and he knows the ibogaine funds are more of a long game. But when the settlement money comes …

“Then you can call dibs?” I ask.

“I would hope so, but it’s not that easy,” he says. “All the budget writers aren’t quite all on board yet.”

“You gotta get all the budget writers to the clinic,” I joke.

“It could happen,” Salomon says, not joking. “If they want to do it, we can make it happen.”

The Vera Project Announces New All-Ages Venue

Dave Segal — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 08:00:00 -0800

The new 300-capacity venue is set to open in Georgetown in early 2027. by Dave Segal

The Seattle music industry has been rife with misfortune since COVID lockdown. Bucking odds, though, the Vera Project has a raft of good news. The city's stalwart all-ages nonprofit organization is celebrating its 25th anniversary this month, and its staff has plans to offer more opportunities for young artists and promoters, to put on more free shows, to launch a new festival, and to open a new 300-capacity venue in Georgetown. And they're going to do all this without selling a drop of alcohol.

For a quarter century, Vera Project—currently headquartered at Seattle Center—has been hosting all-ages music shows and visual arts exhibits, teaching studio recording and screen-printing skills, and providing a “safe space for radical self-expression” for young people. Vera also has helped to transform Black Lodge from an off-grid cultural hub to a legit music venue.

In an interview with The Stranger, Executive Director Ricky Graboski elaborated on Vera Project's ambitious vision for the near future. Vera's goal is to raise $2.5 million by early 2027, when the yet-to-be-named Georgetown space is set to open. (Vera signed a 20-year lease for it.) The org already has garnered more than 53 percent of that total. Much of it has come from Paul Allen's Allen Family Philanthropies; Graboski singles out Amber Rose Jimenez, the organization’s program officer, as an advocate for Vera. “They're just trying to support youth in a real way,” says Graboski. “[The decision] evolved quickly from what seemed like smaller funds to a full Seattle Center-wide thing. We were among the highest-funded [organizations]. We also pitched something fairly radical compared to what a lot of arts funding is pushing out there. Because we're just immediately spending the money on free shows run by young people for young people.”

Vera's Ratsquatch faces off with Snacks the Bunny at the Rock Lottery show in 2025. BRITTNE LUNNISS

Speaking of free shows, Vera has inaugurated “Ticket-blaster,” a program enabling over 60 no-cover events annually, to facilitate experimentation. In addition, the “Hidden Track” scheme—a series of shows produced by people in the community—will foster curatorial skills by six individuals per year, drawn from open applications and peer adjudication. The aim is to boost “under-represented subcultures, communities, or experimental artistic directions,” under Vera staff's mentorship and taking place in Georgetown. “We just started booking underground and alt-comedy stuff,” Graboski says. “We can use this opportunity to find new things out.” Another development is the Always All-Ages Fest, a multi-venue, cross-genre, pay-what-you-can extravaganza scheduled for November. As a bonus, VERA Art Gallery will offer free entry almost every Saturday.

To help fund these endeavors, Vera brokered a brilliant deal with Band of Horses, who are donating a dollar per ticket sold on their upcoming tour. “We'd been talking to them about 25th-anniversary stuff, because they're an important band in Vera's history.” Graboski says he hopes to approach other bands with similar fundraising deals.

A screenprinting demo at Vera during the Rock Lottery show in 2025. BRITTNE LUNNISS

Much is riding on the multi-purpose Georgetown space, which will better accommodate Vera's demographic, most of whom live in the South End. “More young people need more opportunities. We have lots of friends in Georgetown who spent the last 18 months connecting with dozens of community groups to make sure it's something that the community actually wanted.

“Vera is our home base, our all-ages space. Black Lodge is our underground venue. It's as close as we can be to the DIY scene we can get as a nonprofit. We're hoping Georgetown is our mutual aid space. We want it to be run by and for community, so every show's going to have a mutual aid group, a nonprofit, someone there who is supporting something in local community. Forty to 60 tickets at every show will be pay-what-you-can. We're having this crazy modular setup built into the space so we can reconfigure the room for anything.”

With news of the Crocodile being for sale, the health of Seattle nightlife seems more precarious than ever. Yet Vera Project appears to be thriving. What's their secret? “Our strategy has always been 'there's a better way.' Young people need access to arts, culture, community, and gathering spaces. Vera's been weirdly successful in choosing what's a fairly reckless strategy: If folks need things, we provide those things now, not to secure our legacy. And Vera's nearly gone out of business nearly 50 times since we were founded.”

Zookraught playing the Vera stage at Bumbershoot in 2025. BRITTNE LUNNISS

Grants from Doors Open and Satterberg, abundant donors, special events, and dedicated volunteers have also kept Vera thriving. “We've been scrappy forever. We try to keep our budget as low as possible. We've just gotten good at asking the right people for money at the right times. And we've gotten good at not having to take money from major corporations or foundations whom we don't agree with ethically.

“The message we're trying to send is, Vera's working because our community is largely young people, and they're not fully broken down by this system yet. They're still excited. Because they're building what we're putting on, it's working. If people gave in to this ecosystem in a real way, then artists would be supported, and maybe these venues wouldn't be shutting down.”

The Light Rail's Cross Lake Connection Will Be an Aries

Nathalie Graham — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 12:44:00 -0800

My sister in law says there are serious astrological complications. by Nathalie Graham

Huge news! This morning, Sound Transit announced that the new light rail connection bridging Seattle’s 1 Line and Bellevue’s 2 Line will open on March 28, 2026. And, yes, you’re correct, that makes the watery connection a fiery Aries.

How will this bode for one unified Seattle metropolitan area? Will the 1 Line and the Cross Lake Connection get along? Well …Seattle’s 1 Line opened on July 18, 2009, making it a Cancer. I texted my 27-year-old sister-in-law, who knows about these things and has also seen ghosts before, what to make of this astrological pairing.

“OOH, now that’s interesting,” she texted back. “Plain logic would say idiot idea.”

Uh oh.

This connection has already been mired in complication. This bridge between worlds—Seattle, a Sagitarrius (December 2, 1869), and Bellevue, an Aries (March 31, 1953) (I told my sister-in-law this and she said “that’s tea I believe it”)—was supposed to open back in 2020. Planning disputes with Bellevue (classically argumentative Aries) and 5,400 concrete track ties that needed rebuilding delayed the project by six years.

My sister-in-law said that because both Aries and Cancer are cardinal signs, these are the signs that start each new season and are often seen as the “alphas” of the Zodiac, they could “get along way better than makes sense.” I sent her their complete birth charts. “The argument could be made for balancing each others’ energies, but to be honest they probably shouldn’t date,” she responded.

Then, she followed up with, “Genders?”

“They’re technically non-binary,” I said. “These are the birth charts for Seattle’s light rail lines.”

“Well, they’re not traditionally compatible, I’ll tell you that much,” she said.

Analyzing the chart, the trouble seems to be that the Cross Lake Connection (or, as my SIL calls it, Miss Aries) has a moon in Leo which means a lot of “unadulterated confidence/main character syndrome.” That tracks. The Cross Lake Connection is the first ever instance of a light rail train crossing a floating bridge with its own power. But, this main character energy might not get in the way too much because, with Mercury and Mars in Pisces, the Cross Lake Connection “doesn’t really know how to fight” (as a Pisces with too much Pisces in my own chart, I can attest to this).

The 1 Line on the other hand—Cancer Mommy, according to my SIL— “loves and hates herself ad nauseum with all that prominent Gemini. And though she will try to scream (Mercury in Leo) it comes off more like little volcano spit ups than anything because where’s the rest of the fire in her chart?? That’s right. NOWHERE.”

Artistic renderings of the birth charts. NATHALIE GRAHAM

This could explain why our sweet little 1 Line is always starting and stopping.

So, there may be troubled waters ahead for the Cross Lake Connection. Cafe Astrology affirms this.

“The two persons are drawn towards each other, but the union can be unstable at times, largely because there will inevitably be division, probably through misunderstanding on romantic levels, which may frustrate the partner." The division could also be Lake Washington.

Of course, the 1 Line and the Cross Lake Connection are not the only two lines in this tango. Bellevue’s 2 Line is part of this as well. That line is a Taurus. “Ughhhh unfortunately queen shit,” my SIL says about that. How does that line fit into this mix?

“She would be the undisputed leader if she gave a fuck, but she just doesn’t so the Cross Lake Connection will operate as the de facto leader,” my sister-in-law says.

According to the chart at large, the Bellevue 2 Line “doesn’t really prize communication (there’s no air energy).”

The most surprising thing about this dive into the light rail line stars is that, according to Cafe Astrology, Line 1 (Seattle) and Line 2 (Bellevue) are two loving, tolerant partners. Not only that but they have “enormous physical passion. The sexual attraction is intense and insistent. They want to be around each other as much as possible. Their sexual relationship evolves with time, instead of dissolves."

The Cross Lake Connection should be bringing them together, but it could be keeping those two apart with its Aries-ness.

Minnesotans Launch General Strike Against ICE

Conor Kelley — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 11:01:00 -0800

Faith leaders, labor unions, and community groups in Minnesota have banded together to call for a state-wide general strike today to protest the “ICE campaign of terror." It's kind of a big deal. by Conor Kelley

In the past two months, President Donald Trump has deployed over 2,000 Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents to occupy the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul for Operation Metro Surge, described by the Department of Homeland Security as “the largest immigration enforcement operation ever carried out.” It has looked more like an armed invasion. ICE agents deployed to the area have thus far arrested 3,000 (including protesters), assaulted and pepper sprayed many, and killed two people: Renee Good, 37, shot three times in the face by ICE agent Jonathan Ross; and Victor Manuel Diaz, 36, who died by “presumed suicide” in an ICE tent in Texas eight days after being detained in Minneapolis.

The local resistance to this attack has been extensive. On social media, there are countless videos of people in Minneapolis doing everything in their power to make ICE’s job miserable. By day, they’re tailing ICE agents on foot and in cars, blaring their plastic whistles and car horns to alert the neighborhood. They’re throwing water balloons full of urine at the officers, and pouring quickly-freezing water in their paths so they slip and fall. At night, they’re posted up outside hotels where ICE agents are staying chanting and playing drum sets.

But today, they’ve been asked to seize an economic weapon. Faith leaders, labor unions, and community groups in Minnesota have banded together to call for a state-wide general strike today, January 23, 2026. To protest the “ICE campaign of terror,” Minnesotans are being asked not to work, buy anything, or go to school, in the hope that it will pressure the federal government to end this siege and compel legislators to vote against additional funding in the upcoming congressional budget.

This “Day of Truth and Freedom” is the first general strike in the U.S. in 80 years, the first in Minnesota in over 90, and only the 13th general strike in the history of this country. It serves as a reminder that human labor fuels the American machine, and workers can halt it at will. But simply put, the will has not been strong enough for the better part of a century.

The Twin Cities’ last general strike was in 1934. Frustrated by employers’ refusal to recognize their union and grant much-needed wage increases during The Great Depression, Teamsters truckers organized with other unions as well as non-union and unemployed workers across the Cities to come together for a series of cities-wide strikes that started in May of 1934 and continued deep into the summer.

At its conclusion on August 21, Teamsters Local 574 had won recognition for their union and prevailed on most of their major contract demands. Their efforts flipped the public’s perception of unions in the area, turning a staunchly anti-union area into a model for worker’s progress to the rest of the nation.

But the human cost was steep. Two strikers and two deputized civilians had been killed, and reports claimed at least 67 strikers had been injured by police.

Afterwards, general strikes in the US ceased for over a decade. Then, coming out of World War II in 1946, a fresh wave of general strikes took place across the country as workers demanded their wages keep pace with the rising cost of goods. 4.5 million workers picketed throughout the year from Stamford, CT, to Oakland, CA.

However, 1946 marked the last year of general strikes in the U.S., making today’s collective action something our country hasn’t seen in decades — but here we are.

At the time of publication, hundreds of businesses across the state of Minnesota have agreed to shut down for the day in solidarity, with counts ranging from nearly 500 to over 700.

Small businesses comprise over 99% of Minnesota’s businesses, making the state uniquely positioned for an economic shutdown. Businesses participating include restaurants, bars, bookstores, museums, and other community gathering places. In addition, some businesses are remaining open but offering their support by donating to the Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota and other allied organizations, and providing food and hot beverages for the protestors.

They’ll need the support: forecasts say at the hub of the protests, the Twin Cities, this will be the coldest weekend of the winter, with lows reaching negative 20 degrees. The National Weather Service warns weather this cold can “cause frostbite on exposed skin in as little as 10 minutes.”

All eyes are on Minnesota today, as millions of us watching make our own private calculations for how far we’ll go to protect our cities. Or how we’ll live with ourselves in what’s left of them.

State Bills Bring Farmworkers to the Table

Conor Kelley — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 11:00:00 -0800

Two bills in Olympia could create a collective bargaining structure for the hundreds of thousands of farmworkers in Washington to band together to negotiate for fair wages, workplace protections, and improved labor conditions. by Conor Kelley

Who grows your food and what do they deserve?

A bill introduced into the Washington State Legislature Tuesday would grant our state’s farmworkers the same collective bargaining rights you and I share for the first time in our state’s history. But opponents ask: Is it the right time?

Senate Bill 6045, sponsored by Sen. Rebecca Saldaña, D-Seattle, and its identical companion, HB 2409, sponsored by Rep. Sharlett Mena, D-Tacoma, would create a collective bargaining structure for the hundreds of thousands of farmworkers in Washington to band together to negotiate for fair wages, workplace protections, and improved labor conditions. These basic rights are afforded to nearly all workers, but farmworkers have thus far been excluded.

To explain, president of the Washington State Labor Council April Sims led off Tuesday’s Senate testimony with a history lesson.

She reminded the crowd that while the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 gave nearly all workers in the US the right to organize and collectively bargain for better working conditions, it specifically excluded agricultural work that was typically performed by Black, Latino, and Asian American workers.

“You have a chance to both empower the farm families who supply our food and to correct this historic injustice,” Sims said.

If the legislation passes, farmworkers would gain collective bargaining rights under the umbrella of the Public Employment Relations Commission (PERC), which typically oversees public employees’ union efforts. It’s unusual for private workers to be covered by PERC, but there is precedent, as farmworkers would be joining two other types: symphony musicians and agricultural cannabis workers, strange bedfellows who were pulled into PERC’s jurisdiction together in 2025.

During Senate testimony, farmworkers described their working conditions in terms familiar to most of us: Trump’s tariffs and inflation are driving up prices, they’re making even less than they made years ago, and they’re under pressure to work faster and longer despite all of it.

But testimony afterwards at the 13th Annual Farmworkers Tribunal, a meeting of farmworkers and allies from across the state, took a more somber tone, as workers recalled being forced to work in extreme weather. When there was flooding in Skagit Valley in December, “They sent us to work as though our lives did not matter to them,” a farmworker named Eduardo said. “We are disposable to them.”

Another speaker, Angelica Ramirez Silva, a 17-year-old senior at Burlington-Edison High School in Burlington, Washington, reminded the crowd of the current of anxiety running through farmworkers’ lives these days. Farmworkers fear for their safety from ICE, especially after independent farmworkers union Familias Unidas por la Justicia (FUJ) saw one of its organizers, Alfredo “Lelo” Juarez Zeferino, detained and pressured to self-deport last year. She said every day she goes to school scared, just hoping her two farmworker parents will be there when she gets back home.

“What if I come home and they’re not there? What if I receive a call that my parents were picked up by ICE?” she asked, stifling tears. “I come here and ask everyone to do everything in their power to make these people’s voices heard and help keep these families together.”

In a text to The Stranger, Edgar Franks, Washington State political director for FUJ, writes that unionizing can help these families in a meaningful way. “We believe that unions can help create safety for immigrants. It is a place people can go to for resources, information, and actions. We would also become part of a labor community,” Franks writes.

“Winning a union contract has changed my family's life for the better in every way,” said Tomas Ramón Vasquez of FUJ. “We're tired of hearing the excuse from the agricultural industry that giving farmworkers the same rights as everyone else will run farms out of business.”

Opponents of the bill claim exactly that.

“Washington's farms finished 2024 with a net negative income of nearly three hundred million dollars,” Pam Lewison of the Washington Policy Center claimed, but neglected to cite her source.

In a follow-up with The Stranger, Lewison passed along USDA data that shows a more complicated picture. Yes, according to USDA data, Washington farmers reported a net loss of $294 million in the last reported year of 2024, but that doesn’t appear to be because they're paying hired farmworkers more. Farmers actually paid these workers $931 million less in 2024 than in 2023. This $294 million shortfall appears to be due in large part to farmers hiring outside laborers, including many H2-A visa–imported workers (up $791 million from 2023 to 2024), increases in electricity and fuel costs (up $33 million), and the significant decrease in government subsidies (down $34 million, and $778 million down from the pandemic subsidies of 2020).

Their money troubles look to be in the rearview now, too, as the USDA is forecasting a 40.7 percent increase in farm profits nationwide in 2025, in large part due to $40.5 billion in government aid, the highest amount since 2020.

Lewison also suggested that this legislation was unnecessary because farmworkers could already collectively bargain. Which is true, technically, but farmworkers unions like FUJ don’t have the protection of the law behind them, making it more challenging for them to organize and negotiate against powerful farm owners.

Sen. Steve Conway (D-Tacoma) then asked Lewison, “What is the enforcement mechanism, if you don’t have a collective bargaining law?”

“We have several enforcement agencies, Senator,” Lewison stammered. “Both Labor & Industries and also the Department of Labor both have the opportunity to enforce those voluntary labor groupings.”

Which they wouldn’t, because farmworkers are specifically excluded from the National Labor Relations Act. But financial concerns continued to come up in opposing testimony, with farmers and their representatives speaking to “horrendous financial conditions,” with one claiming they are just “flat broke.” Too broke to pay a fair wage?

At the end of Senate testimony, Sen. Saldaña spoke to these concerns from the business lobby that times were too tough to offer these workers rights the rest of us enjoy.

“In my father’s time, when he was an agricultural worker in southern Texas and in Oregon, it was not ‘the right time.’ When I was a young organizer working with the farmworkers union, it was not ‘the right time,’” she said. “The way we’re [growing food] right now is not working. It is leaving fruit on our trees. It is wasting thousands of pounds of nutrition. And our supply chain doesn’t work. The retail we’re doing doesn’t work. But it also doesn’t work because the fundamental way we’ve structured this industry is based on exploitation.”

Slog AM: ICE Detained 5-Year-Old Near Minneapolis, Chicago Children’s Hospital Pauses Trans Care, Anti-ICE Protester Arrested for Disrupting Church Service

Micah Yip — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 09:58:00 -0800

The Stranger's morning news roundup. by Micah Yip

ICE Detains a 5-Year-Old near Minneapolis: And tried to use him as bait to catch his family. On Tuesday, Liam Conejo Ramos had just been picked up from school when masked agents apprehended him and his father in the driveway. MPR reported that another adult living at the house begged agents to let the boy stay. The agents then marched Liam up to the door and made him knock, hoping this would lure his family members out of the house. Nobody answered the door, and ICE took Liam and his dad away. Their lawyer thinks they’re in a family holding cell in Texas, but isn’t entirely sure. Liam is one of four students in the same school district north of Minneapolis that have been detained by ICE over the last two weeks.

ICE at Our Own Schools: Seattle Public Schools (SPS) is dealing with the aftermath of at least six schools sheltering-in-place Tuesday after unconfirmed reports of ICE activity in South Seattle. At last night’s school board meeting, half a dozen parents, teachers and community members spoke about how stressful that day was. Interim Superintendent Fred Podesta said district policy tells principals when they should order a shelter-in-place, which has worked well for local law enforcement activity. But federal law enforcement? Folks were having to make decisions on the basis of unconfirmed information and little risk assessment. Podesta thinks SPS hasn’t given its school leaders the tools needed to deal with ambiguous ICE reports, and they’re going to correct that. It’s unclear how the district will correct that.

More Local ICE Stuff: The feds have a plan to expand Tacoma’s Northwest ICE Processing Center, adding five courtrooms, airport services for deportation, and 60 additional beds for detainees. It hasn’t been approved yet.

Open Up: For years, legal aid groups have advised immigrants not to open the door for ICE unless agents have a warrant signed by a judge. But according to a May 2025 memo obtained by the Associated Press, ICE claims it doesn’t need a warrant and can forcibly enter certain homes. The memo permits ICE to enter based only on a narrow administrative warrant for a final order of removal. But without the judicial warrant, the arrest is unconstitutional, as it violates the Fourth Amendment’s protections against unlawful search and seizure. But ICE has been violating the Fourth Amendment for years, so this memo just validates that.

Minneapolis Church ICE Protester Arrested: On Sunday, activist and civil rights attorney Nekima Levy Armstrong led a protest to disrupt service at Cities Church, where one of the pastors is also a local ICE official. Now, she’s been arrested, according to an X post by US Attorney General Pam Bondi, writing, “WE DO NOT TOLERATE ATTACKS ON PLACES OF WORSHIP.” It’s unclear what crime Levy Armstrong has been charged with, but the Justice Department has said they’re considering prosecuting her under the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act, which prohibits physically interfering with a person seeking reproductive services or trying to participate at a house of worship.

‘Catch of the Day’: That’s what the feds have named their newest ICE operation in Maine. Yesterday, the Associated Press reported a surge of ICE arrests in the state, stoking fear in larger cities likePortland and Lewiston. Maine doesn’t have a large undocumented population, but it does have thousands of African refugees, particularly from Somalia, who’ve been targeted by this administration. Portland’s mayor, Mark Dion, said the city council stands with their immigrant communities, and citizens have formed ICE alert networks.

Chicago Hospital Pauses Trans Youth Care: Housing one of the oldest gender-affirming care programs in the nation, Chicago’s Lurie Children’s Hospital won’t issue new prescriptions for puberty blockers and hormones to children and teens. The switch comes less than a week after the Trump administration announced Lurie, along with five other hospitals, including Doernbecher Children’s Hospital in Oregon, was being referred for an investigation by the Department of Health and Human Services. A Chicago trans advocacy group called the hospital’s decision “pre-compliance,” pointing out that no funding had yet been pulled.

Kidfluencers: State Rep. Kristine Reeves wants to prevent another Ruby Franke (the Utah family vlogger who ran the popular YouTube channel “8 Passengers” before being arrested for severe child abuse) in Washington. She’s sponsored House Bill 2400, which would establish legal protections for child influencers, like trust accounts for their earnings and the ability to remove their content from the internet once they become adults. Think of them like Hollywood’s child actors, Reeves said: these kids are working and deserve the same protections from exploitation and long hours.

FEMA Flood Aid: Yesterday, Gov. Bob Ferguson asked the Trump administration for $21.3 million in FEMA assistance to help people whose homes were damaged by last month’s flooding. If Ferguson’s request is granted, the program would provide up to $43,600 for housing, repairs, and other needs. But it could take months. Though Trump did approve FEMA search-and-rescue help in the immediate aftermath of the floods in December, the President likes to withhold aid from blue states.

2 Line: A Seattle Times reporter joined South Transit and Mayor Katie Wilson for a practice trip on the new 2 Line across Lake Washington. Sound Transit CEO Dow Constantine said the route connecting the International District to Bellevue will open this spring. Officials will share the launch date tomorrow.

Key Takeaways From Trump’s Davos Speech: Trump is obsessed with Greenland, and droned on about how the US needs the semiautonomous Danish territory for national and international security because Denmark is too weak to protect it. He claimed he wouldn’t use force to take Greenland, but the man’s a known liar. He said some other annoying shit, which you can read about here.

A Reminder That It’s Thursday. We’re almost to the weekend, guys. Hang in there. This morning, we’ll see freezing fog, before a chilly day with sun and clouds. KUOW reported that yesterday was Seattle’s ninth straight day without rain, and it looks like we’re going into our 10th. The high will be 42 degrees and the low will be 33.

Now, a word from Megan:

Don’t Forget to Send Us Your Valentines! We’re filling our February issue (on stands February 4!) with hundreds of your love notes! Just head over to thestranger.com/valentines and spill your heart in 150 characters or less and we’ll put it in the pages of The Stranger! For FREE! But you gotta hurry. Only the first 500 entries are guaranteed to appear in the paper, and submissions must be received by 5 pm on Friday, January 23, for possible inclusion. And new this year: The first 20 people to purchase a new one-year subscription to the print edition of The Stranger can get a super-sized valentine! Just buy your subscription here, and then forward your receipt to valentines@thestranger.com using the same email address you used when submitting your valentine message, and we'll display your message in larger font with an extra cute design! Cuuuute!

City Council Hears Public Comment on Police Violence at Cal Anderson

Micah Yip — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 16:08:00 -0800

New bodycam video brought eight people to the public comment period at yesterday’s City Council meeting. Six of them were at the protest that day. Some said they were brutalized and arrested, or had witnessed police violence at the park. All voiced anger over the city’s nonhandling of the matter. by Micah Yip

Last Memorial Day weekend, far-right Christian supremacist group Mayday USA used Cal Anderson Park as their own house of worship for a flamboyant event they advertised as a battle in the spiritual war against “child butchers” and demonic forces (queer people and progressivism, respectively).

Hundreds showed up in nonviolent protest, but were met with a very violent Seattle Police Department (SPD). This week, bodycam footage, obtained through a public records request and shared on social media, revealed the cops’ intent to inflict violence on the protesters that day. In the video, Officer Matthew Didier can be heard riling up his fellow cops, saying, “We’re here to fuck people up now,” and “We’re going in this time with guns blazing and all our pieces in place.”

That video brought eight people to the public comment period at yesterday’s City Council meeting. Six of them were at the protest that day. Some said they were brutalized and arrested, or had witnessed police violence at the park. All voiced anger over the city’s nonhandling of the matter.

Over the past year, the city has conducted investigations of that day’s police violence. During the six-hour protest, 23 people were thrown to the ground, cuffed and arrested—all of whom were protesters.

An SPD spokesperson told The Stranger that the video was part of an internal review and Sentinel Event Review conducted by the University of Pennsylvania’s Quattrone Center, which they said was “a form of proactive accountability designed to help police departments increase professionalism, safety, and public trust.” The department did not confirm whether or not the video would result in any disciplinary action.

According to a letter sent last Thursday by the Seattle LGBTQ Commission to City Council, the mayor’s office, and media outlets, including The Stranger, nearly all of the investigations into the 28 separate allegations against 13 officers have been completed. But the Commission said just two allegations were sustained against one officer, who only received a written reprimand as discipline.

During public comment, Andrew Ashiofu, a commissioner on the LGBTQ Commission and former City Council candidate, called SPD’s actions that day “state-sanctioned violence,” and urged accountability.

“Seattle prides itself on being a progressive city, yet whenever it comes to LGBTQIA+ safety and representation, we remain reactive instead of protective,” Ashiofu said. “We wait for harm, for crisis, for headlines, and only then do we respond.”

Another commenter, Gabriel Diaz, played the audio of Didier’s statements into the microphone before describing how, during the protest, cops tackled him from behind, restrained his arms and punched him repeatedly in the head and ribs while he yelled “I’m a medic” over and over.

“We need to make sure these officers are held accountable for the harm caused to the community, not just swept under the rug as happens time and time again, specifically to our trans and queer communities,” Diaz said.

Kelsey and Jay Burns described how they were beaten and arrested at the protest. They both said they spent the weekend in jail, concussed and without medical care, despite Jay’s vomiting and inability to move from the cell floor.

“My expectations are that, without public pressure or action from this council, that this type of behavior will continue unchecked,” Kelsey said. “As we have seen repeatedly, the police will not hold themselves accountable.”

Alexander Dean said he was thrown to the ground after running to help a young woman being pepper sprayed by a cop. “Matt Didier decided that he was gonna go in and have people fuck us up, and so they fucked us up,” Dean said. “I don’t get how that is acceptable.”

After the public comment period, Councilmember Bob Kettle addressed commenters as chair of the Public Safety Committee. He said he’s committed to working with his committee and police accountability partners on the Cal Anderson report and following up with SPD and Chief Shon Barnes.

“We have a responsibility in our Public Safety Committee and in this council to do the oversight and bring to the fore that report,” Kettle said.

But City Council has failed to act on police accountability time and time again—most recently, by approving the Seattle Police Officers’ Guild’s (SPOG) contract in December that sorely lacked accountability measures. Then-Council President Sara Nelson and Councilmembers Bob Kettle, Dan Strauss, Joy Hollingsworth, Martiza Rivera, and Debora Juarez voted to approve the contract while Councilmembers Rob Saka, Alexis Mercedes Rinck, and Eddie Lin voted against it.

New City Councilmember Dionne Foster released a statement last week, saying she was “disturbed” by the footage and Didier’s comments, and called for transparency and the quick release of the final report.

“Seattle residents have a fundamental constitutional right to free speech and peaceful assembly,” Foster said in the statement. “Policing decisions at protests must be guided by de-escalation, clear standards, and accountability.”

Six Seattle Schools Sheltered-in-Place After Unconfirmed ICE Activity

Vivian McCall — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 15:09:00 -0800

At least six schools sheltered-in-place after these unconfirmed reports. by Vivian McCall

At least six Seattle public schools sheltered in place after unconfirmed community reports of ICE activity in the city’s South End.

The confirmed schools included Mercer International Middle School, Cleveland STEM High School, Maple Elementary School, Dearborn Park International Elementary School, Beacon Hill International Elementary School, and Aki Kurose Middle School, according to Seattle Public Schools Chief of Staff Bev Redmond.

Redmond says several schools sheltered-in-place after these unconfirmed reports. Sheltering-in-place is different from lockdown—while exterior doors are locked, students are free to move between classrooms. The decisions were made on a school level and out of an abundance of caution, Redmond says.

Some schools may have stopped sheltering-in-place, while others will continue until the end of the school day. Redmond says the district is working to confirm additional details, and compile a list of the schools that sheltered-in-place.

Seattle Public Schools Safety and Security staff have been on site throughout the day and have not seen ICE. Staff remain on alert, Redmond says.

The Stranger has asked the US Department of Immigration and Customs Enforcement if agents are in the area. The department has not responded.

School Board Director Joe Mizrahi says the potential of ICE activity was treated like any other threat to student safety, which, unfortunately, most students have experienced and run drills for all the time.

“But ICE is a pretty unique threat and we are in such a fast moving environment [that] we need to push to have a more clear protocol and make sure that teachers, students, families, and community understand it. Because there is a lot of the same and a lot different.”

Port Commissioner Toshiko Hasegawa, who is running for King County Council District 2, said in a statement, “No one–no child, parent or educator, deserves to live in this kind of chaos and fear.”

Hasegawa first heard the reports of the shelter-in-place order from a friend with a child at Cleveland High School. Hasegawa’s children attend a daycare just blocks away. Hasegawa wants to see childcare centers partner with SPS to send out alerts to families if anything like this happens again.

But, she cautioned against spreading inaccurate information.

“As always, we must balance the need to keep our community members safe against the risk of causing undue fear or spreading misinformation,” Hasegawa said in a statement. “I will continue to share information as I receive it, and I’ll always take reasonable steps to verify any reports before I share them on my platforms.”

Texting from a hearing for the farm worker bill of rights and immigrant worker notification bills in Olympia, State Sen. Rebecca Saldaña, who is running for the same seat as Hasegawa, wrote that the shelter in place has been lifted at Cleveland STEM High, and her daughter, a student at the school, joined students across the district to protest ICE “trying to intimidate our children while they should be focused on learning, targeting our children when their hard working parents are at work.”

The Stranger was unable to confirm with Cleveland STEM High that the shelter-in-place had been lifted.

Saldaña continued: “It is heartbreaking and maddening that kids and teachers had to shelter in place out of fear that they could be targeted by ICE. I'm thankful to Seattle Public Schools for their quick action to put families first.”

Seattle City Councilmember Eddie Lin, who represents District 2, writes in a statement that “schools should be safe, welcoming places for all, and it is heartbreaking that ICE is now creating such intense fear in schools. ICE's activities are immoral, unconstitutional and antithetical to our democratic ideals. This is another dark stain in our nation’s history and those responsible must ultimately be held to account. We all have a moral duty to resist this tyranny.”

This article has been updated with additional detail since its original publication.

“If We’re Going to Say His Name, Then We Have to Continue the Fight”

Marcus Harrison Green — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 13:09:00 -0800

Voices from Seattle's 43rd Annual MLK Day March. by Marcus Harrison Green

Photos by John Caplinger for The Stranger

On a gentle January morning, against the backdrop of civil rights being dismantled in plain sight across the country, thousands gathered at Garfield High School, refusing silence in a nation increasingly estranged from its own conscience. The city’s 43rd Annual Martin Luther King Jr. Celebration followed its familiar rhythm: workshops in the auditorium, a rally inside the Garfield gymnasium, then a march spilling into the streets. But nothing about this year felt ceremonial. Not the moment we’re living inside, nor the theme guiding the day.

Where do we go from here?

Dr. King asked that question in the final year of his life, as the nation recoiled from its own civil rights gains and recommitted itself to war, repression, and inequality. Today, the echo of that question hits with the force of a national indictment: in 2026, one year after Donald Trump’s second inauguration—held, grotesquely, on King’s holiday—civil rights enforcement has been hollowed out, voting rights sit under open assault, and diversity itself is framed as a threat. Trans people are targeted with cruelty masquerading as policy. In Minneapolis, communities live under the shadow of federal occupation with ICE raids normalized, dissent branded as insurrection, and militarization treated as governance. History is not merely being revised; it is being weaponized.

In response, people chose presence over retreat at Garfield.

They came carrying children and clipboards, grief and resolve. They came for workshops that asked not only what is broken, but what must be built. They came for the rally with its songs, testimony, honoring community leaders, and for the reminder that courage is often quiet and collective. They came to the opportunity fair because survival, in moments like this, is not individual. And they marched—not because marching is enough, but because isolation is fatal.

Inside the gym and along the route, no single message dominated. Calls for Palestinian liberation stood beside demands for strong unions. Affirmations that trans Black lives are not negotiable moved alongside appeals for healthcare, housing, peace, and dignity. The convergence was not tidy, but it was honest. If authoritarianism depends on fragmentation, then this kind of gathering—imperfect and plural—is its natural enemy.

What this day made clear is that Martin Luther King Jr. is not honored by comfort. He is honored by continuity. By the refusal to believe that progress moves in one direction, or that rights sustain themselves. King was not only a dreamer; he was a disruptor who was most dangerous to power when he named racism, militarism, and materialism as inseparable forces.

The question, Where do we go from here?, does not map the road ahead, but it does require us to walk it together.

What follows are voices from those already in motion, through education, organizing, and the increasingly radical act of standing together in a time designed to pull us apart.

Some statements have been lightly edited for clarity.

Jamil Suleman, filmmaker and community organizer

I think one of the most important things we can do is get people together. When we’re in person, rather than stuck in the oppositional social media silos we usually operate in, and we’re actually with each other in community, that’s when some of the most positive things can happen, right?

It really comes down to organizing and protecting our community members, and having that unity we’ve always known is there. But to really see it, you have to show up. You have to be in person with everybody else. And that’s what these events help do.

That’s the legacy of Martin and everyone from that era—from the Panthers on. It was always about getting people together, getting people on the same page, mobilized and organized. That’s why there’s such a big turnout today. There’s a lot going on in the world and a lot going on in this country, and we need to show that we have the unity to stand by the principles we truly believe in.

There are organizations and people who have been doing this work for a very long time, and what we need to do is support them. We don’t have to recreate the wheel. On the hyper-local level, there are mutual aid organizations that already exist and have been helping people get what they need. We need to show up for them, learn more about them, join them, and support them in any way we can.

Aaron Dixon, co-founder and Captain of the Seattle chapter of the Black Panther Party

Well, it reminds us that we always have to keep fighting for justice and fighting for human rights—not just civil rights, but human rights. And it reminds us that we are in a state of fascism under Trump, just as we were, in part, under Richard Nixon.

I don’t think a lot of people realize that when Martin Luther King was murdered, it didn’t just lead to an explosion of people joining the Black Panther Party. It also led young people of all ethnic backgrounds to join organizations and fight for change: fight for radical change in America. King’s death was a turning point.

And there’s something else people often don’t realize: it also led to the death of little Bobby Hutton, the first person to join the Black Panther Party and the first member to be killed.

So Martin Luther King plays an important role in modern history, not just for Black people, but for America as a whole. He also came out against the war in Vietnam, which I believe contributed to the decision to assassinate him.

He’s someone we will always remember and always uplift, because he played such a critical role. And today, right now, we are living under fascism. We could use his leadership more than ever. But at the very least, we still have his memory and his legacy, and that’s something we can use to move forward, and to confront the forces of fascism we’re facing today.

Tony Benton, proprietor of Columbia City Theater and Rainier Avenue Radio

For someone like me, it means remembering that when I woke up this morning, I didn’t have to worry about dogs being sicced on me. I didn’t have to worry about fire hoses being turned on me. I didn’t have to worry about being beaten. That comfort, under these circumstances, really reinvigorated me.

It also reminds me how important it is to make sure this message continues to resonate as we move further away from Dr. King’s time, how we connect people to what it meant then, and why it still matters today. The conveniences we have now are things people worked hard for, things people were willing to die for, so that we could enjoy them today.

And then there’s just the beauty of the day itself: being around people at the career fair, everyone smiling, everyone happy, everyone being gracious, thoughtful, and empathetic. It’s really an amazing thing to be a part of.

Abdi Mohamed, community organizer

We should commemorate this day every year. As an African immigrant, we are riding on the back of Dr. King. Whatever rights we enjoy today, every part of our lives in this country is connected to the struggles he fought for. And we can’t just let that go. We have to celebrate it, we have to be part of it, and that’s why I’m here today.

For me, Dr. King’s legacy shouldn’t be something that only lives in libraries or in books. It should be part of our daily lives. We have a responsibility to educate the current generation and the generations coming after us.

And you know, Dr. King wasn’t someone who just talked and sat on a couch. He was a mover and a shaker—a community organizer, a freedom fighter. We may never be able to fully walk in his shoes, but we have to try to place ourselves there. We keep his legacy alive by teaching what he fought for, what he stood for, and by living it every day

Alex Hudson

I think in some ways it’s a touchpoint back to history, a reminder of the length and longevity of the struggle for racial justice, and for undoing white supremacy and anti-Black violence in this country. And in one sense, that’s comforting. It reminds us that this is a struggle we didn’t have to invent. That the language, the tactics, the ways of opposing these forces already exist.

But in other ways, it’s incredibly disheartening to realize that we’re still talking about the same things 50, 60, 70 years later, right? I find his speeches deeply inspiring and motivating. And as a white person, it’s also deeply sad to me that white people continue to carry this violent, destructive virus of white supremacy in our culture, and to see the pain and suffering it causes to other people, to other souls.

So I’d say: read. Read a book. Read the news. Talk to other people. Get out there. I hate to sound like a self-help quote or whatever, but go touch grass. Talk to people. Think about what it would actually mean to live in a truly just world, and then figure out how to move toward that with the people you know. Every day.

It’s simple, and it’s big, and it all adds up.

KL Shannon, community organizer

I think Dr. King’s legacy is really about what he embodied: nonviolence, peace, and fearlessness. And when I think about the pressure that was placed on him, it’s overwhelming. When Dr. King was assassinated, and they did the autopsy, they said he was only 39 years old, but his heart looked like that of a 67-year-old man. That tells you the kind of stress he was carrying.

And when he came out and spoke against the war, everything shifted. People turned on him. So for me, his legacy is about embodying that courage—speaking your truth even when you’re scared, even when it makes you unpopular.

That’s what I so deeply appreciate about Dr. King. He stood by his principles no matter what people said. He stayed committed to nonviolence. He stayed committed to peace. And that, truly is what his legacy is.

Katie Wilson, Mayor of Seattle

I think Dr. King’s legacy reminds us, especially in this moment, that it’s the responsibility of all of us to stand up for both civil rights and human rights, and to continue the struggle for racial and economic justice. It’s a moment to reflect on how far we’ve come because we have made real progress, much of it rooted in Dr. King’s work, and at the same time to reckon with how far we still have to go.

Bana Abera, organizer

I would say that not much has changed since the days when Dr. King was marching, resisting, and being arrested. So much of what he spoke about is still painfully relevant to what we’re experiencing now. If we’re truly going to honor his legacy, if we’re going to remember him and say his name, then we have to continue the fight. The struggle isn’t over. The dream he carried, the vision of freedom and equality for all people, of ending exploitation and violence against Black people and against all people. The job is not done.

Girmay Zahilay, King County Executive

His legacy means we’ve got to keep fighting. That’s what it means to me. Right now, so many people’s civil rights and human rights are being eroded, assaulted, and attacked in ways I haven’t seen in my lifetime. I know others have witnessed moments like this before, but for us, this level of explicit attack on civil and human rights feels unprecedented.

And that means we have to come together and recommit ourselves to the struggle, to change, and to fighting for one another. Everybody has a role to play in that. You don’t have to be an elected official. You don’t have to be a professional advocate. But everyone has a role in creating the change we need.

Greg Ramirez, Deputy Director SEIU6

I think it’s not just about any one day. It’s about continuing to stay active and continuing to fight for whatever struggles are in front of us, right? From a labor union perspective, of course we focus on workers’ rights but the reality is, all of these issues are interconnected. Workers’ rights, human rights, immigrant justice, all of it goes hand in hand.

Dr. King gets quoted a lot, and people like to cherry-pick what he said. But ultimately, what he was really talking about was human dignity. And that transcends everything—race, labor, all of it.

For us, it’s about continuing to show up, continuing to do the work, and trying to leave this world a little better than we found it.

Mary Puttmann-Kostecka and Matt Kostecka, medical doctor and public school educator, respectively

Mary: I think one of the best ways forward is to let go of the idea that you have to do everything, all the time. Instead, find ways to get to know your neighbors and really know your community. It’s easy now, with so much of our lives online, to lose touch with the people who live right next to us or just down the street. And when that happens, it becomes harder to understand what people around you are actually needing, wanting, or thinking.

So I’d say start there. Try something new. Show up in small, meaningful ways, and don’t feel like you have to do everything.

Matt: Sometimes we fall into a very simple archetype of who Martin Luther King was and what he stood for. My kids and I were actually listening to the Mountaintop speech on the way down here, and what really struck me was that the work wasn’t over.

By 1964 and 1965, Dr. King had shifted much more toward advocating for poor people and leading the Poor People’s Campaign. And like one of the speakers said today, if Dr. King were alive now, he’d be in Minneapolis. He’d be marching alongside the protesters there.

His work wasn’t just about equal rights under the law. It was about true freedom, real opportunity in this country, things that go beyond what happened in 1964 and 1965. And I think what I’d want educators, and parents, to teach their kids about the continuation of his work is this: first and foremost, the work isn’t done.

But it also doesn’t always have to look as grand as passing civil rights legislation or marching on Washington. It can be as simple as supporting union labor. It can be as simple as taking care of your community: cleaning it up, showing up, and doing the work right where you are.

Havika Fleming

For me, it really means coming together with people—people of all kinds, with similar beliefs and different beliefs, from different backgrounds, involved in different fights and movements, and choosing to move in solidarity and in love. Truly.

And I think we do that in Seattle by staying open and accepting people for who they are and where they come from. We try to make sure equity and equality are present and accessible to everyone, whether someone’s been here for twenty years or just arrived. We do what we can to show up for everybody.

Slog AM: Trump Still Insists Greenland is His, The Crocodile Up For Sale, WA Again Considers Lowering BAC Limit

Vivian McCall — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 08:59:00 -0800

The Stranger's morning news roundup. by Vivian McCall

For Sale, Venue, Unprofitable? After its owners closed its smaller rooms Madame Lou’s and Here-After and laid off half its workforce, the Crocodile is up for sale. The financial picture must be bad, because the sale is being handled through a receivership process, an alternative to bankruptcy. According to the National Independent Venue Association, only 40 percent of the state’s independent venues and festivals are profitable. It does not bode well that the Croc, an iconic venue that’s been independent for 35 years, is struggling this badly.

For Sale, Thrift Store: The University District’s Red Light Vintage is up for sale, and the store’s original owner, Tacee Webb, is trying to buy it back. Webb has applied for a small business loan, but the funds won’t be available for a few months, so she’s asking for public support to keep the home of Seattle’s bygone naked shopping spree running in the meantime. The store was featured in Macklemore's “Thrift Shop” video. It’s all we have.

Weather: First the morning’s patchy fog will lift, then the clouds, for a partly sunny day with a high near 48 degrees. Tomorrow, it’ll be sunny, followed by a checkerboard week of sunny and cloudy days.

Once again, lawmakers are considering lowering the legal blood alcohol content limit for drivers from 0.08 percent to 0.05 percent. As we, and particularly me via Malort, discovered last year, 0.08 percent is definitely impaired, so this might be a good idea.

We’re Watching: The Washington State Legislature is considering a bill to regulate how data from automatic license plate readers (ALPRs) is stored and shared, so it doesn’t end up in ICE’s hands. Considering the unaccountable and untrustworthy handling of these digital spyglasses by police and the ALPR company Flock, we’d do well to ban this surveillance technology outright, but at least it’s something. Almost half the country has already regulated this technology.

Speaking of Surveillance: Seattle has entrusted its police CCTV camera network, already an inexcusable idea if you truly believe the federal government is authoritarian, to Chief Shon Barnes, who, as The Stranger reported last week, ignored multiple guardrails around Madison, Wisconsin’s body camera pilot.

ICYMI: Nathalie profiled Imraan Siddiqi, the director of Washington’s Council on American-Islamic Relations running to replace Democratic State Rep. Lauren Davis in the 32nd District.

Portland Shooting: Police were searching northeast Portland last night for a man suspected of shooting two police officers, reports The Oregonian. Police say the officers responded to a call of a person brandishing a knife near the city’s Lloyd Center, and were shot after making contact with the man. Portland’s Police Chief Bob Day wouldn’t say if the officers fired at him.

Secret Police, Open Up: Mischief, a toy store in St. Paul, Minnesota, was interviewed by ABC News about distributing free whistles for citizens to alert their neighbors of ICE activity. Three hours after airtime, two plainclothes ICE agents arrived at their door and demanded proof that the store’s employees could legally work in the country.

Band of Brothers? The Pentagon has ordered 1,500 active duty paratroopers to prepare to deploy to Minnesota to stop people protesting the federal intervention that terrorized immigrants and killed Renee Good. The two battalions in the 11th Airborne Division are trained to fight in the Arctic.

“No Going Back”: President Donald Trump said there’s “no going back” on his plan to wrestle Greenland from Denmark, claiming that “only power that can ensure peace throughout the world—and it is done, quite simply, through strength.”

Blowback: The World Economic Forum has become an emergency summit for the EU in Davos, Switzerland. The Union’s top official called Trump’s plan to punish eight European countries for standing up for Greenland with a 10 percent tariff a “mistake especially between long-standing allies.” Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission, promised an “unflinching, united, and proportional” response from the EU.

More Blowback: Also speaking at Davos—in aviator sunglasses, to underscore the seriousness of the situation—French President Emanuel Macron said we’re experiencing “a shift towards a world without rules, where international law is trampled underfoot and where the only law that seems to matter is that of the strongest.” In a private text Trump shared with the world, Macron wrote: “I do not understand what you are doing on Greenland.” (Politico has this unnecessarily detailed breakdown of the text’s obvious meaning.)

Goddddddd: In a shockingly stupid text to Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre, Trump wrote: “Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America.” Støre said he has “several times clearly explained to Trump” that an independent Nobel committee, not the government of Norway!!!!!!!!!!!, awards the prize. A Nobel “snub” really could unravel our European alliances.

God: Timothy P. Broglio, the Catholic Archbishop of the US Military, said it would be “morally acceptable” for troops to disobey orders as Trump prepares to take Greenland and deploy troops to Minnesota. “Greenland is a territory of Denmark,” Broglio said in a BBC interview Sunday. “It does not seem really reasonable that the United States would attack and occupy a friendly nation.”

Relaxing Music to Lower Your Blood Pressure:

Civil Rights Nonprofit Director Imraan Siddiqi Wants to Represent Legislative District 32

Nathalie Graham — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 08:30:00 -0800

Sitting at Shoreline Diva Espresso, Imraan Siddiqi looked tired. Diva down? Not this diva, who wore a shirt with the words “I know my rights” inside an outline of Washington State. by Nathalie Graham

It has already been a long year for Imraan Siddiqi, the executive director of the civil rights nonprofit Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) Washington, which is working to protect immigrants from being sucked into the gears of Donald Trump’s administration. Sitting at Shoreline Diva Espresso, he looked tired. Diva down? Not this diva, who wore a shirt with the words “I know my rights” inside an outline of Washington State. It’s a mantra pivotal to his work.

That morning, CAIR had achieved the culmination of three weeks’ worth of effort, getting a Palestinian immigrant out of the Northwest Detention Center on bond. The man had been detained the day after Christmas, when CAIR was on a holiday break. No matter. Siddiqi, at home with his family, picked up the phone and jumped into action.

He called CAIR-WA’s four lawyers and directed a team member to drive out to Auburn to comfort the man’s wife, who was alone with their newborn. In the weeks leading up to the man’s bond hearing, Siddiqi sent community members and religious leaders to sit with him, to make sure he was less alone.

Three weeks later—“Imagine how long those weeks were for him,” Siddiqi says wearily—the man could finally go home. Siddiqi showed me the video on his phone of the man’s release that morning. A woman greeted him outside a chain-link fence. “Happy New Year,” she said, embracing him.

It’s this kind of work, and the prospect of helping people on a grander scale, that makes Siddiqi want to run for office. He wants to be the representative for Legislative District 32, a seat already held by a Democrat, Lauren Davis.

“I have nothing against the incumbent,” Siddiqi says, “but I feel that there is a shortfall in terms of leaders who have failed to meet this moment, to stand up as our communities are being ravaged by ICE.”

Siddiqi is not shy about challenging Democrat incumbents, either. In 2024, he tried to unseat Rep. Kim Schrier (WA-08), who he felt hadn’t stood against Israel’s war on Gaza. She crossed a line when she voted to censure Rep. Rashida Tlaib, the only Palestinian member of Congress, he says. Siddiqi believed running against Schrier could “change the narrative on the genocide” and show “that there are voices out there who are going to stand up.”

Siddiqi didn’t make it past the primary, but he’s feeling optimistic this time. He pointed to Zohran Mamdani’s win in the New York City mayoral race, and Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson’s razor-thin triumph over Bruce Harrell.

“There has been an energy shift in this country within this last year,” Siddiqi says. “Young people will turn out [to vote] if you have people who are willing to stand on business. We don't want the same corporate Democrats occupying these offices for decades and not moving the needle at all.”

Davis has been in office eight years and isn’t the picture of a corporate Democrat. She’s pushed for progressive taxation legislation and drug decriminalization in Olympia (which is why we’ve endorsed her so many times). However, recently, she’s backed off some of her progressive ideals. Just this week, she broke ranks with Democrats to oppose a bill that would allow for the release of three-strike offenders currently serving a life prison sentence if any of the strikes occurred while the offender was a juvenile. The bill coincides with a 2012 Supreme Court ruling that found life sentences for juvenile offenders to be cruel and unusual punishment and a 2018 Washington State Supreme Court ruling that upheld the same sentiment. She expressed her “alarm” on conservative radio host Jason Rantz’s show. Last year, she hand-wrung over the public health implications of allowing retail cannabis stores to operate within Lynnwood’s city limits.

“I'm just the strongest candidate,” Siddiqi says.

All his life, he’s had to explain himself, to educate his peers about Muslims. Growing up in Auburn, Alabama, and Atlanta, Georgia, he and his family were often the only Muslims around.

He felt this kind of activism was what he was meant to do, but in 1999, he came to a crossroads. His older brother, who was starting to take over the family jewelry business, was in a horrific car accident and lay comatose in a hospital bed. Siddiqi, a college student, knew someone would have to support his parents. His brother survived. But by the time he’d mostly recovered, Siddiqi had dropped out and taken over the business.

Two years later, the Islamophobic fallout of 9/11nudged him back toward activism. He penned op-eds. He got his degree, and an MBA. In 2010, shortly after opening a coffee shop in Phoenix, Arizona—called “Where You Bean?”—he joined a mostly defunct chapter of CAIR. Six years ago, he moved north to lead our state chapter.

CAIR mostly fights anti-Muslim discrimination, but after Afghan refugees fled their collapsing country for the US in 2021, Siddiqi knew the organization would have to change.

“There was going to need to be a deeper integration of immigration law into what CAIR Washington was doing,” Siddiqi says. “It initially started with evacuees from Afghanistan, refugees who are coming here and helping them either reunite with their families or start their new life over here.”

It’s come in handy quite a bit since. Given, you know, everything.

So, Siddiqi is running for office to help more people with his expertise.

His biggest focuses when he gets into the legislature will be affordability and protections for immigrant and nonwhite communities. His platform is still fuzzy.

Recently, CAIR-WA has been helping local Somali immigrants who have been threatened by right-wing misinformation campaigns. Many have had their businesses and personal information doxxed, or exposed online. Siddiqi would like to beef up protections against doxxing—that is, people targeting others by publishing private and identifying information online. That could help the Somali community and anyone protesting ICE. In 2023, the legislature passed a bill allowing anyone who was harmed by doxxing to sue a doxxer. Siddiqi would like to see those protections for doxxing victims go further. He didn’t explain how.

As far as affordability goes, Siddiqi wants to reduce costs. How? Also unclear. When asked, he offered one idea: starting with the exorbitantly wealthy.

“I'm very passionate about holding billionaires accountable,” Siddiqi says.

His business background means he gets the whole economics thing. “Income inequality is the gulf that is growing exponentially,” he says. (The real Gulf of America.)

He supports the new millionaires tax that’s being talked about in the legislature. Gov. Bob Ferguson has championed a 9.9 percent tax on income over $1 million. There’s also talk at the state level of pursuing a broader income tax. Siddiqi wouldn’t say outright whether he supported that, fearing it could be a “hot button issue” that would turn voters off.

“That is something that, if it reduces other areas of taxes, we should definitely explore,” he says of the income tax. “Getting a vibe from our voters is going to be extremely important.”

Mostly, it’s about bringing change to Olympia, especially when it comes to protecting people against ICE.

“I'm going to push all these people, whether it's the attorney general, whether it's the governor, [to] act on the behalf of these people who are impacted by this fascist administration,” Siddiqi says.

A Police Chief and His Cameras

Carolyn Bick — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 15:28:00 -0800

After a failed pilot program in Madison, SPD Chief Shon Barnes is leading a department trusted with yet another controversial camera program: the network of police CCTV cameras on Seattle’s streets, which the public protested in City Hall as recently as this week. The programs have concerning parallels: In Madison, the pilot program failed to collect necessary data and ignored instructions from their City Council; in Seattle, Barnes didn’t even wait for data from the pilot to push an expansion of the program. And like Madison’s bodycam program, Seattle city leaders are counting on the police department to observe “guardrails” and “accountability.” by Carolyn Bick

Classic Seattle weather—cold, wet, and grey—graced Seattle Police Chief Shon Barnes’s first day on the job this January. But inside the hallowed chambers of Seattle’s government, City leaders were positively glowing. Finally, they said, following a closed-door police chief selection process, the city had a model of accountability and progressive policing it needed to see the City into a new, Consent Decree-free era.

He had the resume. Barnes had briefly served as the director of training and professional development with the Civilian Office of Police Accountability in Chicago. He’d led the police department in Madison, Wisconsin, which had recently implemented a body-worn camera pilot program. He talked openly about leading the Salisbury Police Department into greater accountability. He was a former school teacher. In short, he was the police chief who would prioritize transparency and reform.

And Barnes leaned into that reputation. In an opinion piece in the Seattle Times after his first 100 days, he wrote: “My earliest efforts led with transparency and accountability to the public and to our officers—creating an open-door policy with SPD employees, removing access restrictions to our executive floor and encouraging people to reach out directly to ask any and all questions. I believe every voice should be heard and can be instrumental in helping us move forward. The hard truth is that SPD has weathered a difficult five years, marked by leadership changes, staffing losses and shifting public trust. But we are charting a new course.”

But a report released in Madison in October brings that reputation into question. Months after Barnes left the Dairy State, Madison’s Office of the Independent Monitor (OIM) dropped a report on their old chief’s police body-worn camera pilot program, Barnes’s pet project.

The civilian oversight agency report lampooned the former MPD chief. It was a litany of Barnes’s failings. Four chapters of the report began with the word “failure.” Barnes had ignored City Council’s “multiple directives” for essential, specific guardrails, which likely violated state law, the office wrote.

The OIM specifically made sure to note that the failure was Barnes’s, not the department’s current leadership.

Then, in the weeks between the November election and Mayor Katie Wilson taking office, speculation swirled about whether or not Barnes would remain in charge of SPD. Wilson was reportedly on the fence about the decision for weeks, and, according to one Stranger source familiar with the situation, Barnes himself allegedly told fellow officers he was certain he would be out of a job come 2026.

But in December, newly-elected Mayor Katie Wilson announced that she plans to keep Barnes on as police chief.

“My administration will work with Chief Barnes to make SPD a place where professionalism, integrity, compassion, and community partnership are at the center of every action,” she said. It was reportedly an effort to maintain stability and continuity. To set expectations for the Chief, and give him a chance to meet them.

That leaves Barnes leading a department trusted with yet another controversial camera program: the network of police CCTV cameras on Seattle’s streets, which the public protested in City Hall as recently as this week. The programs have concerning parallels: In Madison, the pilot program failed to collect necessary data and ignored instructions from their City Council; in Seattle, Barnes didn’t even wait for data from the pilot to push an expansion of the program. And like Madison’s bodycam program, Seattle city leaders are counting on the police department to observe “guardrails” and “accountability.”

Neither Barnes nor SPD returned The Stranger’s multiple requests for comment.

Bodyworn cameras

Barnes stepped into the role of Madison’s police chief in January 2021, almost a year after a police officer murdered George Floyd in Minnesota. Black Lives Matter protests against racist policing had dominated American life that June. “Defund” and “abolition” had entered the common vernacular. Police accountability was in the air, and a popular response was to strap body cameras to the chest of every officer in their department.

Barnes had every reason to think the department deserved scrutiny: at the time, almost half the time the Madison Police Department (MPD) used force, it was against Black residents. And while Barnes didn’t start the conversation about bodycams in the MPD, (the department’s SWAT team had used them for years, and the debate about outfitting the entire MPD had been underway since 2014), he was a vocal proponent of them from day one.

Not everyone in the community agreed with him. The Black- and Southeast Asian-led nonprofit Freedom, Inc. led the charge in Madison. They had been longtime vocal opponents of body cameras, arguing that they’re a double-edged sword: Technically, they were a tool to record potential police misbehavior, but those same body cameras could be used against civilians—specifically to surveil and criminalize Black and brown people. Plus, nationwide, even when videos clearly show officers attacking Black people, those videos don’t guarantee justice.

Freedom Inc. is backed up not only by several Madison City alders, but also by a chorus of alarm bells from journalists, civil rights groups, and think tanks: A 2017 study found that bodyworn cameras do not deter officers from treating Black people with disrespect at traffic stops; the Brookings Institute wrote in 2022 that, with the rise of facial recognition technology combined with the federal government’s historical surveillance of Black communities, bodyworn cameras could be used to increasingly track, profile and surveil not only Black communities, but Chinese communities, too, under Trump 1.0’s China Initiative through the Department of Justice; and the NAACP and the ACLU both share these concerns.

So it should be no surprise then that Madison’s own Body-Worn Camera Feasibility Review Committee—which was tasked with analyzing a body-worn camera program prior to implementation, and drafting a policy for the MPD to follow in a pilot program—highlighted concerning data that Barnes should have taken into account, in his creation of the MPD’s body camera pilot program.

Their final report said that the issue deserved further evaluation, particularly given the researched and documented potentials for police abuse of body cameras. Specifically, the committee noted that the available scientific literature regarding body-worn video cameras shows that they allow for heavier surveillance and intrudes on privacy, and that the available data suggests body-worn cameras “expand criminalization of marginalized populations.”

While the report concluded that the MPD could adopt a body-worn camera program, its first stipulation was that the department should do so only if the MPD “formally adopted the BWC policies recommended by the Body-Worn Camera Feasibility Review Committee with, at most, minor modifications” to the proposed policy.

That policy included a rule that officers would not be allowed to review the bodycam footage before completing their reports, unless it was required, in the field, to address “an immediate threat to life or safety.”

But that didn’t happen.

The Pilot Program

According to the OIM’s October report, Barnes’s department disregarded a number of council’s demands. It failed to create a real, randomized sample to test the program, ignored council’s directive to track officer time spent on the pilot, and failed to measure key metrics in the program.

Perhaps most crucially, the pilot broke that committee’s rule about reviewing footage. Barnes allowed officers to review their tapes before writing any police report, even if they’d shot someone or broken the department’s code of conduct. But the department also had the power to limit their access on a case-by-case basis.

The report focused on this loophole.

Once exposed to video footage of an incident, the report said, officers’ memories may be altered or influenced. Officers who are allowed to review footage ahead of giving a report may also consciously choose to lie about incidents, based on what action or angles the body-worn cameras caught. This can lead to an increase in everything from inaccurate court testimony to justifications for officers shooting and killing a person. The office backed up these statements with a hefty number of in-report citations from multiple credible sources, including accountability experts and the ACLU.

“The Single Most Important Metric”

On top of the procedural flaws, the report called Barnes out for failing to collect key data that would inform the risks of continuing the program.

The office also links the use of body-worn cameras to higher rates of prosecutions, where prosecutors know body-worn video exists. Even in cases where the person was innocent, prosecutors are more likely to drag a person through trial and force them through ultimately unnecessary and potentially expensive legal hurdles.

The committee called this “the single most important metric specified in the Body-Worn Camera Feasibility Review Committee report.” And, once again—as with many other gaps in Barnes’s policy—the office noted that the pilot program failed to measure and test it.

“Most BWC studies (albeit not all) that have tracked criminal charges have shown an increase in prosecutorial charging rates, particularly for lower-level offenses,” the report reads. The report found an approximate 150 percent increase in the likelihood of misdemeanor charges being filed by prosecutors in cases with BWC video.

The report states that prominent accountability investigator, OIR Group’s Los Angeles-based Michael Gennaco, “noted that prosecutors would tend to automatically bring misdemeanor charges in cases where they knew BWC video was available,” including cases where the charged individual was innocent.

“The charged individual would often then plead out to get out of jail and get on with their life,” the report reads. “In Madison, such an effect could most heavily impact communities of color, given the neighborhoods that are most heavily patrolled (and that would receive the most exposure to BWCs).”

The office noted that it was odd for the pilot program not to have included this metric in its measured outcomes, particularly because the officers themselves make initial charging decisions, recommending cases to prosecute.

Parting shots

The OIM report wouldn’t come out until months after Barnes left the MPD. But before he left, he was already showing his distaste for the department’s accountability structures.

It starts with Greg Gelembiuk, an evolutionary biologist, who would eventually go on to become the OIM’s data analyst. Gelembiuk declined to be interviewed for this story, but at a public meeting, he chimed in during the public comment section, pointing out that, contrary to what Turner and Barnes were saying, a body camera program is actually quite expensive. Amelia Royko Maurer, a police accountability activist who was at that meeting, told The Stranger what Gelembiuk said and how Barnes and Turner responded.

The numbers provided accounted neither for officer training time, nor the cost of time associated with officers fulfilling body camera-associated administrative tasks, Gelembiuk said in the meeting. Someone has to then spend time reviewing and logging the camera footage, and redacting footage for public disclosure. He estimated the program could cost $23 million over the course of five years.

“Chief Barnes turns to Dr. Broderick Turner and says, ‘Have you ever heard of body cams costing $23 million?’” Royko Maurer recalled. “And Turner says, ‘No.’ And they both chuckle.” (This was another metric that MPD failed to track, despite the Madison City council’s directive to do so.)

When Barnes announced that he was leaving the Madison Police Department to lead SPD, he gave exit interviews to a number of outlets throughout the city. And in several, he took direct aim at the OIM and Gelembiuk, in particular.

Madison’s OIM exists under the oversight of the city’s Police Civilian Oversight Board (PCOB). The OIM is empowered to investigate the MPD, and is meant to analyze and identify problems within the department and recommend policy changes.

All of this is impossible to do without data and information—Gelembuik’s job.

But Barnes seemed to disagree, and he had a bone to pick about it.

“I think the office of the independent monitor and the independent monitor were on a great path,” he said in an interview with the Madison365 podcast. “I think they were showing some promise, and then they decided to hire a data analyst, and they switched their focus from actually taking complaints and investigating or creating an investigative process to asking for data from the police department so (they) can find a problem…They are a hammer looking for a nail, and probably pose one of the greatest threats to the trust and legitimacy that we have built up between the police department and the community.”

That data analyst was Greg Gelembiuk, who challenged Barnes’s cost analysis in that public meeting years earlier.

“That is a complete misunderstanding of our role. That is 100 percent misunderstanding of our role,” Gelembiuk told Madison365. “We are not just the complaint department. That was never the idea. Our most important role is … to do analysis and to identify problems in the department, and then recommend policy changes or ways in which those problems can be rectified.”

Madisonians tell The Stranger that these were just the last jabs in an ongoing conflict between Barnes and the OIM. Royko Maurer says that before these interviews, she called Barnes in late October, because she had learned that Barnes had allegedly started an internal campaign against the data analyst position, following OIM’s decision to hire Gelembiuk.

“I called Barnes to tell him, ‘Independent oversight will help you,’” Ryoko Maurer said. “‘It is a friend to the chief. It puts pressure on your officers to do the right thing. It puts pressure on them to ask for help when needed, before something bad might happen—before they find themselves in a situation of officer-created jeopardy.’”

“And he says, ‘I’m going to call you back. I’m going to call you back tomorrow, I promise, because I want to discuss this with you,’” Royko Maurer said.

Barnes did not call her back, she says.

Instead, Royko Maurer learned that Barnes increased pressure against the data analyst following her phone call to him.

Royko Maurer said that Barnes approached people in city government, and “was telling individuals within city admin and [government] that the OIM didn’t need a data analyst, that it was redundant and that the OIM and PCOB were doing great until the data analyst showed up,” Royko told The Stranger in a later email. “It was an obvious effort to divide and conquer within the OIM and PCOB and to stir up bad feelings among those in city admin, [government], the PCOB and OIM and direct them specifically towards a data analyst he [Barnes] could not control.”

“The chief is the most powerful person in the city,” Royko Maurer says, “and people are easily swayed when someone with such rank pays them special attention.”

One Madison official Barnes had approached confirmed this to The Stranger. That official asked to remain anonymous. According to this official, Barnes insinuated that MPD could handle that accountability work themselves.

Surveilled in Seattle

Barnes’s push for cameras has since surpassed Madison’s borders. He’s been a vocal proponent for increasing surveillance cameras in Seattle, in the Seattle City Council’s recent passage of legislation expanding its use of CCTVs around the city. Notably, the city will place more cameras in the Chinatown International District and the Central District, both areas with larger communities of color.

The expansion was met with huge community pushback, not the least of which was based on the fact that the city council voted to expand the program in its infancy, less than four months after the program’s pilot began last May—before the pilot was complete, and before any data could be collected about its effectiveness.

Both the Seattle Office for Civil Rights and the Community Police Commission strongly opposed the City’s decision to expand its surveillance program. Both agencies noted that data regarding surveillance cameras do not support claims that they reduce crime. Their concerns hearken back to experts’ concerns regarding body-worn video.

But since Barnes first started dabbling in community-opposed camera programs in Madison, the stakes have gotten higher. For one, the current president and his supporters are doing everything in their power to establish an autocracy, and immigration enforcement has repeatedly accessed surveillance camera programs to track immigrants throughout the US.

While the council committed to certain measures that allegedly make the program safer, the wording of those accountability measures are lukewarm, at best. For instance, the council unanimously passed an amendment that would institute a 60-day “pause” of the program, if the City is subpoenaed by the federal government—meaning that one subpoena would have to be fulfilled before they could shut it down. It also does not address any circumstances under which the city would release data without a subpoena.

As recently as this week, protesters have flooded City Hall to protest the surveillance program. The cameras in the expansion program haven’t been installed yet, but the original CCTV cameras are still in place. Right now, the City is depending on Barnes—who disregarded many of the Madison council’s parameters for the bodycam program—to now observe the City Council’s simple guardrails to keep Seattleites safe from the federal government, let alone overpolicing.

New City Council Handles Its First Protest

Micah Yip — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 16:00:00 -0800

Protesters demanded the city investigate and hold ICE accountable, end cooperation between Seattle and ICE, and defend Seattle’s status as a sanctuary city. by Micah Yip

Jonathan Toledo was done waiting. He was going to schedule that sit-down with new Council President Joy Hollingsworth, and he was going to do it now—even if “now” was in the middle of Tuesday’s raucous protest at the city council meeting.

“I can’t wait until [the next meeting],” Toledo, who leads the Seattle Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression (SAARPR), called out to Hollingsworth after the public comment period ended. “Every day, ICE locks up more people.”

The night before, SAARPR sent a letter to each councilmember with three demands: investigate and hold ICE accountable, end cooperation between Seattle and ICE, and defend Seattle’s status as a sanctuary city.

They demanded each councilmember sign the statement in less than 18 hours or they’d protest at the meeting. Besides Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck and Dionne Foster’s chief of staff—who responded a minute before and a few minutes after the meeting began, respectively—no one else responded, and none signed. They couldn’t, really—in a text to The Stranger, Rinck says they were restricted by the Open Public Meetings Act, which they would’ve violated if more than five councilmembers took action outside of a meeting.

So, Tuesday afternoon, Toledo and about two dozen demonstrators were in the council chambers holding a banner that read “ABOLISH I.C.E." They had each given public comment, calling for protections against ICE, actions over platitudes. Some asked them to stop collaborating with ICE.

“I will connect with you one-on-one,” Council President Hollingsworth told Toledo from the dais. “I will stand side-by-side with you and hear what you are saying every single time.”

“ARE YOU GOING TO VOTE TODAY TO END ICE COLLABORATION?” someone shouted.

“No, we are not. It’s not on the calendar, but I’m willing to talk about it,” Hollingsworth said, the chamber erupting with objections.

It was the first time this new council dealt with public dissent. It was an opportunity to take a different tack. When former City Council President Sara Nelson took control of a newly-elected conservative council in 2023, they promised to bring “decorum” to council chambers, which translated to shutting down public comment early and arresting protesters—a bad look that didn’t turn out well for her in the end.

Last week, Hollingsworth at least implied she was ready for a new chapter. “Everyone who walks through these doors will be treated with respect and kindness—no matter how they show up in their spirit, their attitude or words,” she said in a speech after being appointed council president last week.

As if to test this, Kshama Sawant—who just happens to be campaigning for Adam Smith’s congressional seat—arrived like the ghost of City Council’s past. Sawant’s campaign team waved signs with her face on them, and she took to the mic to promote herself as the socialist alternative candidate, briefly condemning ICE terror.

For about an hour, SAARPR and Sawant’s campaign got their say, but neither got the in-the-moment, short-notice action they wanted. Again, it’s a matter of government procedure—the OPMA bars councils from taking or even deliberating on policy without an agenda posted with adequate notice to the public.

While council can hear anything anyone wants to say during public comment, they can’t just add items to an agenda with less than 24 hours notice, especially ones as complex as SAARPR demanded.

That’s not to say they couldn’t address SAARPR’s demands and set a new policy. Like, perhaps, getting rid of those police cameras.

In October 2024, Nelson’s council voted to put up a network of real-time crime fightin’ CCTV cameras downtown, in the Chinatown-International District and on Aurora Avenue. Then, in September, they voted to expand that network to Capitol Hill, SoDo and Garfield High School, against the objections of more than 100 public commenters and organizations like the ACLU of Washington and the city’s Office of Civil Rights, who said the federal government could use that data to track immigrants.

Councilmembers Hollingsworth, Bob Kettle, Sara Nelson, Maritza Rivera, Debora Juarez, Rob Saka, and Mark Solomon voted for. Councilmembers Rinck and Dan Strauss voted against.

Speaking to The Stranger yesterday, Rinck—who’s been staunchly against SPD’s CCTV program—said removing the cameras would require a longer legislative process. Last year, she and Kettle co-sponsored an amendment that would shut down all CCTV for 60 days if the feds subpoena for immigration data, and council would then vote on whether or not to continue the program. The problem is that the city would have to send some footage to ICE before the program was actually shut down, when we could just not have a surveillance program.

The cameras council voted for in September haven’t been installed. The ball’s in Mayor Katie Wilson’s court to stop those from going up, Rinck says. During the campaign, Wilson aligned herself with Rinck’s position, saying in a statement that “turning on more cameras won’t magically make our neighborhoods safer. But it will certainly make our neighbors more vulnerable.”

Meanwhile, SAARPR’s call to enforce the city’s “sanctuary status,” is a call for an empty promise. Sanctuary designations don’t protect anyone from ICE. Just look at Chicago and Minneapolis.

“The language of Sanctuary City gives a sense of false protections that just don’t exist, which is why there’s been kind of a movement shift to Welcoming City and really clarifying what are things within the city’s power,” Rinck says.

The state has some protective measures like the Keep Washington Working Act, which restricts state and local governments from cooperating with the feds, but ultimately, as Rinck puts it, “federal law reigns supreme.”

Council recessed and left the chamber. After 10 minutes of speeches and chants, the protesters left. Council then returned to the scheduled agenda.

SAARPR tells The Stranger they’ll continue organizing in the community, but still want city council to read and sign their demands.

In an email to The Stranger, Hollingsworth says she’s grateful for those who came forward at the meeting, and reaffirmed council’s responsibility to listen and engage.

“We are committed to contributing to dialogue not division,” she writes. “Our community has my commitment that, no matter how you show up in chambers, I will always respect you and your voice.”

Editor's note: An earlier version of this story referred to Adam Smith's "Senate" seat. Smith is a US Representative. We regret the error.

Slog AM: US Terrorizes Greenland, US Terrorizes US, Washington Sheriffs Yell on Facebook

Micah Yip — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 10:00:00 -0800

The Stranger's morning news roundup. by Micah Yip

“Momgate” Strikes Back: Remember during Mayor Katie Wilson’s campaign when former Mayor Bruce Harrell’s team tried to turn getting financial support from her parents for her toddler’s childcare into a scandal? It’s back. Wilson was fined $250 by the city for not reporting the $10,000 given to her by her parents, which the Seattle Ethics and Elections Commission decided should've been reported as in-kind contributions. Wayne Barnett, the commission’s executive director, said child care help hadn’t come up in past campaigns, which makes sense. Most campaigns in this city are run by wealthier people and men. Wilson cooperated fully with the commission and promptly paid the fine, he said.

One Less Sweep in the City: Yesterday, Mayor Wilson visited an encampment in Ballard scheduled to be swept by the city, took a look around and decided to stop that sweep (temporarily), so they could take more time to “improve outcomes” for the residents, which presumably means getting them sheltered. And shortly after that, the Mayor sent out an alert that this morning, she is making a major announcement about her emergency housing plan. We’re watching for updates later today. Sidenote: We Heart Seattle’s Andrea Suarez was also at the encampment, making videos about how annoyed she was that Wilson didn’t agree that treatment should in fact come first (studies show it shouldn’t).

Off the Menu: The Washington State legislature is considering a bill that would ban the sale, possession, transport, and distribution of farmed octopus in the state. “Octopus are intelligent creatures. They’ve shown aptitude for problem-solving,” said Rep. Adam Bernbaum, a Dem from Port Angeles. And a 2021 study showed that they can experience distress and happiness. (Maybe they can solve our budget problems, which certainly distress them.) Now don’t worry, the bill isn’t meant to keep you from your favorite grilled octopus if that’s your jam. “But if we can make sure that its harvest is done in a more compassionate, less painful way with fewer ecological impacts, we should do so,” said Bernbaum.

Again: A week after ICE shot and killed Renee Good in Minneapolis, a federal officer shot a man in the leg in the same city. DHS said the officer was attacked with a shovel while trying to make an arrest. After a car chase involving a Venezuelan national ended in a crash, DHS claims the driver and two other people attacked the agent. An ICE agent and the man ICE shot were taken to the hospital with non-life threatening injuries. Minneapolis officials said on X: “The City of Minneapolis again demands that ICE leave the city and state immediately.”

Now to Vivian, for more bad news.

Very tough, Tim: Trump is threatening to invoke the Insurrection Act to stop people from protesting and/or filming his ICE agents in Minneapolis (which VP Vance has said are allowed to operate with “absolute immunity”). Trump wrote on Truth Social: “If the corrupt politicians of Minnesota don’t obey the law and stop the professional agitators and insurrectionists from attacking the Patriots of I.C.E., who are only trying to do their job, I will institute the INSURRECTION ACT, which many Presidents have done before me, and quickly put an end to the travesty that is taking place in that once great State.” Minnesota Governor Tim Walz posted a “direct appeal” to the President, asking him to “turn the temperature down.” “This is not who we are,” Walz wrote. Seeing as this keeps fucking happening, I think it is exactly who we are!

Yesterday, Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio met with Danish Foreign Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen and Greenland Foreign Minister Vivian Motzfeldt at the White House to talk about the future of the semiautonomous Danish territory Trump is threatening to take by force. Rasmussen said there’s still a “fundamental disagreement” over Greenland and that it was “clear that the president has this wish of conquering over Greenland.” Trump didn’t take part, but said after the meeting that “We need Greenland for national security … We’ll see how it all works out. I think something will work out.”

At Denmark’s request, NATO allies Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden and Canada are deploying troops to Greenland for a joint exercise, the pointedly named “Operation Arctic Endurance.” In a speech today, French President Emmanuel Macron said his country would be sending “land, air, and sea assets” to Greenland. Denmark’s army chief says he’s ready to defend Greenland. Breaking with our NATO allies to seize Greenland’s mineral resources and Trump’s refusal to accept the territory is not for sale is serious shit. It could cause global conflict, maybe wars. It is absurdly dangerous

In a CNN interview earlier this year, Trump’s aide Stephen Miller said Greenland rightfully belonged to the US and that nobody would fight us militarily for it. His quote has been echoing in my head since: “We live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power,” he said. “These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”

Alright, back to me!

Fucking with the Fourth Estate: The FBI raided the home of Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson and seized her devices as part of a leak investigation tied to a Pentagon contractor. Natanson wasn’t accused of any wrongdoing, but agents took her phone, laptops, and Garmin watch. They said they were in pursuit of a government employee who was accused of improperly retaining classified material. Executive Editor Matt Murray said the search was “deeply concerning and raises profound questions and concern around the constitutional protections for our work.”

Border Patrol Shooting Victim in Court: Luis David Nino-Moncada was one of two people a Border Patrol agent shot in a car last week in Portland. Agents claimed he’d repeatedly slammed into their car. After being hospitalized for several days, he pleaded not guilty yesterday to aggravated assault on a federal employee and damaging federal property. His passenger, Yorlenys Betzabeth Zambrano-Contreras, is being held at an immigration detention facility in Tacoma, facing a charge of illegal entry into the U.S. The DHS claims both were affiliated with the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua.

Megadonors, Megacuts: The Gates Foundation is going on a $9 billion spending spree this year to fund for global health, vaccines, women’s health, education, and AI (?????) while quietly shrinking its workforce by up to 500 jobs.

Emergency: Seattle’s emergency management system is stretched thin ahead of a season of storms, floods, and the World Cup. Officials told city leaders the city lacks the staff and solid crisis plans to handle co-occurring disasters, from power outages to transit shutdowns, without buckling. Aging infrastructure and climate change adds to the strain. City leaders now face pressure to patch long-neglected holes in the safety net.

The Girls Are Fighting: Boomers posting bad takes on social media is annoying enough. But when they’re boomer cops posting bad takes on Facebook about an ICE agent shooting and killing a woman? Pierce County Sheriff Keith Swank posted “PSA: if law enforcement tells you to stop. STOP,” he wrote. Thurston County Sheriff Derek Sanders called him out on Facebook, saying it’s “disturbing that we have an elected sheriff in our state mocking Renee’s death on social media.” Swank shot back and called him an “altruistic narcissist.” What?

News Bad, Weather Fine: Cloudy. High of 46, low of 42.

Slog AM: Varsity Theater Will Close This Week, Bob Ferguson Grows a Spine, Maybe, and Trump Keeps Making Moves on Greenland

Megan Seling — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 09:49:00 -0800

The Stranger's morning news roundup. by Megan Seling

Today Will be Gray: What you see outside right now is what you will get for the day—it won’t get brighter, it won’t get warmer, it won’t get colder, but it also won’t rain, probably. Those clouds in the sky will remain in the sky. It’s the big nothing. It’s like living under a weighted blanket. I love it so much.

Bobby Is Back! Yesterday, Gov. Bob Ferguson delivered his first State of the State speech, and in it he called out the “horrific and unjust” actions of the Trump Administration, and praised Dems’ efforts to tax the rich. A nice thing to see after he spent the first year of his term appeasing Republicans. Still, words are cheap. Now we need action. We’re watching, Bob.

King County Prosecutors Won't Charge Pedro Gomez: Cheryl Delostrinos, a local organizer, says Gomez raped her in 2024. In the story published on The Stranger yesterday, “KCPAO didn’t decline to charge Gomez because they doubted her account. In fact, in a written response to The Stranger’s questions, the prosecutor’s office emphasized on five separate occasions that they do believe her.” But “prosecutors concluded they could not prove the elements of rape in the second- or third-degree beyond a reasonable doubt when weighed against what they described as the ‘most plausible, reasonably foreseeable defense.’” Read the whole maddening story here. Then join me in screaming into the void for the rest of the day.

Another Theater Bites the Dust: The Varsity Theater in the U District is closing. Their last day of operations will be tomorrow, January 15. In a press release, Jeff Brien of Far Away Entertainment (which took the theater over in 2015 after Landmark Theaters closed it) said: “We have never fully recovered from the pandemic when we were forced to close for almost a year. Since then a series of Hollywood labor disputes, reduced film releases from major studios and increased operating expenses have prevented us from generating sufficient income.” Far Away also runs Historic Admiral Theater in West Seattle, as well as theaters in Anacortes, Bainbridge Island, Stanwood, and Lynnwood, among others, but they say that none of those theaters are in danger. “We are leaving all operating equipment behind in the hope that the theater remains available to show digital movies with digital sound,” Brien added. “We are anxious to identify any interested parties who may want to exhibit film, live entertainment or special events.”

President Pedophile Protector: Yesterday, while Trump toured a Ford plant in Michigan, a line worker allegedly yelled out to Trump, calling him a “pedophile protector.” TMZ has shared a couple of videos in which Trump appears to say “fuck you” to the employee while flipping him off. The employee told The Washington Post that he’s been suspended from work pending an investigation and, “As far as calling him out, definitely no regrets whatsoever.” Yes, there is a GoFundMe in case he loses his job.

“I don’t feel as though fate looks upon you often, and when it does, you better be ready to seize the opportunity,” said TJ Sabula, the UAW worker who heckled President Trump and who Trump flipped off and cursed at. “And today I think I did that.”

Gift link: wapo.st/4sG38CD

[image or embed]
— Mike Madden (@mikemadden.bsky.social) January 13, 2026 at 5:40 PM

A Spine? In This Autocracy? The opening paragraph of this New York Times story reads like Antifa fan fiction: “Six federal prosecutors in Minnesota resigned on Tuesday over the Justice Department’s push to investigate the widow of a woman killed by an ICE agent and the department’s reluctance to investigate the shooter, according to people with knowledge of their decision.” As of Monday, just four prosecutors had resigned. More of this, please! Don’t play their fascist games!

That Dirty Work: Officials continue to look for ways to make it appear as though Renee Good deserved to be shot in the face three times by an ICE agent. Their latest attempt is releasing “new documents [that] shed light on Renee Good’s ties to ICE monitoring efforts in Minneapolis.” First of all, that shitty CNN headline buries the lead. Those documents? They were shared with parents at her kid’s school and appear to recommend that people keep an eye on ICE activity in the area through “nonviolent civil disobedience tactics practiced at American protests for generations.” Makes sense! ICE activity has time and time again led to violence, so parents should be aware of it when en route to pick up children, right? And before you get all “Leave ICE alone! Let them do their jobs! Don’t interfere and don’t get hurt!” here’s the thing, and maybe I’m yelling at the choir here, but WE CAN DO THAT. We can film cops and federal agents carrying out their duties in public places, and they ARE NOT SUPPOSED TO SHOOT US IN THE FACE WHEN WE DO. All these alleged documents suggest is that she was killed by the very people she warned everyone about. Horrifying.

Trump Thinks He Can Just, Like, Take Greenland: Today, VP Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio are meeting with Greenland’s prime minister. Yesterday, Trump said that the US “needs” Greenland, which is the same terminology used by seventh-grade boys when telling their girlfriend they “can’t” dump them. “Anything less than” getting Greenland would be “unacceptable,” he said. PM Jens-Frederik Nielsen has told them that Greenland needs to remain part of Denmark. Whose needs will win? And am I naive for hoping that if Vance and Rubio fail to walk away with Greenland in today’s meeting, Trump will deem them both “losers” and the dramatic infighting will begin?

Death Toll Climbs in Iranian Protests: The U.S.-based Human Rights Activists News Agency says more than 2,500 people have died in nationwide protests in Iran. Weirdly, Trump has been freaking out on Truth Social about it, telling protesters to “keep protesting” and claiming he has “canceled all meetings with Iranian Officials until the senseless killing of protesters STOPS. HELP IS ON ITS WAY.” Are you as confused as I am? JD Vance is saying Renee Good was “disorderly” and the officer who shot her has “actually done a very, very important job for the United States of America.” Is it opposite day? Did I wake up in the upside-down? WHAT IS HAPPENING?!?

Because Look at This: The Trump administration is escalating arrests and “aggressive tactics” in Minneapolis, including against people protesting last week’s shooting. The New York Times has compiled several videos showing agents breaking car windows and pulling people out of their cars, assaulting people who are standing near them, and intimidating people filming any incidents. Trump says they’re there to round up “murderers” and “convicted criminals,” but we know that’s not true. And a recent ProPublica investigation found “more than 40 cases of ICE agents using banned chokeholds.” That is illegal. They’re breaking the law. The hypocrisy is making me crazy.

But What About Freedom of the Press? The FBI has executed a search warrant at a WaPo reporter’s home, seizing her phone, two laptops, and a watch in an “investigation into a government contractor accused of illegally retaining classified government materials. “It's worth reiterating, though we shouldn't have to, that journalists have a constitutionally protected right to publish government secrets,” said Reporters Without Borders in a statement. The journalist, Hannah Natanson, was told she’s not the focus of the probe.

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King County Prosecutors Won't Charge Pedro Gomez

Marcus Harrison Green — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 15:08:00 -0800

Cheryl Delostrinos' case represents a structural crevasse in sexual assault crimes, caught between the limits in the definition of consent, and a jury’s willingness to believe victims. by Marcus Harrison Green

Cheryl Delostrinos, a South End organizer and abolitionist, doesn’t believe in the criminal justice system.

She didn’t believe in it on June 18, 2024, when she says she went to a strictly-professional meeting over drinks with Pedro Gomez, the one-time director of external affairs for former Seattle mayor Bruce Harrell.

She didn’t believe in it when, according to police reports, she woke up drunk and disoriented to Gomez performing oral sex on her. Or when she told him “no,” and Gomez continued to pull her toward him, lift her, and force her back onto the bed despite her repeated verbal refusals.

She didn’t believe in it when she made the police report and submitted to a sexual assault kit.

But she turned to the system anyway, because she believed it was the only way to find some accountability for what happened to her. Then she waited a year and a half for a charging decision on her case. Delostrinos was right to doubt the system’s ability to help her find justice. In December, Delostrinos learned that the King County Prosecuting Attorney's Office declined to charge Gomez with a crime.

KCPAO didn’t decline to charge Gomez because they doubted her account. In fact, in a written response to The Stranger’s questions, the prosecutor’s office emphasized on five separate occasions that they do believe her.

What is at question is how her experience fits into state law. And in this case, everyone The Stranger spoke to agrees that it’s simply too limited to deliver justice in many sexual assault cases like hers. Her case represents a structural crevasse in sexual assault crimes, caught between the limits in the definition of consent, and a jury’s willingness to believe victims.

In a confidential declination memo shared with The Stranger, the Prosecutor’s Office said the case was “legally insufficient” under Washington law, meaning prosecutors concluded they could not prove the elements of rape in the second- or third-degree beyond a reasonable doubt when weighed against what they described as the “most plausible, reasonably foreseeable defense.”

For Delostrinos, the decision arrived as both confirmation and a fresh rupture. “The process of learning about the KCPO’s decision felt broken,” she said, describing how direct communication came only after her attorneys reached out, and how an SPD advocate followed up days later with information she already had. She said she was “not surprised” by the declination because, in her view, “I do not believe the criminal legal system is structured to believe or meaningfully support survivors of sexual violence, especially in cases that live in the gray areas where there is no direct video evidence of harm.”

The standard being quietly demanded of survivors, she said, is both unreasonable and revealing: “It is not my instinct, nor should it be expected, to video record an assault or a moment of non-consent while in a situation of violence.” Without that, she added, “it becomes my word against his.”

KPAO considered the possibility of charging Gomez with second- or third-degree rape, both as “alcohol assisted” sexual assault. First, they’d have to demonstrate that Delostrinos was too drunk to consent.

In the police report, Delostrinos reported that she came-to during the alleged rape, and said “no” when she realized what was happening to her.

The legal and cultural definitions of consent differ. Colloquially, we tend to learn that a drunk person cannot consent, particularly if they’re blacked out. But according to Washington state law, a victim’s intoxication isn’t enough for a charge to stick. They have to be incapacitated, and that incapacitation needs to be obvious—like someone struggling to walk, vomiting, or phasing in and out of consciousness.

Bridgette Maryman, a senior deputy prosecuting attorney for the county and chief deputy of the gender-based violence and prevention division, recognizes the limitations of this definition.

“Alcohol can cause someone to be in a blackout state where they have no memory of what happened, but they're walking, they're talking, they're driving, they're making purchases, and seeming to other people that they may be capable of consent, and that's just the reality of the way alcohol impacts us and the limits of our law as it relates to rape,” she told The Stranger. “It sucks.”

The other hurdle in this case is reasonable doubt. In Washington, like all other states, for a prosecutor’s office to press charges, they must demonstrate that they can prove the case “beyond a reasonable doubt.” In Delostrinos’ case, the DNA evidence indicated that sexual contact indeed happened. So the defense’s job would be to cast doubt on Delostrinos’ incapacitation. KPAO identified several routes that the defense was likely to take—security camera footage showing her walking steadily out of the building, a phone call to a friend where she simply called the encounter a “wild night,” and the possibility that a fight with her fiancé after the alleged rape might have motivated her to file a false report. (Yes, false reports are incredibly rare—somewhere between 2 and 10 percent of cases—but the statistical likelihood of a crime is not admissible evidence.) The legal burden of a criminal case is intentionally high and meant to avoid wrongful prosecution.

“The defense can present and argue mutually exclusive theories of the case that conflict with each other,” says Patrick Lavin, the chair of the special assault unit at KPAO. But as long as one of them can cast reasonable doubt—perhaps that a victim had a motive for making a false report, or that an assailant had reason to think they had consent—a charge can’t stick. That’s a defense attorney’s job. This is all standard, good lawyering, the KPAO lawyers emphasized to The Stranger.

And the KCPAO memo is explicitly about the legal calculus. It’s not an assessment of whether Delostrinos was harmed, but whether the case state could survive a jury instructed to acquit if they have a reasonable doubt.

“We believe Cheryl and our charging decision is in no way a reflection of the reality of what happened to her,” says KPAO’s Bella Halroyd, who wrote the charging decision. “It is merely an assessment of what we can legally prove beyond a reasonable doubt, and those are very different things. Our system is inadequate to provide healing to most survivors.”

Delostrinos is unsure whether she’ll pursue a civil case against Gomez and emphasized that she first filed charges “to create accountability by naming the harm, informing my community, and removing this person from a position that allowed them to continue using their power and platform to harm others,” she said, adding that she is “deeply grateful” for the people who navigate the system in alignment with her abolitionist values.

“I don’t know what accountability looks like moving forward,” she told The Stranger. “But I am committed to my own healing and to supporting other survivors of sexual violence in my communities.” She hopes that the act of coming forward opens the door to “deeper conversations, shared responsibility, and collective action toward safer, more accountable communities.”

Still, the declination carried its own loss: “While I would not have chosen to move forward with charges even if they had been filed, I am still disappointed that I was not given that choice,” she said. “The loss of that agency matters.”

Week One as Seattle’s Top Lawyer

Nathalie Graham — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 11:30:00 -0800

City Attorney Erika Evans has a lot of work ahead, especially if she’s going to stick to her campaign promises of bringing back community court and addressing the backlogged DUI and domestic violence cases. by Nathalie Graham

So many sneakers and Blundstones. In a sterile lobby of the hulking Columbia Tower, next to the Monorail Coffee stand, office workers in jeans walked by. Schlubs. Breaking from the crowd, Erika Evans walked briskly from the elevators in black heels with a leather binder stamped with “Seattle City Attorney’s Office” in her hands.

It’s Wednesday, just two days after Evans was sworn in and officially took over the buzzing lawyer hive that is the City Attorney’s Office. Evans, the first Black person and second woman in the office’s 150 year history, will oversee prosecutions of criminal misdemeanors, the most serious of which are driving under the influence and domestic violence crimes. She’ll also be the city’s lawyer in all civil matters, like when big businesses sue the city for implementing any kind of progressive revenue or when the federal government attacks the city.

Evans started the week by kicking the right-wing media hornets nest. In an attempt to start untangling the mess her predecessor, Republican Ann Davison, made of the city, Evans issued a memo directing prosecutors in her office to prioritize diversion over court for drug cases in a way Davison, whose whole thing was arresting drug users, hadn’t. The plan is to work closely with the Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion (LEAD) program to assess options for those caught with or using drugs. A 2023-era city ordinance codified that approach—diversion over recidivism—but Davison flouted that with her own punitive policies which were unsuccessful at getting people into treatment, which Davison claimed was the point.

Evans has a lot of work ahead, especially if she’s going to stick to her campaign promises of bringing back community court and addressing the backlogged DUI and domestic violence cases. The Stranger met with Evans at a weird office lobby to ask what Seattle can expect from her in the coming days, weeks, and months.

This Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.

You hit on this during your swearing in ceremony, but let's dive in again. What are your immediate priorities for this office? Day, one week, one month, one what can we expect?

We have already told our prosecutors we're no longer doing blanket affidavits on judges. There was a big battle with one of the elected judges, Judge Puja Vaddadi, and that resulted in more cases getting on a backlog, because there's not an elected judge hearing matters.

[Editor’s note: Davison preemptively disqualified Vaddadi from hearing criminal cases. Vaddadi filed a bar complaint against Davison and Davison’s at-the-time criminal justice chief, Natalie Walton Anderson.]

And so that was something that we told our office that effective January 1, we're no longer going to be doing blanket affidavits. It's an individual basis. There is discretion we have, but we're not going to be trying to unseat elected judges through other means, just because.

And had a blanket affidavit—which broadly bars a judge from hearing cases—happened before Anne Davidson and her office had stopped Judge Vaddadi from overseeing criminal cases? Was that an action typical of the city attorney’s office?

Not in my nearly decade recollection of this office had there been a blanket affidavit. There were individual affidavits of prejudice that get filed occasionally, but to have a directive to an entire office that all these prosecutors, shall not allow [Vaddadi] to hear cases—I don't remember that happening.

Any more plans for this week that get the ball rolling?

You may have seen some stuff on the [memo I released].

Oh, yup, I saw that. But, I’d love to hear what you have to say about it.

Oh, it was simple, some people lost their minds with things we've said on the campaign trail, things I am going to deliver on, the things that I've talked about— that's important to me. It's also important that we're being good stewards of our public dollars and of public safety and essentially just directing our prosecutors that if we're getting cases for someone using or possessing user quantities [of drugs], the first approach is to make sure they're getting connected with LEAD (Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion) or some diversion.

And that's even what the law says. The ordinance says it is recommended and encouraged that people that are arrested for that get diverted. The City Attorney’s Office was just criminally charging folks and not giving them that opportunity. And the numbers that the Department of Public Defense came out with said 97 percent got that prosecution and no treatment.

So we're actually going to be following the law and making sure people have that opportunity to get connected with services and treatment. And we are saying, if there is no meaningful progress, we're really trying, and that's not happening, we reserve the right to do other methods or traditional approaches.

On that note, this memo that you put around drug use and drug possession diversion seems to have been misinterpreted.

[Laughs] Yes.

Seattle Police Department Chief Shon Barnes sent an email that overstated your memo and sent things into a tizzy. He said all charges related to drug possession and drug use would be referred to LEAD. Is that a misunderstanding? Is that incorrect?

I think [the memo] was just interpreted that [SPD] won't make any more arrests, which that's not true. He didn't say that in his memo, either. [Editor’s note: According to an internal email obtained by Publicola, Barnes wrote, “Effective immediately, all charges related to drug possession and/or drug use will be diverted from prosecution to the LEAD program.”] Officers still have the discretion to make arrests. That's something that the mayor and the chief control, we're just saying on our end that we're going to let them get diversion. And [Barnes] is just saying, also in conjunction and partnership, we're going to make sure these folks get that opportunity for diversion, too.

Would you say that Mike Solan's interpretation of your memo was correct? In case you missed it, he called the memo “an ignorant political decision to arrest offenders for open drug use.”

No, no, it wasn't. The way he put it out there there's gonna be no more arrests. It’s misinformation. Don’t believe the hype!

Just staying on this since it’s really the only news that’s happened since you’ve been in office. Sorry, about that.

You know what? Thank you for saying that. Because it's like, damn Mayor Wilson and me, can we just get inaugurated and try to get things done?

But, anyway, Councilmember Rivera sent an email to her constituents mentioning your memo and that she is really concerned about it, that she's going to watch your decision “very closely” and that in the past two years Seattle has made significant progress combatting overdoses, reducing property and violent crime, and that she doesn't want Seattle to go backwards. What is your response to that?

It seems she believed in the hype. Which was inaccurate information. I did reach out to Councilmember Rivera yesterday about this and we have a meeting on the books now. I really look forward to speaking with her, talking to her about some of the misinformation.

It seems like there's going to be a lot of resistance to policies that help drug users and poor people. How are you going to both deliver results that you mentioned on the campaign trail while fighting these narratives that people are going to leverage against you?

That's a deep question. It really touches on what I mentioned on Monday. I think back that my grandpa did, wearing a black beret, raising his fists and just being met with outrage. He got death threats. People were so angry. It was what was needed in that moment, and it stood the test of time. And so I'm putting that lens on what's been currently happening that hasn't been working.

We can go to 12th and Jackson, we can go to parts of Belltown. We need to have better, smart approaches to what we're seeing on our streets, and people are going to be angry, but I'm committed to being a good steward of public safety and our dollars, and not just saying things that sound good, but trying to actually address underlying root causes. And I say that with the backbone of someone that's been working in public safety for nearly a decade at almost all levels. Having that perspective as well is important when you've been doing the work. Evidence is in our streets right now of how the status quo has not been not working.

Going back to your priorities on the campaign trail. You talked about bringing back community court. What does it take to bring that back? And are those wheels in motion?

Yes, they are in motion. We have met with the Seattle Municipal Court. They're very excited. They want it back. We're working in partnership with the Department of Public Defense. We have folks from their office that have helped us on our transition team, so stay tuned, because I want to make sure we have a good relationship and the priorities of [community court] in conjunction with DPD, the courts, and our office. We're setting the things in motion to get it to get it back. It's going to take time.

Okay, and we’ve talked about this before, but refresh my memory: Is bringing back community court something that has to go through city council, or is that something that you have all of the levers and pulleys that you do on your own?

It's kind of mixed. From speaking with the court, it seems that we might be able to do certain things to get—not a skeleton—but something kind of there without needing all the additional funding yet from city council. That's something we're actively figuring out right now.

Another one of your priorities, speeding up these case backlogs, specifically around domestic violence and DUIs. Anything in the works for that right now?

I just got the data. We currently have about 1,300 cases that are in the backlog, which is not as high as it's ever been. [Editor’s note: When Davison took office, due to the pandemic, the case backload reached 5,000.] But considering the former city attorney dismissed and just dumped a whole bunch of cases to try to clear it, it's like a new backlog has been created now and I’m making sure that we're just being really intentional about what we're filing.

I'm meeting with our DV folks in the next week or two, and so that is a priority to making sure those cases are getting charged quickly. Same with DUIs. Another thing that is a priority this legislative session is trying to find private funding for the labs, because the toxicology backlogs do contribute to some of the delays with the DUIs. We're hoping to get things moving to deliver on those things.

Are you expecting turnover in the city attorney's office? I know your predecessor was not the most ideologically aligned with you. I don't know if that extends to the attorneys that were under her. Will they be staffing changes?

Deputy Seattle City Attorney Scott Lindsay, he's no longer staying on board. Her Criminal Division Chief, Fred Weiss is no longer staying on board, and her Civil Division Chief is no longer staying on board, so I have essentially hired a whole new leadership team.

I'm bringing on board, for our Civil Division Chief, Becca Cohen. She's coming from the Department of Justice. She's been leading the civil division of the US Attorney's Office and is someone that Attorney General Nick Brown put into that spot. She was at the DOJ for 20 years and she also identifies as a woman of color. We're bringing on board, as our Criminal Division Chief, Jenna Robert. She is coming from Nick Brown’s attorney general's office right now. And we have Alan Pyke as our communications director. He worked on Bernie Sanders campaign previously.

So, a little different from Ol’ Ann?

[Laughs] Yes.

So, this may have changed, but during the election, some public defenders came forward and were not supportive of your candidacy. They brought up concerns that, as a prosecutor, you worked against their clients and worried you wouldn’t stay true to the progressive values you championed on the campaign trail. What do you say to those people? Are you still hearing these doubts?

I'm a city attorney for the entire city. I had multiple people from the Department of Public Defense on our transition team to help lead our action items and priorities. I am all about collaborating and partnering with them, and I really want to change the culture between DPD and our office there. Historically, it hasn't been something that is a good partnership. There's always people that aren't gonna be happy. They have some great people in their office and I look forward to working with them.

You're Seattle’s first Black city attorney. What does that mean to you?

I'm thinking more so what it means for our city and what it really means for young Black and brown folks, when they see this, they think, “This is possible. This is something that we can and will also do.” And it also is something we did together as a city to make history together. It's meaningful. It's about damn time.

When we met last year when you were just launching your campaign, I got the sense that you didn't want to center your identity.

Yeah, I didn’t want to be the Black candidate.

Right, you didn't want to run on identity politics. Can you just walk me through that choice?

I know that as diverse folks, when that becomes a focal point, everything else gets missed. I needed to lean in. I'm the most qualified person. I might be the youngest out of everyone that ran. But when it came to actual boots on the ground, actual experience, I was the most qualified. That was important because I didn't want me being a Black woman, to get people thinking, “Oh, that's just the reason why.” I’m not explaining this well, damn it!

Is there room for any New Year's resolutions for you as a person who just became the city attorney?

Absolutely. I’m trying to drink more water.