The Stranger

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.

The Heart Sellers Is Unfortunately Really Fucking Relevant Right Now

Nathalie Graham — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 16:13:00 -0800

See 'The Heart Sellers' at the Seattle Repertory Theater through February 1. by Nathalie Graham

The day The Heart Sellers premiered at the Seattle Repertory Theater, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer shot and killed a 37-year-old woman in Minneapolis. One day later, when I saw the show, a federal agent shot two people in Portland after, court documents claim, six border agents attempted to pull them over.

For the last year, President Donald Trump has waged war against immigrants. He is destroying real people and families. He has ripped through the fabric of our country, criminalizing those who come here for a better life—the very principles America was founded on. Even before he won re-election, Trump and the Republican Party stoked the fears of its already paranoid base by magnifying the crimes of a few immigrants and inventing disgusting narratives about others. Throughout the play, I could not quiet the outside world in the Leo K. Theater.

The Heart Sellers by Lloyd Suh is a story about immigrants. Directed by Sunam Ellis, the play is beautiful, and it is sad. It centers on Luna (an electric Becca Q. Co) and Jane (played quietly, and then dynamically, by Seoyoung Park), who meet each other in a grocery store on Thanksgiving in 1973. Neither one of them is from the US. Luna is from the Philippines. Jane is from Korea. They came to the US with their medical resident husbands to escape dictators (Ferdinand Marcos for Luna, Park Chung Hee for Jane). Their husbands are working at the hospital all night. They are alone, but not only on this holiday. They are always alone. Luna and Jane recognize each other as outsiders.

Luna invites Jane up to her apartment. Jane accepts. Luna wants to do Thanksgiving. She bought a turkey but doesn’t know how to cook it. Jane, who’s been watching Julia Child, knows what to do. Except, the turkey is frozen. Cooking it will take hours. They have nothing but time.

There is a hunger for friendship and connection pervasive throughout Heart Sellers. It’s awkward at first as outgoing, bold Luna tries to coax something—anything—out of quiet and reticent Jane. Soon—after a taste of Cheez Whiz and a bottle of wine their husbands wouldn’t approve of—Jane loosens up. Personality pours out of each of them as the play evolves. They both have communist sisters! Jane likes to paint! They both watch Soul Train! It verges on manic at times. All of this has been bottled up. They have not been able to be themselvessince moving to America. Because they sold their hearts upon entering the country.

The Hart-Celler Act, otherwise known as the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, passed during the height of the Civil Rights movement is the only reason Luna and Jane could be in America. The policy abolished the National Origins Formula, the bedrock of American immigration policy since the 1920s, which reduced immigration from outside northwest Europe. Adolf Hitler gave the National Origins Formula a coveted (to, ahem, some) Mein Kampf shout-out, commending it for excluding immigrants of certain races.

Now, they are here. Every day, they’re left to wonder: Was it worth it?

Luna—prone to wild daydreams and an active imagination—tells Jane about how she always pictured the Hart-Celler Act literally, as though it was someone selling hearts on the side of the road. And that, when she came to America, waiting in the immigration line, she pictured the border patrol agents asking people to exchange their hearts in order to enter the country.

As of 1965, America truly embraced the whole melting pot thing and started welcoming people like Luna and Jane into the fold. Except, it is not so welcoming to be a stranger in a strange land.

While showing Jane her photo albums, Luna points out a picture of herself and her husband at Disneyland.

“You went to Disneyland?” Jane exclaims.

Yes, Luna says. Then she clarifies: Well, only outside Disneyland. They couldn’t afford the tickets to actually go in. But they could see the castle! And the tram! It was fantastic.

Luna and Jane and their young families are as close to the American dream as Luna was to Disneyland, but they are as far from it as Luna was from getting a picture with Mickey Mouse. It is something they can appreciate, like the country town Luna and her husband drove through, where she saw a crowd of people celebrating, a picturesque barn, and seasonal flowers. She knew she couldn’t stop and join in the fun, because she was too different. They will always feel as though they’re on the outside looking in while in America. She still fantasizes about that barn.

Together, though, it’s better. She and Jane make plans for tomorrow, for the next day. They are friends now. But their friendship isn’t a guarantee, because anything could happen. And, who are they really? This experience—this place—has changed them. They have left their hearts at the threshold of this country. Still, they envision a future. It is what is best for them and their families.

Heart Sellers, a one-act play with only two actors, is small and it is intimate. Because of Co’s nimble acting from comedic to sentimental and Park’s tender trepidation mixed with genius physical comedy, I left the theater caring for these characters. Which makes it all the more tragic to know that things seem to be trending far worse today for immigrants in this country than they were in 1973. With ICE raids, travel bans, and canceled citizenship appointments, we have put restrictions on who can dream of more. Luna and Jane were so full in that theater—they brought me to laughter and to tears—but the American dream has never felt so hollow.

The Heart Sellers plays at the Seattle Repertory Theater through Feb 1.

Zahid Chaudhry Could Be Home by Thanksgiving

Carolyn Bick — Tue, 25 Nov 2025 14:48:00 -0800

The Army veteran and husband of a former Congressional candidate has been detained by ICE since August. If he's detained much longer, he could lose his eyesight.

by Carolyn Bick

As time creeps by in the Northwest Detention Center, pressure builds in the muscles behind Muhammad Zahid Chaudhry’s eyes. The swelling tissue puts pressure on his optic nerve. For Zahid, as he’s called, the world blurs into a series of muted tones. Subtitles he could once read look like characters in a language he doesn’t understand. His eyesight is fading. And if he stays untreated in the stressful, dirty conditions of the detention center for much longer, it might never return.

The decorated, disabled veteran and legal permanent resident suffers from thyroid eye disease, a degenerative condition that can result in blindness if not treated. He’s originally from Pakistan, and has lived in the US for more than 25 years. He’s married to Melissa Chaudhry, a US citizen who ran for Congress against Adam Smith last year. The pair has two young children together.

Zahid has lived with the threat of deportation for years, stemming from the government’s claims that he was dishonest about a long-ago fraud conviction on his visa application. He applied to stay in the country based on his service in the military.

On August 21, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents detained him based on an old final removal order from 2008. He was taken directly from what was allegedly his citizenship interview. Based on court documentation and emails between Rep. Adam Smith’s office, USCIS, and ICE that Zahid’s family obtained after he was taken, the alleged interview appears to have been a vehicle to arrest him.

According to these pieces of documentation, even before Zahid’s citizenship interview, ICE had decided to act on the old order of removal, while USCIS had decided to deny his citizenship application.

While Western District Court of Washington appears to have recognized the medical emergency and has paved the way for his release—possibly as early as this week before Thanksgiving—it still may be too late to save his eyesight.

But neither Zahid nor his wife know for sure. After all, since his detention on August 21, no qualified doctors have been sent in to see him to assess the state of his sight. It was only after the court ordered ICE to come up with a briefing schedule so that the court could consider Zahid’s emergency release petition—called a habeas corpus petition—on medical grounds, Melissa says, that “all of a sudden, people started approaching him at [the NWDC] to coordinate his treatment.”

Melissa, their shared family, and their supporters have been working to get Zahid out of detention since the day agents took him. Melissa told The Stranger that on November 20, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals transferred an emergency motion for release pending decision to the Western District Court of Washington. The court immediately accepted the motion and, the following day, turned around an order that both forces ICE to hastily move on Zahid’s case—think hours, not weeks—and allows Zahid to respond to what ICE files.

Melissa says that ICE sent the filing on Sunday, November 23, and Zahid expects to receive it by physical mail. However, because Zahid is representing himself pro se, no one else can see his legal paperwork. Melissa told The Stranger that, to avoid further delays, Zahid requested that the family file his response, based on what he believed ICE would say.

She shared the majority of that response with The Stranger, excluding personal information, such as the couple’s children’s birth certificates. The response includes Zahid’s declaration stating that staff at NWDC only started coordinating his medical care the day the federal court issued its order. University of Washington (UW) neuroscientist and researcher Micaela Romero also wrote a five-page declaration about how the conditions in the facility and the lack of care worsen Zahid’s degenerative eye disease and traumatic brain injury (TBI).

Earlier in Zahid’s detention, Romero advocated to get Zahid removed from nearly a full week in solitary confinement, where detention staff subjected him to 24-hour bright lights. Because he uses a wheelchair, he could not stand up to cover up the lights with anything, and could not easily move to cover his face or head.

Zahid suffered significant harm from these conditions, Romero’s declaration states. Such lighting conditions are a known form of torture that cause severe psychological distress.

In addition to lack of proper treatment, Zahid is also subject to the conditions of the NWDC, Romero noted in her declaration on Zahid’s behalf. As La Resistencia has extensively detailed through direct testimonies of those inside, these conditions include extremely dirty spaces, inadequate and spoiled food, and medical neglect.

Stress has consequences on the body, Melissa says, and those consequences are showing up in Zahid’s.

“There are neuroinflammatory cascades that happen that make immune function decrease, that increase cardiac stress and risk of heart attack — that just make all kinds of inflammation worse, including the … muscles behind his eyes,” Melissa says. “All of the stress is increasing that pressure on his optic nerve. And that's the real issue, if his optic nerves will be damaged. Other forms of blindness you can kind of fix. You can swap out lenses in the case of cataracts, other things like that. Optic nerve damage you cannot fix.”

It’s not hard to imagine how his eyesight could deteriorate so rapidly in such a place.

The deleterious conditions have also worsened his other health issues, including a service-connected traumatic brain injury (TBI). This increases the overall stress on his body: The worse one condition gets, the worse they all get, as his body fights to work.

Since his imprisonment, Melissa says that Zahid has also been denied his usual medications.

“He doesn't have his standard medications for pain or for his thyroid issues or for his migraines or for anything else. I don't know what they're giving him,” she says. “He says it's mediocrely sufficient for him to not be excruciating all the time. Just some of the time.”

But at all times, Zahid is in pain on some level, she confirmed—“It's the point.”

“This is someone who has always come here legally, has never broken any US laws. He’s been here for 25 years doing nothing but contributing to his community and raising a family. Please wake up,” Melissa says, when asked if there was anything she wanted to say to readers. “If you haven't already, please look at this and wake up. This was never about following the rules. He was taken at a citizenship interview.”

Melissa filed Zahid’s response on November 24. As far as she knows, she told The Stranger, the court has not yet ruled on anything. She’s already emailed his doctor to coordinate an appointment for eye treatment this week, and plans to set a place for him at the Thanksgiving table. She lives in hope.