Grassroots organizing wins moratorium on ICE detention centers in Burien, WA

Burien, WA — On the night of October 26, in the City Council room of the Burien Library in the metropolitan area of Seattle, grassroots organizers and community members celebrated the passage of Ordinance 911 by unanimous vote of the Burien City Council, implementing a 6-month moratorium on detention centers. This is recognized as the first step to buy time for the council to formulate and pass a permanent ban through the city land-use code.

The idea for a ban on detention centers in Burien came from the King County Immigrant Rights Alliance (KCIRA), a new and growing organization dedicated to building a broad fight-back against ICE and their local collaborators. The combination of KCIRA’s persistent pressure, bringing the need for a detention center moratorium to both the community and council, and a friendly city council resulted in a swift victory on their campaign of less than three months. Now, organizers are preparing to bring the lessons of this win to the community and build their forces for the next fight.

Why a detention center moratorium, and why Burien?

“With Trump’s accelerating attacks on immigrants across the United States, targeting a quota of 3,000 immigration arrests per day, ICE is running up against a physical infrastructure problem,” said Joseph Ostheller, a KCIRA organizer. “Documents between ICE and the private contractor GEO Group, who runs the for-profit Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma less than 25 miles south of here, indicate that ICE wants more space to wrongly imprison people. All over the country, the Trump administration is looking to build as many of these concentration camps as they can.”

The problem for ICE and GEO Group, however, is that a 2018 change to Tacoma’s land use code cut off legal avenues for private contractors like GEO to build or expand new detention center capacity. While the question of compliance and enforcement by Tacoma City Council isn’t guaranteed, organizers from KCIRA say they fear GEO Group could attempt to expand their operations for ICE in King County instead.

This fear has been shared by communities all across the county, resulting in a series of jurisdictions passing moratoriums on the construction of new detention centers, such as the cities of Seattle, SeaTac, Tukwila, and Kent, as well as the unincorporated areas of King County itself.

When asked about why they chose Burien as the site for their first campaign, Ostheller said, “Burien is a small, yet very diverse city of over 50,000 people, with over a quarter of those being first-generation immigrants. In recent months, Burien and its surrounding areas have seen an intense increase in immigration terror, detentions, and violence from federal agents. It is also next to King County Airfield, the airport that ICE uses to conduct its deportation and transfer flights, making it a prime target for expansion of ICE’s operations.”

Lessons and next steps

The biggest lesson organizers are taking away from this first step is that grassroots movements are needed to make change happen even with progressive politicians. Since the last election cycle, Burien City Council has had a progressive supermajority that set up a special committee to address the concerns of immigrants in the local area. However, when organizers from KCIRA began their work on their campaign, the council had only gone as far as non-binding resolutions. After their efforts, work began immediately on developing a detention center moratorium. Thanks to this pressure, both KCIRA and the city council are looking to go further.

While a temporary moratorium was the KCIRA’s first demand, the struggle continues for a permanent ban through the city’s land use codes, and even further to ban the use of automated license plate readers (ALPRs) such as FLOCK and Axon cameras that ICE is using to track and detain people across the country.

Now that their first major victory is under their belt, immigrant rights organizers in King County say they are eager to turn up the heat and work even harder to bring more immigrants, supporters, and family members into the fight.

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