A supposedly blue county in Washington State is criminalizing immigrants who may be working in precarious or even coercive informal economy jobs. This is happening amid ICE’s violent crackdown on immigrants. Instead of going after those who exploit, the county finds it easier to attack the victims.
A bonanza of artificial intelligence, big pharma, and insurance
Conejo is “bunny” in Spanish
God I miss the early iPods so much
Despite wide public support for the Millionaire's Tax, 30k people have signed CON on this legislation getting its first hearing this Friday, outnumbering those in the PRO column four to one. It's really easy to sign PRO - do it now!
In the coming days you might well hear arguments that surveillance is the answer to the tragedy of gun violence, and therefore Seattle shouldn't turn off SPD's cameras. I urge you to interrogate this framing.
And for those who are in Washington and think things might be better here, please learn about how we don’t have parole in our state and haven’t for years. And yet, as the ACLU states, we aren’t safer for taking parole away.
www.aclu-wa.org/news/no-seco... 2/
You need to watch The Alabama Solution. The bravery of these incarcerated men is beyond, esp. given how abhorrently they are treated. Solitary for years. Beaten or killed by guards. No medical staff, no protection. Retaliation for exposing the truth. The carceral state is rotten to its core. 1/
They say you can't make sex work safe so the only option is to abolish it. I say you can't make police and prisons and borders safe so the only option is…?
i spoke out against KCPAO’s exploitative and gratuitous use of a series of photos of brutalized and bloodied women survivors in my public comment before the presentation even started, because I saw them posted on the city’s website before the meeting. i thought perhaps …
Great thread from an absolutely astounding morning at Seattle City Council. It appears that losing allies on the council has not made Bob Kettle or Maritza Rivera behave in more normal ways.
My name is Emi Koyama and I am the director of Coalition for Rights & Safety for People in the Sex Trade and a co-founder/co-director of Aileen’s, a peer-led community space, street outreach, and leadership development project by and for women working along the Pacific Highway in south King County. We reach about 100 mostly homeless, majority Black and indigenous women. I am testifying to provide an alternative perspective in anticipation of KCPAO’s presentation on sex trafficking. Prosecutors operate within an adversarial criminal justice system, which focuses on winning convictions and cutting plea deals rather than truth-seeking, genuine remorse and contrition, and restoration of survivor and community wholeness. They also bring this adversarial approach to policymaking, which does disservice to our city and its residents.
In the slides KCPAO has prepared for the committee, you will see prosecutors throw any and all arguments to see what sticks, regardless of representativeness or soundness of their sources. They use a mix of images including stock photos, screen capture from a fictional drama film, image provided by surveillance data analytics vendor Palantir that provides a faulty special app for ICE agents to geolocate and recognize faces of citizens and immigrants, photo stolen from online advertisement of someone who still works as an escort, and a series of photos of brutalized, bloodied women that show their faces, in complete disregard for their safety, privacy, or dignity.
They instrumentalize Black and Indigenous women’s particular vulnerabilities to abuse and exploitation without offering any remedies addressing socioeconomic conditions that produce those vulnerabilities. They selectively quote and weaponize survivor testimonies that are useful in ceding further power for the law enforcement, while neglecting how the law enforcement is also a source of violence in the lives of many women we know. They silence voices of survivors who do not agree with the prosecutors’ ideas of how we protect and empower the most vulnerable among us. Policymaking should not be adversarial. Efforts should be made to gather those most impacted by any given issue whether they align with the law enforcement or not, and amplify the voices of the most vulnerable without preconceived agenda. Prosecutors have a role to play in these conversations, but their dominance is unwarranted and disrespects survivors.
My public comment to the Seattle Public Safety Committee this morning before the pornified KCPAO presentation.
He's turning an actual debate into a moral issue, chastising people like me and actual experts on sex work like Emi Koyoma for suggesting that aggressive prosecution and pointless, potentially violence-inciting "john letters" are stupid, wrong, and have "psychological problems."
Kettle is also criticizing people in chambers - today, longtime sex worker advocate Emi Koyoma - who argue against the carceral state and the "john letters" the police send to men. He says "the people who come in here and yell at us" are being hypocrites on Epstein.
The King County Prosecutor's Office is currently doing an exceptionally exploitative presentation about sex trafficking to the Seattle City Council that includes slides of identifiable bloodied, brutalized women and identifiable women who are nude or nearly nude.
GOAT
Terrorism.
Good journalism from the Seattle Times about a disturbing practice that’s deliberately hidden from the public. As an attorney who’s worked in this particular hospital, I’m not the least bit surprised.
Shut down the government, tank the economy, who tf cares. Not another cent to DHS. Abolish ICE, abolish CBP, tear it all apart. Leadership right now is civil disobedience, zero complicity, no bargains.
This should be a top legislative priority
BTW when I say abolish ICE, I mean abolish it entirely and replace it with exactly nothing. Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. That's it.
There's a pretty direct line from us reacting to Black Lives Matter by choosing to
elect people who said "defund is dead" to where we are now.
Agree, they need to shut it down
Sen. Cantwell, your turn! @cantwell.senate.gov
About time!
Federal agents cannot murder people in broad daylight and face zero consequences.
I will NOT support the DHS bill as it stands.
The DHS bill needs to be split off from the larger funding package before the Senate—Republicans must work with us to do that.
I’ll keep fighting to rein in DHS and ICE.
Also, may I say that I don’t agree with people saying ICE and CBP need “more training.” They’re doing exactly what this administration has trained them to—impose a reign of fear in blue cities. They don’t need more training. They need to be ripped up root and branch.
I can't put into words the feeling of watching our government, a hive of evil antisocial filth, the absolute worst humanity has to offer, colliding with the best. Ordinary people trying to help each other, risking everything to stand up for what's plainly, unambiguously fair and right. It's unreal
NYT video analysis confirms victim’s gun was removed before he was shot. So he was unarmed. www.nytimes.com/2026/01/24/us/minneapoli...