Port of Seattle Commissioner Toshiko Hasegawa leaned forward over the too-small table at Avole, the Central District coffee shop on Friday. Two days earlier, an ICE agent, Jonathan Ross, had shot Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis, and the government had spent the week lying about it..

“I went to the protest last night,” Hasegawa says, dry eyed with a voice strangled by emotion. “There's so many different feelings, but what can we do?”

Her resolve strengthened. “No one is above the law,” she says, her voice echoing in the empty coffee shop. “I want to see King County arrest, prosecute, and convict Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers who should be equally as afraid that when they break the law that somebody is going to come knocking at their door.”

After four years as a Port of Seattle commissioner, Hasegawa is ready for a new job, one where she can flex her muscles on criminal justice reform, housing, and mental health access, none of which she could do at the Port. She’ll deepen the work around building up childcare services and transit-oriented development she started at the Port. Hasegawa is running for King County Council District 2, the seat Girmay Zahilay’s ascendence to King County Executive left open. Rhonda Lewis, the current District 2 council member appointed to the seat as a caretaker, will not seek election. The district spans from the University District to Tukwila, covering everything in Seattle east of I-5. 

Hasegawa already has an opponent. State Sen. Rebecca Saldaña announced her candidacy last month, and brings a decade-long progressive record with her on the campaign trail. Hasegawa has an impressive resumé, filled with positions on state agencies like the Washington State Commission on Asian Pacific American Affairs and the King County Office of Law Enforcement Oversight, but only four years in elected office. She’s leaning on her ideas.

Hasegawa has a priority list that reads like a progressive politics fanfiction, because her priorities are everything. And a stacked list of local elected officials are backing her, from Seattle City Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck and King County Councilmember Teresa Mosqueda to her own dad, Sen. Bob Hasegawa and Seattle City Attorney Erika Evans. 

When it comes to ICE, Hasegawa is not playing around. 

If elected, she’d says she’d evaluate whether or not the King County Sheriff’s Office is complying with ICE. The Department is restricted by a King County ordinance to protect immigrants that mandates non-compliance and the state-level Keep Washington Working Act, but Hasegawa wants the King County Office of Law Enforcement Oversight to have subpoena authority to check their work. The county should know exactly what role the sheriff’s office is playing in all of this, and the office should be proactive in protecting our people from the feds, she says.“The Sheriff's Office should not hesitate to make referrals to the prosecuting attorney's office when something illegal has happened,” Hasegawa says, “and the prosecuting attorney's office should not hesitate to bring charges and try an individual who has violated the law should they have the preponderance of evidence and feel they can bring that case.” It’s one of the most specific plans for fighting ICE from a local politician in the past year.

Hasegawa set her jaw. She made strong eye contact.For her, it’s personal. 

Hasegawa is a fourth-generation Japanese Seattleite. She lives in the same Beacon Hill home her grandfather bought in 1954. Years prior, he, his siblings, and his father passed through the barbed wire fences at Camp Harmony, an internment camp in Puyallup, land now used for the state fair.  Later, the Hasegawas were moved to Minidoka, another internment camp in Idaho, where they slept in horse barracks. They committed no crime, and were not given due process.

“And that became the rallying cry of Japanese Americans: Never again,” Toshiko says, pausing for emphasis. “That's exactly what's happening right now.”

Hasegawa says that Japanese Americans believe Japanese Internment happened due to a lack of  political leadership, Hasegawa explained. Representatives did not stand up to protect Japanese Americans. By running for this office, Hasegawa feels as though she’s fixing history. “I see my role as being the political leadership that I wish my grandparents had during World War II.”

For Hasegawa, representing District 2 wouldn’t just be about protecting her community from the tangible boogeyman of ICE. She wants to protect them from unaffordability, she says. A real concern is childcare. A mom of two, Hasegawa is paying $4,200 a month for daycare. That mounting expense led her to decide against a third child.

“I wish that I had time for hobbies, I do,” she says. “We’re too busy surviving.” Hasegawa, who has the hashtag #bossegawa in her Instagram bio, beat the drum for childcare when she ran for Port. Without her, she says, the Port wouldn’t have implemented its new navigator program for childcare which helps airport workers access programs and available subsidies or the  “brick and mortar” childcare facility for airport workers now underway.  

“If it's possible at the Port, it is possible at King County,” Hasegawa says. She plans to build more “brick and mortar childcare facilities” near transit corridors and wants to establish an easily-navigable portal where people can see all their childcare options and resources available to them. 

Now, for the rest of everything. Hasegawa wants to build more housing. She wants to invest in community land trusts that mirror the Africatown housing development in the Central District. She wants to reimagine policing and boost diversion programs. She wants Rainier Avenue South to have a protected bike lane and a strip of grass running down the middle like “a lung.” A lung? Yes, a lung. “I would love that for us,” she says about this imagined stretch of greenery down Rainier Ave. And, she wants to put a lid on I-5. 

Those last two aren’t really in her jurisdiction as a county council member—they’re more city things, but they’re on her list anyway.

“Absolutely nothing that major happens in a vacuum,” Hasegawa says. The county will need to work “mano y mano” with the city on these projects.  

While a Lid I-5 feasibility study was published in 2020, there hasn’t been much movement on making that plan a reality. Maybe it just needs a strong advocate on the King County Council, she reasoned.

“I would love to see King County lean in, in a major way, and advocate for lidding I-5, that concrete scar that has divided our community, that has plagued us with noise and air pollution that has been at the center of environmental injustice conversations,” she says. 

“That’s a lot of ambitious things,” I said.

“We can do hard things,” says Hasegawa bossegawa-ly.