Maybe you fled the Khmer Rouge’s genocidal regime in Cambodia in the 1970s only to face deportation proceedings 40 years later. Maybe you are a Salvadoran asylum seeker threatened with death for being trans. Maybe you are a Russian immigrant on a deadly hunger strike at the Northwest Detention Center. Or maybe you’re an Iranian family living in Redmond that was harassed at the Blaine border crossing coming back from a Whistler ski trip and Persian pop concert in Vancouver.
If you were any of these people here in Washington, then you wouldn’t be alone. Amid President Donald Trump’s terror campaign against immigrants, which has roots in the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations, there are tireless immigrant-led organizations and activists right here in the Evergreen State who have your back. If Washington is a sanctuary state in any meaningful sense of the term, then this is the grassroots connective tissue that makes it so.