Seattle City Council continued its crusade against ICE last week.
Adding to Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck’s derailed-then-passed detention center moratorium, Rinck and Councilmember Bob Kettle introduced two more anti-ICE bills at last Tuesday’s Public Safety Committee meeting.
Both bills are good, but not perfect. Kettle’s would ban ICE from staging operations on city-owned or city-controlled property, essentially codifying and broadening an executive order from Mayor Katie Wilson. Rinck’s would put a 60-day pause on automated license plate readers (ALPRs) immediately if the federal government made a legal demand to access the data to track immigrants or abortion seekers.
As for the not perfect part, Kettle’s bill can’t stop the feds from detaining people on city property, and Rinck’s can’t keep the city from handing surveillance data that’s already been collected over to the feds, it only stops us from collecting more. But they are obstacles that make it harder for ICE to do fascism.
Let’s start with Kettle’s bill. If passed, and ICE wanted to set up a base on, say, a police precinct parking lot like they have in Hammond, Indiana, they couldn’t.
In essence, Kettle’s bill codifies an executive order Mayor Wilson introduced in January, with a couple weedy caveats. Wilson’s order directs city departments to create no-ICE signage on that city-owned property. Dionne Foster amended Kettle’s bill to read “city-owned or controlled” instead of “city-owned and controlled,” a subtle change to de-ICE even more properties, like ones the city leases to essential service providers, city-run programs, county partnerships and community-based organizations.
But again, limitations. There’s nothing the city can do to stop ICE from operating, says Directing Attorney Tim Warden-Hertz from the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project.
“In my mind, it’s about ensuring that city resources aren’t being used to facilitate ICE’s work,” Warden-Hertz says. “The effect of that would be to make ICE do their own work and find their own resources.”
Now for Rinck’s bill. The solidly anti-surveillance councilmember’s proposal to shut down the cameras when the city or its vendor, Axon, receives a warrant, subpoena, court order for data that could be used to target immigrants or people seeking abortions. If that happens, it would also trigger a review process where the City Council can decide whether to continue or end the ALPR program.
ALPRs are cameras that automatically scan license plates, logging when and where the car was spotted. In Seattle, the system runs on the in-car video systems of Seattle Police Department patrol vehicles, scanning plates as officers drive around the city.
Advocacy groups warn that those scans can provide investigators with movement patterns that make it easy to track vulnerable groups the federal government wants to target. In fact, the feds have already used surveillance data, both in Washington state and across the country, to track marginalized communities, says Warden-Hertz.
It’s basically a copy-paste of her and Kettle’s amendment to last fall’s CCTV-expansion, which would shut down the CCTV program for 60 days if the feds subpoenaed its data, sans the abortion language. This bill remedies that by requiring a 60 day pause of the CCTV program if the data will be used for reproductive health care enforcement. (At the meeting, Rinck also said she plans to amend the ALPR bill to explicitly include gender-affirming care protections.)
While advocates and some electeds like Rinck argue the city should simply end the surveillance programs altogether, she doesn’t have the votes. Pro-surveillance councilmembers outnumber the anti-surveillance ones.
“I think this is a step towards at least trying to create some sort of safeguards,” says Warden-Hertz. “But I think pretty clearly, the balance falls in favor of ending it.”
The bill also emphasizes the power that the executive branch has to protect residents from the feds. It explicitly states that the mayor, along with the police chief, can decide to shut off CCTV and ALPRs if they determine the data is being used or potentially could be used for immigration enforcement or reproductive health enforcement. On the flip side, if the cameras enter a 60-day pause, the mayor could turn them back on if she believes they’re necessary to gather evidence of unlawful operations by ICE, Border Patrol or or at reproductive health care facilities.
But the real kicker is that Mayor Wilson already has the power to shut off the cameras whenever she wants. The fact that she hasn’t has driven campaign volunteers and at least one of Wilson’s former staffers to co-write and circulate a petition calling for her to shut them off (it’s all over Instagram). After all, we’d all be a lot safer if there were no surveillance data sitting around waiting to be subpoenaed.