Special Council meeting scheduled for tomorrow

I noted on Monday that the City Council stumbled in attempting to approve a typically routine grant-acceptance ordinance, and ended up in a parliamentary rathole — all because of a $90,000 line-item in which ICE reimburses SPD for costs related to joint narcotics enforcement activities at the Port of Seattle. The Council has scheduled a special meeting for noon tomorrow (Wednesday) to resolve this mess. The Council will take up an amended version of the bill that strikes the ICE reimbursement but leaves the rest of the line-items intact. Passing it will require five “yes” votes, but with the ICE …

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Ramirez DACA case goes to crazy-town

One of the big stories this week — locally and nationally — has been the arrest and detention of Daniel Ramirez Medina, a 23-year-old resident of Washington State who was brought to the US illegally as a child and has been a beneficiary of the Obama Administration’s Deferred Access for Child Arrivals (DACA) program since 2014. Last Friday he was arrested and is still being detained by U.S.  Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).  And at a time when immigrants — both legal and illegal — are living in fear of the Trump administration’s saber-rattling about immigration policy, this has become …

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