Tanya Woo Tries Again; Advocates Tell Council How they Can Help Limit "Existential" Threats from Trump
Today's Afternoon Fizz.
1. Tanya Woo is apparently trying a fourth time to get on the city council, after voters rejected her in 2023 (when she lost to Tammy Morales in District 2) and 2024 (when she lost to Alexis Mercedes Rinck for a citywide council seat.) In between those campaigns, the newly elected centrist council appointed her to citywide Position 9, in a direct rebuke to the voters who had just chosen Morales over her.
Woo has not filed for office yet, according to campaign records, but she is listed as a candidate for the position on the city's Democracy Vouchers website, where she has indicated she will be seeking public funds for her campaign. Candidates for district council seats must collect 150 signatures and campaign donations of at least $10 to qualify.
After winning appointment from her fellow centrists in a pantomime of public process that wasted city time and resources vetting seven candidates who never stood a chance, Woo had an unremarkable 10 months on the council, casting votes in favor of the council's new law-and-order agenda but proposing no significant legislation of her own, beyond a dead-on-arrival proposal to create special "no-protest zones" around councilmembers' homes.
Woo also claimed to be the victim of a "xenophobic" hate crime when someone wrote "Tanya Woo hates black people!" and "Fuck Tanya Woo" on the outside of the apartment building her family owns in the Chinatown-International District. During the budget process, Woo opposed Morales' proposal to study anti-displacement measures for at-risk homeowners as part of the city’s comprehensive plan—saying the proposed environmental impact study (EIS) would "help inform, but not do what we think it’s going to do, based on what I’ve been hearing recently” before asking what an EIS was.
The other candidates who have also filed for Position 2, currently filled by "caretaker" appointee Mark Solomon, are Bruce Harrell transportation advisor Adonis Ducksworth, assistant city attorney Eddie Lin, and real-estate investor Takayo Ederer; all three previously sought appointment to the open seat.
2. Rinck convened the first meeting of the council's new Select Committee on Federal Administration and Policy Changes last week, bringing advocates for reproductive rights, the LGBTQ+ community, and immigrants together to discuss the thrriskeats the Trump administration poses to vulnerable people in Seattle.
The threats are well known. Trans people risk losing access to gender-affirming care across the country, and even in Washington state, there are laws on the books that allow forced outing of LGBTQ+ kids and students seeking gender-affirming care.
Health care, similarly, is the line, as Trump threatens to pull federal Medicaid funding from any provider that offers abortions or gender-affirming care. As Courtney Normand, director of Planned Parenthood Alliance Advocates Washington, noted at least week's meeting. "About 40 percent of all Planned Parenthood patients are Medicaid patients, so [the loss of Medicaid funding] is an existential threat to our ability to be safety-net health care providers at all in Washington and across the country."
For undocumented immigrants in Seattle, the threat is similarly existential. Although Seattle is a "welcoming city" for immigrants—meaning, primarily, that city employees, including cops, aren't allowed to inquire about anyone's immigration status—ICE raids have already hit the city, according to the immigrants' rights advocates on last week's panel.
"We received reports of ice appearing in people's workplaces, including a restaurant in downtown Seattle," Vanessa Reyes, policy manager for the Washington Immigrant Solidarity Network, said. "We've gotten reports of people getting deported very quickly after detention, being sent to detentions in other states, and those who have sent to the detention center in Tacoma reporting unsafe and unsanitary conditions."
In many cases, the solutions, where they exist, are at the state level—through lawsuits by the state Attorney General's Office, expanded shield laws for people who help others get health care they can't access in their own states, and laws protecting students at school, including needed revisions to the so-called parental rights bill, a right-wing initiative the state senate passed unanimously last year.
At the city level, though, the advocates who spoke last week proposed changing laws and policies the current city council just put in place, like new live camera surveillance, expansion of automated license plate readers, and the use of police to crack down on people with addiction, men who pay for sex, and people who commit crimes that are often linked to poverty, like shoplifting.
"One thing that's really going to have a negative impact on our community members are the ways in which people can be subject to mandatory detention without bond, just for having been arrested for a crime such as shoplifting—not even convicted, but just potentially being accused and arrested, Jenny Mashek, directing attorney with the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project, said.
Sami Alloy, the interim executive director of Pro-Choice Washington, added that she wanted to see the city "curtailing the surveillance of Seattle residents" by limiting the use of technologies like automatic license plate readers," which could potentially be used to undermine the state's shield law.
And Taylor Farley, the executive director of Queer Power Alliance, said, "We need to maintain and strengthen our local tenant protections, not to roll back what we've already put in [place]. We've put those protections in because they were needed at the time, and they're still needed and they're going to be needed for the future."
The council has called for more policing, more surveillance, and more emphasis on arrests for low-level crimes, including banishment orders that restrict people from going into certain areas of the city even if they haven't been convicted of a crime. The council is also considering rollbacks to existing tenant protections, including the winter eviction moratorium, maximum late fees, and the "first in time" rule that requires landlords to rent to the first qualified candidate.
Councilmember Cathy Moore, who supported all the policies advocates identified as areas of concern, disputed some of the advocates' characterizations before asking them about concrete actions the council could take to help fund or advocate for things like gender-affirming care. "We don't always agree, and I would certainly heartily disagree with some of the representations that have been made, but I'm not going to take this opportunity to go into that," Moore said.