The team intends to help kids whose parents are deported, especially in situations such as if a parent is taken into custody while their child is in school.
The team intends to help kids whose parents are deported, especially in situations such as if a parent is taken into custody while their child is in school.
Gov. Bob Ferguson announced a state rapid response team Monday to try to help families of those targeted for deportation by the Trump administration.
The Family Separation Rapid Response Team, which Ferguson created via executive order, will be housed within the Department of Children, Youth, and Families.
The team intends to help children whose parents are deported, especially in situations such as if a parent is taken into custody while a child is in school. The team would work to make sure those kids continue to have someone to care for them and have uninterrupted access to school.
President Donald Trump has been clear about his intentions for mass deportations, Ferguson said.
“So I want to be clear about the impacts,” the governor said at an event Monday morning at the Centilia Cultural Center in Seattle’s Beacon Hill neighborhood. “It means ripping families apart. It means kids losing their parents. It means businesses losing their workers. It means communities being significantly altered.”
Top Trump administration officials visited Chicago on Sunday to witness the start of ramped-up immigration enforcement and deportations.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement said it made 956 arrests nationwide Sunday and 286 on Saturday, The Associated Press reported. While some of the operations may not have been unusual, ICE averaged 311 daily arrests in the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, the AP reported.
The new team, Ferguson said, would include representatives from DCYF, the Office of Refugee and Immigrant Assistance, the Washington State Patrol, and the governor’s office.
“I will be directly involved in this,” Ferguson said.
The team will be tasked with reviewing policies to assist immigrant families, especially in areas where a large number of children could be separated from their families. The team will meet with state education officials and local school districts to focus on “mitigating disruption” to kids’ education and development.
Ferguson spoke at a site, El Centro de la Raza in Seattle, that’s been a frequent home for immigration advocacy in the Trump years. He spoke surrounded by advocates and fellow Democrats and addressed a crowed that included toddlers from the center’s child care program holding signs with messages like “Keep Families Together.”
Leaders and immigrant advocates spoke about the current of fear surging through immigrant communities in the wake of Trump taking office.
“Targeting immigrants doesn’t make our communities safer,” said state Rep. Emily Randall, who just took office, representing the Olympic Peninsula. “What it does is spread fear through our communities, so that folks are afraid to go to work, afraid to send their kids to school, afraid to call the police when something happens in their neighborhood.”
Daniel Vingo lives in Seattle, and is seeking asylum after fleeing Angola, where he had been involved in the independence movement for the province of Cabinda. He got a work permit in July and has enrolled at Seattle Central College.
“I started working, I was very happy,” Vingo said. “But this changed when the election happened.”
Since Trump took office, Vingo said, he’s been hearing from fellow asylum-seekers, who are calling him, scared, wondering what’s going on.
“I can’t go to school, I can’t go to a hospital, I can’t go to public transportation, all those kind of things,” people are telling him, Vingo said. “And it’s really, really very hard.”
A Washington law, passed during the first Trump administration, generally prohibits local police from aiding federal civil immigration enforcement.
Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell sent out a directive to city departments this month reminding employees that the city does not ask about immigration status and the Seattle Police Department does not help ICE, instructing them to immediately notify the mayor’s office of any requests from federal immigration enforcement.
On Monday at the event, Harrell said he had a simple message to immigrant communities: “We love you, we love you.”
“This is a wake-up call here in America,” Harrell said. “When we see the federal government’s policies play out in real time, we have to understand the fear, the insecurity that this causes amongst everybody.”
Ferguson said the state, largely through the Attorney General’s Office, will push back if officials think the president goes beyond the law, but that the president has a lot of legal authority when it comes to immigration.
“A dozen years ago it would be unimaginable we’d be having this conversation,” Ferguson said. “So even a state like Washington isn’t necessarily prepared for this because who could imagine we’d be going through something like this?”
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