With reporting by Alex Garland
The area outside Garfield Community Center has become a camp as organizers say hundreds of asylum seekers are making the grounds and tennis courts their temporary home while local governments try to sort out how to provide more permanent shelter.
District 3 City Councilmember Joy Hollingsworth says she is meeting with Mayor Bruce Harrell’s office Wednesday to address the new camp.
“Our office is aware of the migrant asylum seekers who have set up an encampment at the Garfield Tennis Courts,” Hollingsworth said via social media Wednesday morning. “We are working with the Mayor’s office, King County and service providers to address this situation immediately.”
UPDATE 5:56 PM: Campers began packing up the site Wednesday night. According to a community organizer and asylum seeker, a donation had been made to keep the group in the Kent Quality Inn for at least 10 more days.
KNKX’s Lilly Ana Fowler reports organizers said hundreds of the asylum seekers were “forced to camp outside last night in Seattle.”
Organizers had been waiting for a decision from the King County Council hoped to move shelter efforts forward.
The group has been at the center of demonstrations and protest including recent arrests at Seattle City Hall as “hundreds of Venezuelan, Angolan, and Congolese refugees” have been “bounced around from a church in Tukwila to hotels in south King County for the last few months.”
$32.7 million has been slated for asylum-seekers flowing into Washington but the process of making funding and resources available is still underway, KUOW reports.
The courts are used by the Garfield tennis team and the area also typically hosts recreation activities during the week.
It’s not clear what is next at the Garfield encampment or how long organizers are planning to stay. Wednesday, a worker was being tracked down to open the outdoor area’s public restrooms for campers to use.
A director of emergency services for the parks department was at the scene.
People at the scene said they expected as many as 300 to arrive at Garfield Wednesday night.
UPDATE: It sounds like Hollingsworth and the mayor’s office don’t have any quick solutions. In a statement, Hollingsworth said the discussion at Seattle City Hall focused on the camp and a need for “a regional approach to this issue” but did not provide details of any updates regarding providing housing for the group:
My heart goes out to the migrants and asylum seekers. I also want to thank the Seattle City employees who have been on-site throughout the day to evaluate the situation and respond to the immediate needs of this group.
However, the health and safety of youth and families in District 3 is my top priority. We need our community center open, the park clear and our schools safe.
This issue is bigger than Seattle. We do not have the resources to respond to this level of need. Migrants and asylum seekers who have traveled from countries around the world to various cities in King County are in need of work permits, housing resources, and other services. Our county, state, and federal governments need to help address the crisis from our southern border to our city doorstep.
This morning, I met with Mayor Harrell and regional leaders to discuss a regional approach to this issue. The State Legislature just passed a bill that would provide over $30 million for shelter and resources for migrants and asylum seekers – but this money is not available yet. I am urgently asking the State to release this funding and King County to articulate a plan for addressing the migrant population in our region.
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Why can’t we support these people in Mercer Island or Bellevue?
Or how about NOT support them at all and send them back.
Stop being so weird. We need to support them here.
Where are they located on Mercer Island and Bellevue?
So our council was told about this problem in advance and decided to arrest the messengers rather than address it, and now the problem is worse? Truly Harrell’s council. Let’s just give them a bathroom and forget about it, we need to give cops 23% raises.
Disruptive mutual aid activities informed the council in advance that they were going to dump 300 migrants at the Garfield tennis courts on 4/3? I missed that in the other reporting.
Your ire is more correctly directed at the King County Council. They are the ones with authority in the areas where the asylum-seekers had been previously, but they seem to be punting the issue to others with deliberate inactivity.
From the article above:
“Organizers had been waiting for a decision from the King County Council hoped to move shelter efforts forward.”
The Macro Ire should be directed towards the entire dynamic of ‘this should be somebody else’s problem’ passed around numerous times in the hopes it’ll just go away on its own.
Harrell needs to be a 1 and done mayor
I’m impressed with Mayor Harrell and the developing new council. They continue to work to cleaning up the decade of city neglect and decay the previous representatives left. Joy and Bruce will have my vote again if this continues. Unless, an even more law and order candidate becomes an option – they’d get my serious consideration.
Fuck this shit honestly. The CD is just a dumping ground huh? Garfield playfields, the playground, the community center is important. Fuck
Totally agree. This is so unfair for the kids who use the playfield and community center for positive activities. The adult organizers should be ashamed of themselves. Haven’t the kids been through enough with the violence? I guess the activists just don’t care about the community and just want to protest.
Correct, the leftist activists do not actually care about any of the victims of the policies they promote, they don’t care about crime victims, the poor, the sick, the homeless. All they care about is power for personal gain.
Leftists??? It’s the right wing council that does not care.
Change the word leftist to capitalist and you’re correct.
More unfair to the people living outside actually
I am so sorry things haven’t worked out exactly as you may have hoped in our country. Perhaps you would like to return to Venezuela, etc., to try your luck again? The idea that I am supposed to feel guilty for our area’s inability to instantly meet these needs is ridiculous. There was a lineup of people requiring assistance before these people arrived. Perhaps we should deal with their issues first.
It landed here because it is retaliation from the activists that got kicked out of council chambers. They turn everything to sh*t with their performative bs.
Why are they flying the flags of the countries they are fleeing?
Good question!
Why are texans and other wyte southerners chanting “we want to succeed”, yet they have the american & confederate flag plastered over every inch of their posessions?
Why are Americans the least capable of understanding the things they do and don’t realize?
I would ask why, once again, this part of the CD is asked to just accept things. We have the construction of ~ 100 supportive housing units going up across the street from PCC, the Nickelsville camp on 21st and Marion and the LIHI Tiny Village on 22nd and Cherry and now “hundreds “ of people setting up a camp at the Garfield Community Center – an area that’s been a hotbed of gun violence lately. Aren’t we already asking too much of Garfield student? Risk getting shot, now give up your facilities. We allow people with considerable needs to just be discarded/dumped in the neighborhood. What the hell is the plan to help the people who were already here in need? How the hell do we think we can handle hundreds more overnight?
It’s my understanding that the rules of asylum require the individual to ask for it in the first safe country they enter. I’m pretty sure these people came through Mexico. Which is considered a safe country. So really they’re just country shopping. It seems like an abuse of the asylum / refugee system if people were already in a safe country and just decided they’d rather be here. We don’t have an obligation to provide people with anything who were safe in other countries but just wanted to be here instead. At that point they are no longer a refugee or asylum seeker. They are country shopping.
D3 and all of Seattle became the dumping grounds during the Sawant and “progressive” social experiment decade. Even after they were shown the door in the last election, the leftist activists are trying to destroy the city. We need to push back to reclaim it. It is time for a citywide camping ban.
Go Hollingsworth!
Sawant’s response would have been to show up, give a speech… maybe have some of her underlings herd these people into a council meeting when needed. Talk about how in a marxist paradise there would be no blah, blah, blah…
These people would have been weaponized, not helped.
Whomever these a-hole activists were that decided to use these people?
Seattle’s homeless services are not geared to do anything other than traumatize these refugees. These folks don’t have substance issues/are not having mental health crisis, they need housing and food.
These are basic problems that every city in the county should be able to work towards solving the immediate needs.
This almost has to be a troll
It takes a troll to believe that the way we treat homelessness is humane.
Go read up on the people who were transported to Seattle, these people have children who were pull from school for this stunt.
You want to put these families into Seattle’s tiny home villages?
Go finish your glass of champagne.
Why are we so willing to spend infinite amounts of money on foreigners? Oh that’s right politicians think it makes them sound generous to give away taxpayer dollars! Who cares if it destroys our city and our way of life.
The basic problem, here and across the USA, is that almost all illegal migrants (most of whom are “economic” migrants) are immediately set free after a brief detention, to await their asylum hearing which can take years. They can go anywhere they want in the country, including here, and most do not have the means to pay for housing or food, so they are dependent on the American taxpayer to fund their basic needs.
I wonder how much money we are spending in total in the USA to pay for their transportation, housing, etc. This is basically a form of welfare for those who have committed a crime, and it isn’t right!
If you claim asylum at the border today, your hearing date is in 2031. So you can stay and likely get work authorization (that does take a while). If you have a child while you’re here, your child is a citizen.
If you read through their stories, you quickly can that not all of these people are “economic” migrants, at least some of these folks are refugees.
https://www.columbian.com/news/2023/dec/18/tukwila-church-struggles-with-500-asylum-seekers/
What happened to these people yesterday was horrible and if the reports are accurate, this is just another bit of fabricated political theater stunt from Plymouth; kids were pulled from school just for this event. I am sure Plymouth already has a plan on how to cash in on this.
Paying for migrant food sounds much better than paying for Israel’s bombs
Who are the “organizers” mentioned a few times in this article and why aren’t they named?
This has the stink of sawant level antics all over it.
So happy to have Hollingsworth looking out for her constituents in D3.
These types of stunts, meant to draw attention to these people plights, does nothing but turn an otherwise liberal public against them.
Well done.
Hollingsworth does not care about humans on the street. Only businesses. So shame on her actually. She’s awful.
‘Cut a liberal, a fascist bleeds’ suggests that liberals just look for excuses to stop the charade and you’re out here admitting it with your whole chest.
Why did they come to the CD all the way from Kent? I feel like that’s a huge detail that’s missing in the reporting of this story.
They were moved here by Mutual Aid anarchists for political theatre and to blackmail the city.
And I told them they can get free showers at Miller Community Center. The political theater of utilizing the free shower program, I tell ya.
If only we could give these people work visas, they want to work, there is work available, they are here because of a desperate situation, give them dignity.
Happy to see Sawant still living rent free in many of these unhinged xenophobic commenters minds