When news broke in the middle of America’s supercharged presidential campaign that a SeaTac city manager had sought to make a “tactical map” of where local Muslims lived, some in next-door Burien said: not in our town.
A few city leaders realized they had residents who no longer felt safe in their own city.
“We felt we had to act,” says Nancy Tosta, a Burien City Council member. “To let them know Burien was their home, too.”
So shortly after Donald Trump’s election, the Burien council began debating a sanctuary-city ordinance. It said city employees, including police, couldn’t ask residents about their immigration status, or their religious beliefs, when delivering services.
That’s when all hell broke loose.
What followed was nine months of angry meetings that sometimes devolved into slurs. An outside anti-immigrant group spread incendiary mailers. Neighbors on both sides called each other names on social media. It all culminated in an unusual election campaign pitting one slate of four pro-immigration candidates against a more conservative group that came complete with the Trump-like nickname of “Burien Proud, Burien First.”
“It was like the civility we’ve always had in Burien was a thin veneer that got ripped away by Trump’s election,” Tosta says.
Last January, at the Burien Safeway, Jimmy Matta walked straight into it. A 41-year-old construction supervisor born in America to undocumented Guatemalan farmworkers, Matta was picking up some groceries when a white man confronted him.
“Your president is gone. Now you’re going back home,” the man said.
Matta decided to run for City Council in March. He specifically chose to challenge an incumbent, Debi Wagner, who had voted against the sanctuary-city ordinance. She would later donate to Respect Washington, the outside group trying to repeal the ordinance. In an echo of the original SeaTac map proposal, Respect Washington sent out a map listing the supposed Burien addresses of undocumented people who had committed crimes.
There were other issues in the campaign, such as homelessness. But Matta says it was like a Trumpian spell had been cast on the town. He was doorbelling one day with his 14-year-old daughter, Maya, when he asked an elderly woman: “What changes would you like to see in Burien?” He figured she would say more sidewalks or something. Her answer: “I’d like to get these Mexicans out of here and teach them some English.”
“I felt so bad my daughter heard that,” Matta says. “But she said ‘It’s OK, Dad. America is having a midlife crisis.’ ”
Leave it to the 14-year-old to peg the truth.
“‘We’re Podunk Burien,” says Tosta, the council member. “People here recall when we were chicken farms and tin shops. But suddenly we had an outside right-wing group in here, nationally funded. Plus on the left we had Dow Constantine campaigning, Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal, the state Democrats setting up a phone bank.”
More extraordinary is how voters responded. Votes are still being counted, but it looks as if the entire pro-immigration slate will win.
