Elected representatives at all levels of government in the Seattle-King County area came together with religious, labor and nonprofit leaders to speak out against the increase in hate-related incidents that followed the election of Donald Trump at a Monday morning event at the Seattle Center Pavilion.
The gathering, organized by U.S. Rep.-elect Pramila Jayapal, D-Seattle, was in response to the defacement of a mosque in Redmond, whose stone sign has been damaged twice in the past month.
The crime, which police are calling an act of vandalism, is part of a swell of anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim events that have taken place since the federal election on Nov. 8. It follows an 18-month campaign in which the President-elect Donald Trump referred to Mexicans as rapists and posited a ban on Muslims entering the country, before backpedaling to include only people from terror-prone countries.
Kris Kobach, a member of the Trump transition team and author of viciously anti-immigrant policies, also created a program to register Muslim immigrants after the 9/11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, a policy that Trump has said he wants to revisit. The National Security Entry-Exit Registration System (NSEERS) was widely considered to be counterproductive. The domestic registry was indefinitely suspended in 2011 after registering 93,000 men and boys over the age of 16.
It resulted in zero charges of terrorism against any of the people registered, and succeeded mostly at deporting thousands of people who had overstayed their visas...
