Tracy and I went to the ICE Out for Good Rally last Sunday. This was a last-minute addition by Indivisible Seattle to their weekend of protests following the murder of Renee Nicole Good by an ICE agent last Wednesday in Minneapolis. It was the most heartbreaking rally I’ve been to because it wasn’t just about protesting and organizing. This time people remembered the victims of our militarized government: dead, injured, or imprisoned.
Event: ICE Out for Good Rally
Date: January 11, 2026
Location: Cal Anderson Park
Crowd size: 6,500 people
Seattle Times coverage: After Minneapolis killing, protests in Seattle, U.S. demand: ‘ICE out’ | The Seattle Times
Our 12-year-old was worried the night before that we would be arrested and never come home. We told her that we’d be okay, and in truth, this rally was not dangerous like the events in Minneapolis or Portland. King County Executive Girmay Zahilay was scheduled to speak, and our new mayor, Katie Wilson, was able to drop in. Representative Pramila Jayapal and Senator Patty Murray both sent staff to read their letters to us. It was a cold but at times sunny January Sunday, and the rain didn’t come until after the rally was over.
I’ve never felt so sad at a rally before. The use of the military in civilian spaces is something I remember well from my life in communist Romania and from the history of Eastern Europe behind the Iron Curtain. I didn’t think that after moving half a planet away, I would still be seeing the same oppression here. This country was built on people’s rejection of British armies shooting at civilians, and this year we’re celebrating 250 years since the American Revolution, when many of our values were spelled out and set in writing.
Freedom to question our government, freedom of speech, and freedom of assembly are still part of our Constitution and Bill of Rights. But our government doesn’t respect the law of the land, and so we have to get our rights back the only way we can: protesting now and voting when we have the chance. I’ll do both—and everything I can between now and November—but even that is not that easy when the Trump administration keeps attacking the foundation for free and fair elections. If you want to help defend our elections, please take a look at the work Marc Elias is doing at Democracy Docket, constantly fighting in court for our right to cast our votes and have them counted.
As the organizers of the rally on Sunday kept reminding us: We need to do much more than just show up at protests. The attack on our democracy is real. Our democracy won’t survive on its own. It’s just a nice concept that can be easily replaced with a dictatorship if we do nothing while we still can.
