Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell and Washington Attorney General Nick Brown said they are prepared to fight President Donald Trump if he sends the National Guard to Washington. This weekend, Trump ordered the deployment of troops to Portland, a move Harrell called “un-American.”
Standing on the seventh floor of City Hall on Monday morning, Harrell gestured to the bustling streets below and declared, “There is no insurrection here.”
Harrell's message to the federal government was clear: Do not send troops to Seattle as the president has done in cities like Los Angeles and Washington, D.C.
Harrell, Brown, and other local elected leaders including members of the Seattle City Council, spoke to the media after Trump announced online over the weekend that he would send troops to Portland and authorize them to use "full force" to curb protests outside Immigration and Customs Enforcement facilities. Trump has authorized a similar use of the National Guard in Memphis.
“We do not need the federal government bringing in armored vehicles, semi automatic weapons, [or] military personnel to make, quote, unquote, us safer,” Harrell said.
The mayor said he’ll issue an executive order “in the coming days” that will reaffirm Seattle’s commitment to legally protecting immigrant and refugee communities. Joined by fire department and police leaders, Harrell also said the order will preserve law enforcement’s “local control.”
Meanwhile, Gov. Bob Ferguson echoed those comments in an email response to questions from KUOW Monday.
Ferguson said he had spoken with Oregon officials and with Mayor Harrell over the weekend and he was meeting Monday with the Washington National Guard.
"My team and I have been preparing for this possibility for some time," Ferguson said. "We do not need or want the president to militarize our streets."
On Saturday, the president said on social media that he’s sending troops to Portland to stop anti-ICE protests outside federal buildings in the “war-ravaged” city.
Harrell said in a post on Bluesky that he had spoken with Portland Mayor Keith Wilson and the two Northwest cities were united against what he called "an attempt to silence free speech and intimidate the American people."
Brown called the president’s deployment of National Guard troops to cities “un-American” and “unlawful.”
Brown said his team has been in close contact with Oregon Attorney General Dan Rayfield, who filed a lawsuit against the White House on Sunday.
“Our team here has a great deal of experience in preparing and researching these issues, and we want to make sure that if any unlawful and unconstitutional actions happen, that we will be prepared to respond,” Brown said.
Brown said before the president orders the deployment of the National Guard, he’s supposed to work with the governor’s office to establish justification or rationale for sending in troops. That procedure did not happen in Los Angeles this summer, Brown said.
If something similar were to happen in Washington state or Seattle, where the president sends in troops without clear cause, that could mean a lawsuit, he said.
Harrell and Brown said federal troops are not needed to protect federal buildings in Seattle during protests and dismissed the president’s claims of rampant crime in the city. They cited drops in crime numbers and increases in police hiring in recent years.
“We don't need the United States military here,” Brown said. “We don't need President Trump continuing his reckless and destructive behavior in the great state of Washington.”
This story comes to you from the Northwest News Network, a collaboration between public media organizations in Oregon and Washington.
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