Facing eviction, yet again, several dozen asylum-seekers marched into King County Council’s Health and Human Services committee meeting Tuesday morning at the King County Courthouse, asking for help. And this time, it came.
After attending the committee meeting, Councilmember Sarah Perry called several community leaders and was able to secure $60,000 thanks to a donation by the Muslim Association of Puget Sound that will ensure no one from the group has to sleep outside tonight.
“I just called, and I said, ‘We have an emergency,’” Perry said Tuesday. The asylum-seekers were given the OK to stay inside the King County Courthouse until it closed at 5 p.m., but Perry said she was worried about what could happen next.
The money will pay for about 61 rooms at the Kent Quality Inn for more than 200 adults and children, largely from Venezuela, who have been living in hotels for nearly the last two months, after first seeking shelter at the Riverton Park United Methodist Church in Tukwila — which has become the unintentional center of King County’s growing asylum-seeker crisis.
It should last for at least the next two weeks, Perry said. And she’s already heard from one other faith leader who says they’re game to help after this donation runs out.
“We’re living in one of the wealthiest states, you know. We have refugees right here and we can’t help them. That just didn’t sit right with me,” said Mubarak Elamin, who received Perry’s call for help.
Elamin said he reached out to the Muslim Association of Puget Sound, which he is a member of, and they quickly got back to him.
Hyder Ali, a founding member of the association, said it has a long history of supporting migrants and refugees arriving in the region.
Additionally, the call came at an important time for his faith community.
“We are approaching the month of fasting Ramadan, which is a very spiritual month, and a month where we as Muslims do a lot of charity,” Ali said.
The asylum-seekers were largely living outside on the Riverton Park’s property, some for months. In mid-January, a local organization offered to help them move into the Kent Quality Inn to get out of the elements as the region prepared for single-digit temperatures.
But since moving inside, they’ve faced rolling evictions ever since.
First, the organization that moved them into the inn stopped paying the bills. The inn allowed them to stay for a few weeks for free before telling them they had to leave.
Then, the city of Seattle stepped in with $200,000. The city first extended everyone’s stay in Kent before moving the group into two separate hotels in South King County.
But Seattle’s money ran out near the end of February.
Since then, the leader of Riverton Park church, the Rev. Jan Bolerjack, was able to provide $25,000 in private donations, which has lasted about a week.
Tuesday morning, the group woke up knowing that they had to be out of their rooms by 11 a.m., Perry said. And with that fear, they attended the King County Council committee meeting.
“We are very afraid of what is going to happen to us,” Roslin Pallares said at the courthouse through a translator. She’s been living at the Quality Inn and attended the county meetings regularly to advocate for help.
Although, she added, “it’s not easy to expose ourselves, expose our lives and expose our children.”
Another member of the group, Jonathan Lutumba, said he walked across 10 countries to get to the United States, just to find suffering when he arrived.
Lutumba urged the Health and Human Services committee to take the first step to help the group secure housing, “and after the first step,” he said through an interpreter, “we’ll do the rest.”