Banned Together

THERE WERE SIGNS OF LIFE earlier, fits of obstruction, but the moment when the Democratic Party officially awoke from its stupor and caught up to the reality of President Donald Trump came in the last weekend of January, at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport and a half-dozen places like it.

- Tim Murphy

On January 27, Trump had signed an executive order halting travel from seven predominantly Muslim countries. The next morning, following an example set by a few colleagues in New York, Rep. Pramila Jayapal, a member of Congress for all of 25 days, drove to SeaTac in the hopes of staging an intervention. One Somali man had already been put on a flight back to Europe before she arrived, but she feared that more deportations might be imminent.

There was a problem, though—Jayapal had no idea who or how many people were being detained, because Customs and Border Protection officials were refusing to come out and speak with her.

So after hours of haggling and waiting to no avail, Jayapal and a few allies, including fellow Rep. Suzan DelBene, piled into a Port of Seattle bus that snaked around the airport to the baggage handling area. They walked across the tarmac to the CBP office and banged on the door. When it finally opened, they told the CBP agents they had the governor on the line and needed answers. That got them the information they needed—the names of passengers set to be deported—and their intervention bought time for the courts, where lawyers had filed a challenge to the executive order. Late that night, with two would-be deportees already aboard a plane waiting to depart, a federal judge in Seattle, Thomas Zilly, issued a temporary restraining order halting the deportations. When the ordeal was over, Jayapal grabbed a megaphone to address a crowd of about 3,000 protesters inside the terminal.