by David Mendez

Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal has been an immigration advocate for more than two decades. She lobbied, cajoled and agitated when immigrants were under assault after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. She’s visited immigrant detention centers frequently throughout her career in public service. She’s an immigrant herself, having come to the United States at 16 years old, decades before obtaining U.S. citizenship and later representing Washington’s Seventh Congressional District.

And on Wednesday night, during a town hall event, she told an assembled crowd of more than 500 people at Third Place Commons that she’s never seen anything like what the second Trump administration, through agents from the Department of Homeland Security, is doing to immigrants.

“Because this is not about immigration, this is really about the militarization of our federal government against the people of the United States,” Jayapal told her constituents. “Donald Trump may have said that he was going to go after the worst of the worst…but what we are seeing today is nothing like that.”

ICE was on the minds of many last night in Lake Forest Park, and not just because a wintry mix of rain and slushy snow was falling outside. Many folks in nearby communities have been organizing to protect their neighbors and lobby their representatives since Ivan Guzman, a Mexican immigrant who worked in a Shoreline sandwich shop, was detained by federal agents on Aurora Ave. in late January.

“Even if you take ICE's own statistics, 85% of all the immigrants who are being held in those incarceration facilities have committed no federal violations at all. And so these are people who are being picked up, who are green card holders, who are U.S. citizens,” Jayapal said.

When asked by a constituent if she would commit to abolishing ICE, Jayapal demurred, saying that she prefers the term “dismantle ICE.” In 2018, Jayapal cosponsored legislation that she said would create a commission working on alternatives “to redesign the functions of ICE…And then ICE would be abolished at the end of that time, with the best alternative chosen,” she told NPR at the time.

She argued that her stance on ICE, and the Department of Homeland Security in general, hasn’t changed. 

“DHS is now this unwieldy, lawless agency with a culture of cruelty. And so it has to be completely dismantled,” Jayapal said Wednesday night. “We don’t need DHS to exist as it does. ICE and CBP don’t need to exist as they do. And we really need to get back to having agencies that serve the function they are supposed to serve, not the function of cruelty and lawlessness.”

Jayapal also sought to hammer out the concept of an “Epstein Class” — a group of wealthy and influential leaders who have been connected to Jeffery Epstein, the infamous child sex offender who was indicted on trafficking minors before his death while in federal custody. Earlier this month, Jayapal made headlines for her aggressive line of questioning toward Attorney General Pam Bondi during a House Judiciary Committee hearing. Bondi refused to answer questions about the Justice Department’s haphazard release of the Epstein Files, and appeared to have a prepared list of Jayapal’s search queries within the Epstein Files database. Jayapal later condemned the DOJ for “spying” on members of Congress.

“I think it is important also to recognize that there is a direct tie between what’s happening in the Epstein Files and what’s happening in the cover-up in all kinds of other arenas as well,” Jayapal said Wednesday. “Because when you have this class of people who are making these kinds of immoral decisions about the world, and are in these high-ranking positions, you begin to understand how it is that we, as the richest country in the world, now have the most wealth and income inequality that we have seen since the Great Depression.”

The final question of the town hall came from a Lake Forest Park business owner, Vijay Chakravarthy, of Always Summer Cafe, an ice cream and coffee shop that sits below Third Place Commons on the south-facing side of the mall. The shop is what it says on the sign: Warm, bright and sunny, even at night or in a dreary western Washington winter. The shop opened in March 2025 and — if the crowd’s reception to him was an indicator — it’s been a hit. Federal loans from the U.S. Small Business Administration have been “critical” to the shop’s establishment, he said. 

But on Feb. 2, the SBA published a policy update that requires that all owners of a small business applying for SBA loans be U.S. citizens or U.S. nationals. In other words, non-citizen immigrants, like permanent residents holding green cards or immigrant visa holders, are barred from obtaining federal SBA loans. That’s in accordance with a Trump executive order titled “Protecting the American People Against Invasion.”

That change is effective March 1 — little more than a week after the town hall.

Jayapal said the SBA loan change wasn’t on her radar, promising that her staff would look into the matter and get back to him. Then she turned her focus to Trump administration policies.

“This is part of what they’re doing Vijay, they’re trying to use every possible means of going after people who are immigrants,” she said. “If you’re on a visa, they make it harder for you to get that visa or they kick you out. Or if you’re getting loans — and you’re running a small business and the entire commons explodes in applause for you because they all love your restaurant, still, they’re trying to stop you from getting loans.”

Jayapal closed the town hall optimistically, saying that the room is full of love and belief in one another and their community. “I want to thank you for just giving me so much hope and resilience and pride in this district that I represent,” she added.

While many members of the crowd took up on Jayapal’s offer for a quick photo, more than a few skipped it to grab some ice cream and help out a neighbor’s small business. Even when it’s raining outside, it’s always summer there.