Blockades, Chaos and Pepper Spray at Mass SeaTac Demonstration Denouncing Trump's Immigration Ban

Saturday evening, with an organizing time of just two hours, Seattle activists managed to gather a massive crowd at SeaTac International airport in protest of Donald Trump’s executive order suspending immigration from several primarily Muslim countries and indefinitely banning Syrian refugees.

The order has been decried as unconstitutional by the ACLU, a stance given some credence Saturday when a federal judge put a partial stay on Trump’s order as its legality is determined. In the meantime, a crowd of well over 1,000 people amassed at the arrivals level at SeaTac Saturday evening with a unified message that they would not stand for the action.

The crowd size grew so large that at Sound Transit temporarily halted service to the SeaTac light rail station in hopes of stemming the flow of people to the airport, only to see activists arrive by bus from the Tukwila station instead.

According to SeaTac’s official Twitter account, the airport requested the service suspension around 7 p.m. Sound Transit said it was only in effect for 10 minutes, and King County Executive Dow Constantine, who’s also in charge of Sound Transit, seemed to suggest Saturday evening that the suspension should not have happened.

Read more: http://www.seattleweekly.com/news/blockades-chaos-and-pepper-spray-at-mass-seatac-demonstration-denouncing-trumps-immigration-ban/