The pews of Town Hall Seattle were full on Tuesday, January 27, as constituents filed in for an event with US Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-7). A projector displayed footage of the congresswoman’s impassioned rebuttals and fired-up speeches at recent hearings, as she questioned members of President Trump’s cabinet, such as FBI Director Kash Patel, about current issues, including the Epstein files and ICE operations in Minneapolis.
As she entered the stage, she was enthusiastically welcomed with a standing ovation. “This is my 127th town hall,” she recalled, asking for those who hadn’t attended one before to raise their hands.
The event was split into two parts: first a speech by Rep. Jayapal, who ran down the issues she had been working on in Washington, DC, then a Q&A for constituents to voice their concerns.
She started off by addressing the events in Minneapolis. “With [Alex] Pretti’s murder, we know what we saw,” she said. “And this moment calls for us to do everything we can to protect our democracy because they are trying to steal it from under our eyes... Renee Good was a US citizen, a mom, a wife, a daughter, a neighbor, a friend… DHS lying to us, trying to assassinate not just her, which they did, but also trying to assassinate her character and the character of her wife, Becca.”
The congresswoman also told the audience that her office was working closely with Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson, King County Executive Girmay Zahilay, and Gov. Bob Ferguson, among others, regarding the threat from ICE. She also said that although Washington had seen ICE activity, it hasn’t been to the same extent as other states so far.
Additional issues she touched upon included Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill,” the rising costs of education and healthcare, and foreign policy concerns with Venezuela and Greenland, among other things.
Her speech ended by thanking the public for being civically engaged in resistance against the administration’s authoritarian policies. “This is making a difference,” she said. “You’re showing up at rallies, at protests, in Minnesota, in nonviolent resistance that’s really taking on serious risk and showing up in different way than just in a protests or a rally. This is ultimately what defeats authoritarians around the world.”
Q&A
The SGN asked Rep. Jayapal two questions at the meeting: first, about Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, who broke with the party, alongside six other Democrats, to vote in favor of DHS and ICE funding increases five days before; and second, what more progressive Democrats, like Rep. Jayapal, were doing to prevent party members from supporting ICE and other Trump-related policies.
Rep. Jayapal said that every year since being elected, she has voted against increases in DHS funding. Then she remarked that “there was an effort [by Democrats] to make sure that this was a unified vote. And there [were] some people who, for whatever reasons they had, didn’t do that. I think that their constituents need to hold them accountable in whatever way feels appropriate.”
The SGN also asked Rep. Jayapal about the treatment of Trans people in Congress, including Delaware Rep. Sarah McBride, and what progress had been made to protect Transgender civil rights more broadly. She pointed out how she was co-chair of the Transgender Equality Task Force and that “we’re doing everything we can to both fight back against the attacks on Trans people [and] also to elect more Trans people, to make sure that we are holding up our end of the bargain [as the US government] to let people be who they are, and to not target Trans people across the country.”
A majority of the night’s questions were cordial, and primarily centered around concerns about immigration and protecting people from Trump’s policies and ICE. One woman asked how Rep. Jayapal’s office was working to prevent election interference by Trump officials, out of a fear of the upcoming 2026 midterms being suspended, while another attendee expressed concerns about the threat of ICE agents intimidating people at the polls.
Rep. Jayapal responded to both questions with how former special counsel Jack Smith, in his investigation of the January 6 insurrection, surmised that the threat of subsequent election interference under Trump was a very real possibility, adding that “the only thing I can tell you is we are doing everything we can to make sure that doesn’t happen again.”
One attendee, named Nastassya and wearing a purple “Fuck Nazis” sweater, challenged Rep. Jayapal about why she had not filed or called for articles of impeachment against Trump in his second term. The congresswoman responded dismissively to the question, saying that it would not be worth her time, because Democrats do not have the votes right now, as well as emphasizing her track record of filing and voting in favor of impeachment in the past.
Nastassya told the SGN after the event that in March 2025, while she attended a Tesla Takedown protest with Rep. Jayapal as a guest speaker, she had the opportunity to speak briefly with her about the impeachment question. According to Nastassya, “she told me that doing so would be a waste of her time.”
As the Q&A segment came to a close, Rep. Jayapal thanked the attendees for participating and said that she would be taking photos with people for a few minutes afterward. A man from back of a line of people wanting to ask questions, who sported a Bisexual flag patch on his jacket shoulder, called out to her in frustration: “So you have time for photo ops, but not time for our questions?”
“That’s it, sorry, we’re done with time,” she replied.
The full livestream recording of Rep. Jayapal’s Jan. 27 Seattle Town Hall event is available on YouTube.
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