Advocates for Asian Massage Workers Decry 'Sexist, Racist' Raids in Seattle
Bothell police set out in search of sex trafficking and ended up shutting down five businesses for code violations.
In a Seattle suburb, police recently raided five massage businesses suspected of prostitution—and ended up inviting some serious accusations against themselves.
The raids took place in Bothell and were conducted by the Bothell Police Department amid what it described as "ongoing community concerns." But groups concerned with massage worker and immigrant rights say police actions are simply the latest example of discrimination and state violence against Asian women and immigrant workers.
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"You're patting your own back for solving fabricated issues based on your own sexist, racist ideas, and Asian massage workers are paying the price," said Lee Chen at an April 20 rally outside of the King County Jail.
The rally was organized by the Massage Parlor Organizing Project (MPOP), Whose Streets? Our Streets, Red Canary Song, and the International Migrants Alliance, according to Northwest Asian Weekly.
"When these police officers entered these businesses, they barely identified themselves," said organizer J.M. Wong at the rally. "There was no language interpretation. There was no identifying of Miranda rights. People did not know that they could maintain silence."
One Arrest, No Charges, and 5 Code-Violation Shutdowns
Two of the raided businesses—including one just feet away from the Bothell police headquarters—are owned by Lizhen Yang, according to KIRO 7. "She and her husband deny any wrongdoing."
As of last Monday, only one person had been arrested, police said.
That person seems to have been Yang, who was booked into the King County Correctional Facility on April 14 on suspicion of promoting prostitution and human trafficking. She was released the next day, without charges. The King County jail information system now lists her case status as "closed."
All five massage businesses were shut down, with authorities citing fire code violations.
"Why are immigrant businesses being targeted by large-scaled investigations and raids by detectives, police, and fire department over fire code violations?" asked MPOP on Instagram.
According to MPOP, police "ripped security cameras from walls, toppled furniture, knocked down doors, signage, and artwork from the walls" during the raids. "They also seized money from workers."
And those workers are now out of jobs. Police offered no indication if or when the five massage businesses may be allowed to reopen.
MPOP emphasized how raids like the ones in Bothell "don't help workers," who may be traumatized by the encounters with police, have their belongings seized as evidence, and face the threat of deportation. They're part of "systems that silence and criminalize the very workers they claim to be 'saving.'"
Bothell Raids Part of a Larger Pattern
MPOP also noted that these raids are part of a larger pattern of "carceral anti-trafficking," in which (real or imagined) exploitation is addressed not through worker rights and immigrant rights but "police violence, displacing workers, [and] shutting down immigrant businesses," often in conjunction with partners like the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
I wrote extensively about one such operation a decade ago. King County authorities announced that operation as if they had busted an international sex trafficking ring involving Korean women. But no one was ever convicted of sex trafficking. There was ample evidence that the women being described as "slaves" were simply sex workers who moved about freely. The "league" of men police initially described as traffickers were simply patrons and/or commenters on a review board website. And the owner of that website committed suicide during the investigation, in which investigators sought to portray him as a trafficker for running a website where sex workers and their clients posted.
That was my first introduction to the way Asian sex workers are often presumed to be trafficking victims, and how anyone associated with them is assumed to be traffickers. And this happens not just with Asian women explicitly working in the sex trade but those who own or work at massage businesses as well.
We saw this on vivid display during the 2019 stings at Florida massage parlors that led to charges against New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft.
But these big, splashy raids are far from isolated incidents. Homeland Security agents and their informants have a bustling side business in visiting Asian massage parlors—sometimes for months or even years on end—in order to look for evidence of prostitution. (I detailed many such cases in this 2020 Reason cover story, "Massage Parlor Panic.")
Local and federal authorities frequently advertise these operations as being aimed at "human trafficking," but wind up, at most, finding evidence of sex work, code violations, or people giving massages without a license.
Raids Part of Effort to 'Clean Up' Ahead of World Cup, Some Say
At the King County rally, J.H. Chen, with MPOP, spoke of how massage licensure rules make criminals of workers who can't afford pricey licensure schemes or pass an exam with no interpreter. Washington state "forces Asian workers to pay exorbitant training fees of upwards of at least $13,000 and pass an English-Spanish only exam," she said.
The prospect of masseuses working without licenses—or possibly even massaging body parts that police say it's illegal to massage—gives authorities cover for raids and for portraying workers as trafficking victims.
In Bothell, a police update six days after the raids alleged that they had found "workers in lingerie, a worker who was nude, and sexual paraphernalia alongside new and used condoms," in addition to "a significant amount of bodily fluids in and about the rooms." At one location, investigators allegedly "interrupted a sex act being performed by a worker – when questioned, both the worker and the patron admitted there was an agreement to perform the sex act for money."
But the update mentions nothing about police uncovering evidence of force, coercion, human smuggling, or even licensure violations or immigration violations.
This is how it so often goes in "human trafficking" investigations at Asian massage businesses—lending credence to claims that such stings are more about getting rid of businesses that some find tacky or otherwise undesirable as opposed to being a true public safety measure.
At the King County rally, "advocates said the arrests were a publicized effort to 'clean up' the city ahead of this summer's FIFA Men's World Cup matches in Seattle," according to The Seattle Times.
The most "damning" evidence we have right now seems to be that some employees may have been Chinese immigrants. A woman who worked at one of the businesses allegedly told police that she and other employees at the spa performed sex acts there, according to a Times characterization of a probable cause affidavit filed in the case. The woman "said her boss brings women from China to work at the parlor and other locations."
Stereotypes about Asian women and about immigrants allow massage parlor trafficking myths to thrive, and allow police to get away with pretextual stings.
But Chen said that MPOP has talked to hundreds of Asian massage workers and has not found trafficking to be a problem among them, Northwest Asian Weekly reports.
We obviously can't say for certain that police won't yet uncover any exploitation in Bothell. But nearly two weeks after the raids, we've got five businesses shut down for code violations—putting who knows how many employees out of work—and no one charged with a crime, let alone a serious crime.
In the News
Law enforcement's use of location tracking data goes before the Supreme Court today. "Geofence warrants," in which authorities seek info not on a specific suspect but anyone in a given geographic area, "give cops leads but create false positives and have spurred legal challenges," notes James Romoser at The Wall Street Journal. The case before the Supreme Court centers on a Virginia bank robbery:
The case at the high court was brought by Okello Chatrie, who is serving a 12-year prison sentence for robbing a credit union near Richmond, Va. Chatrie says the geofence warrant that was used to identify him was unconstitutional.
Privacy advocates, civil-liberties groups and tech companies have weighed in on Chatrie's side, urging the Supreme Court to limit the use of the warrants. Alphabet unit Google, meanwhile, has taken a step to curb them.
More than 500 million Google users have the platform's location-history function enabled, and until recently, the company had stored all of that data on its own servers. But by July 2025, the company had migrated the data to users' individual devices. So Google no longer has the technical ability to search its user database and identify all users who were present at particular locations.
Google filed an amicus brief at the Supreme Court describing users' location data as a kind of "digital diary of a person's travels" that should have strong privacy protections under the Fourth Amendment.
On Substack
Stephanie Murray's newsletter is always full of interesting data. Her latest entry alone contains info on studies about how attitudes toward transgender rights differ based on parenting status, the relationship between a country's child population and its student test scores, how attitudes toward working moms vary by class, a study on how homeownership is linked to fertility in China, and much more—including this tidbit:
Unattractive Men Are More Likely To Force Their Partners into Sex
At least according to this working paper! It uses U.S. data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health), which follows a nationally representative sample of adolescents into adulthood and apparently includes interviewer ratings of respondents' physical attractiveness. The survey includes questions about within-couple sexual coercion, specifically whether the respondent has ever "insisted on or made [partner] have sexual relations with [respondent] when [partner] didn't want to." Surprisingly, just about 10% of men and 5.4% of women report having forced sexual relations on their partner at least once. Among men, "a one-point increase in beauty ratings decreases the likelihood of perpetrating sexual violence toward one's partner by 1.3 percentage points," translating to a 13 percent reduction. No effect for women.
Read This Thread
OK, two threads today, both from the Free Speech Coalition's Mike Stabile and both on the way age verification laws tend to migrate beyond their original mandates:
We're now in world in which age-based viewing restrictions and warning labels become a solution for any speech we don't like: in this case, videos of athletes who've used performance-enhancing drugs.Censorship never stays "strictly confined," it escapes and spreads like oil-based lube.
— Mike Stabile (@mikestabile.bsky.social) 2026-04-24T16:06:00.896Z
Proton's CEO says age-verification is okay so long as its "strictly confined to areas like pornography and social media." Let me tell you how misguided this is — especially from the head of a "privacy first" company. 🧵
— Mike Stabile (@mikestabile.bsky.social) 2026-04-23T17:22:36.702Z
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• A new "anti-algorithmic discrimination law" in Colorado "tries to regulate the speech associated with AI tools," notes David Inserra at the Cato Institute. "And in a newly filed lawsuit, xAI accuses Colorado of again trying to silence speech that conflicts with the state's viewpoint."
• Meta is cutting about 10 percent of its workforce, the latest in a series of layoffs this year. In January, "Meta fired about 10% of employees who were working on metaverse-related projects," reports CNBC:
Roughly 1,000 people in the company's Reality Labs unit were let go at that time. Another round of layoffs commenced in March and affected hundreds of employees working in a variety of units, including Facebook, Reality Labs, global operations and sales. Meta also said last month that it would shift away from third-party vendors and contractors, which have historically handled content moderation tasks, in favor of relying on various AI technologies.
• Robot recruiters prefer AI writing to human writing.
• New moral panic alert:
💊 Emojis used as coded language to promote illegal activities online?
Some platforms are now detecting emojis used as code for drug sales.
This is one of the key findings of the first EU-wide report on systemic online risks.
Dive in → https://t.co/oAlxoNdogu#DSAForReal pic.twitter.com/OMq0YyIEF5
— Digital EU 🇪🇺 (@DigitalEU) April 22, 2026
