A Washington state firefighter has filed suit claiming he was denied full-time employment and removed from a part-time position on account of his Middle-Eastern descent and non-citizenship.
Damon Winters filed suit in April in US District Court in Seattle against the City of Lynden and Assistant Chief Robert Spinner. The fourteen count complaint accuses Chief Spinner of engaging in a variety of discriminatory actions based upon Winters’ Arab-Egyptian ethnicity.
According to the complaint, Winters “was born in Egypt, is a citizen of Egypt and Canada, and was a lawfully admitted permanent resident of the United States from December 29, 2010 until March 1, 2016, the day he became a United States citizen. He is not white or Caucasian. His ancestry, ethnicity, and race is Arab Egyptian.”