Spokane police waited hours to respond to the ICE protest, upsetting federal agents. Here's why

Almost a year ago, immigration agents looked out their Spokane office window and saw a group of around 20 protesters sitting in front of a white bus meant to transport a group of detained immigrants to Tacoma. They called police searching for help.

The group was sitting, singing and passing out water.

"We all need to remain nonviolent. It doesn't do us any good when police show up if we are confrontational," former City Council President Ben Stuckart, who initiated the protest, told the demonstrators sitting near the bus.

The agents wanted the protesters dealt with, and they wanted the local police to handle it. But police didn't show up.

"I was frustrated," U.S. Department of Homeland Security attaché John LaForte said during last week's federal trial of the three protesters convicted by a federal jury of conspiracy to impede or injure federal agents.

LaForte testified he asked the protesters to move from the bus so they could transport the immigrants to the Tacoma detention center. The protesters declined, he said, so he decided to call 911. He got in touch with someone, but was told the police were unable to respond at that time.

Spokane police Chief Kevin Hall was the one who spoke to LaForte that day, he told The Spokesman-Review. It's not that police declined to show up altogether ; it's that Hall wanted to explore other options before sending an entourage of his officers to surround a group of people sitting on the sidewalk.

"When (LaForte) called me, I asked him a series of questions, like, 'What does it look like if you just stay in the building?' or, 'Can you self-evacuate, is it safe, do you feel unsafe staying in the building?' They assured me they did not feel unsafe staying in the building. They were fine staying in the building, but they wanted to leave," Hall said. "They were very frustrated that we just didn't come in and move people."

Around 5:30 p.m. that day, agents decided they did not feel comfortable exiting through the main doors. Instead, they chose to exit through a south parking lot gate.

As they walked to the gate, protesters saw them and ran to block their exit. That's when a group of agents entered the crowd and immediately began grabbing people by the heads and necks and shoving them toward the ground. The agents were not heard announcing themselves or seen attempting to de-escalate the crowd, according to video footage shown at trial.

When the crowd didn't move, the agents gave up and walked back into the facility. The crowd was angry, and the police had not arrived yet. Demonstrators at a separate protest happening at the same time nearby within Riverfront Park heard about what was going on across the river and made their way to join those at the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility. The protest increased by a few hundred people.

"You expect when you call 911, somebody will show," said Greg McSullivan, a Homeland Security agent. "Nobody was coming to help us."

"We didn't say we weren't coming," Hall told The Spokesman-Review. "We were exploring all the different options to handle this without us being there. Slowing things down in time is de-escalation. ... We saw that wasn't working, and it was actually ramping up, we shifted gears."

Hall had to weigh placing his officers at an ICE facility without violating the Keep Washington Working Act, a state law that prevents local law enforcement from assisting ICE in the scope of their duties. Spokane Police Department policy states that while police are not permitted to assist ICE, they can provide traffic control or "peacekeeping efforts" during a federal operation if an on-duty supervisor deems it necessary.

Balancing it all, and in a rapidly changing, dynamic environment was a sort of "shadow" behind the protest, he said.

"This was new for us, it was new for the city attorney's office, and we didn't know where the lines were drawn when I'm putting my own officers in jeopardy for violating the Keep Washington Work Act as opposed to addressing criminal behavior," Hall said.

Some did escalate to criminal behavior - people had slashed tires of the Border Patrol van and spray-painted the windshield of the white bus. It was enough for the police to decide to step in.

"There came a point where the department made the decision to say this is criminal behavior we have to address, and we have a group of people in a building who aren't being allowed to leave," Hall said. "None of that is aiding or abetting immigration enforcement; that's enforcing local law."

During the protest, Stuckart called Spokane Mayor Lisa Brown, both of whom had known each other through local politics for many years. He attempted to explain it to her: He was the legal guardian of one of the immigrants.

Joswar Rodriguez Torres and his friend were detained that day during a routine check-in with ICE, even though they were allowed to live and work in the U.S. Rodriguez Torres was later released because ICE had illegally detained him, a judge ruled earlier this year.

"My first instinct was to see if there was a way that the state or local could assist in getting (the immigrants) released legally, and I hit a dead end there," Brown told The Spokesman-Review on Tuesday.

As Brown was monitoring some social media posts about the protest, she said it appeared like some demonstrators believed a protest would coerce the release of the immigrants. She never believed that was the case, she said.

A week prior, Brown had been at a national conference with city mayors across the country. President Donald Trump's wave of National Guard deployments into U.S. cities, mostly ones with Democratic mayors and large-scale ICE protests, was a topic of discussion there. The possibility of facing the same outcome concerned her.

"Understanding what other mayors were experiencing made me aware that we needed to do whatever possible to address the situation locally," Brown said. "It was definitely in my mind that the federal government would potentially be using any incident as a justification to send in national troops."

Officers arrived around 6:30 p.m., four hours after the agents had called. Ultimately, no national troops were called in to the city, but it took time to plan how many officers were going to respond, where to place them and what to do to calm the chaos. Their plan was solid, Hall believed.

"When the first wave of officers got there, the plan was to just move the crowd a little bit so that we could create a corridor to allow people out of the building," Hall said. "Then we were all going to leave."

The crowd was not cooperative with that, Hall said. Police were quickly outnumbered.

"That's where I think some of the confusion lies. I can't snap my fingers and have 200 cops there immediately. We were already out of cops. We had already pulled cops from the rest of the city," Hall said. "I needed to do a full city call out of officers, and that takes time. We didn't anticipate the level of resistance that we got."

Police leaders decided their team would create two skirmish lines, or a line where police stand shoulder-to-shoulder to direct a crowd's movement in a certain direction. Spokane County Sheriff's deputies joined the group of police and widened their perimeter to encompass much of the yard abutting the side of the building off Washington Street. Law enforcement attempted to talk with the protesters about their options to leave or be arrested, according to video footage of the protest. When it became clear people were willing to be arrested for blocking entrances and cars, Hall said the department had to call in more officers to transport the arrestees and ensure police still were responding to other calls in the rest of the city.

Hall issued a departmentwide callout for officers to respond if they had the ability to do so. For some officers, it was the first time in their law enforcement career they had received such a call.

Police decided not to go into the crowd ready to arrest immediately, officers testified at trial. The police's dialogue unit, a newly formed unit that focuses on First Amendment expressions, was on standby, although it was in its infancy at the time. Officers trained in dialogue and de-escalation tend to focus on overly communicating with protesters about why the officers are there, why they are making certain decisions, speaking to people in a calm and friendly tone and attempting to work with people to help them continue protesting in a way that doesn't result in arrest. Some of the protesters had been amped up enough from hours before that the unit's assistant commander Sgt. Keith Gonsalves said he made a recommendation that some of those officers don't enter the crowd, but to try and use similar tactics to calm people down.

An upwards of 200 law enforcement officers from across the area ultimately responded to the protest that day.

"We gave protesters multiple verbal warnings, we need you to move back, we need to create some space here. We encourage them that we aren't telling you to leave," Gonsalves said during trial. "Some were listening to commands, some were not ... Protests have been typically peaceful here, and that day was not. If we did something that was misconstrued, it could set off the crowd."

U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives Agent Jared Tomaso, who was one of the agents in the scuffle of protesters outside the parking lot gate, said during trial he does know how to de-escalate a situation, but wouldn't say agents receive "formal" training on it.

"We always train with the mindset of using the least amount of force necessary," Tomaso said. When Tomaso and other agents entered the crowd outside the parking lot gate, they are not heard announcing themselves or speaking in a calm voice with protesters. They are shown instead rounding the corner, grabbing and ripping away a banner and immediately grabbing the heads, necks and arms of people and shoving them toward the ground.

Tomaso said on the stand that there "wasn't an opportunity" to use de-escalation tactics at that point.

Hall said city police officers often have more training than federal agents do on de-escalation and working with crowds.

"I am not trying to attack any person, but federal agencies, (crowd control) is not their arena ... We do this a lot," Hall said. "This crowd consists of teachers who teach our children, grocery clerks who bag your groceries, folks who deliver your mail. These are normal, regular community-based folks, and we've seen that at all of these demonstrations.

"So to think of them as enemies and as all criminals, I think is too broad of a brush."

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