The fallout from two ICE arrests in Spokane: ‘We’re in a terrible Catch-22’
The immigration arrests this past week in Spokane, in retrospect, seem almost perfectly designed to provoke backlash.
The young migrants who got detained came into the country legally and had filed all the proper paperwork for asylum. So they weren’t skirting the law.
They weren’t living in the shadows, either. They had work permits and jobs at Walmart.
One also has a judge-appointed legal guardian — who happens to be past president of the Spokane City Council.
“ICE called him up and told him to come in for a routine check-in, to be there at noon,” says Ben Stuckart, who was on the City Council for eight years and recently became the guardian for Cesar Alvarez Perez, from Venezuela. “I had suspicions about it. But you can’t just decide not to show up, because then you’re going to be in real trouble.
“He had gone through every single correct procedure, and so he showed up at the ICE office to follow the rules.”
It turned out to be a lose-lose situation — and an explosive one.
Alvarez Perez and a friend from Colombia were detained at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement office check-in and sent to the Northwest ICE Processing Center in Tacoma for possible deportation. While Stuckart got arrested trying to block the ICE van as an estimated thousand protesterspoured into the Spokane streets.
This is how it has been going of late in Los Angeles, Chicago and other cities. Provocative ICE arrests of working or rule-following immigrants have touched off protests ranging from civil disobedience all the way to arson. Which in turn led to President Donald Trump calling in the military to some American streets.
“I felt as it was happening that they were fine with provoking a reaction,” Stuckart told me. “It serves their purposes. Why else would you go to the trouble of making a big show of detaining someone who has done absolutely nothing wrong?”
It’s a great question — one that even some Republican members of Congress are starting to ask.
Despite all the storm and drama, did you know the Trump administration has actually been deporting no more people so far than the Joe Biden administration did last year?
Biden’s ICE quietly averaged 742 removals per day nationwide in 2024, according to data collected from ICE by the nonpartisan Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, or TRAC. The edict was to focus on those with criminal convictions or with repeat immigration violations.
Trump’s ICE has noisily averaged 737 removals per day through April — about 1% fewer.
In Washington state, TRAC data shows the new administration also is filing dramatically fewer cases in immigration courts. For example, in April they filed just 392 deportation cases, a monthly low for the past four years. A year ago April, Biden’s immigration system filed 2,517 deportation cases in the state.
Now part of this disparity is that Biden’s lax border policies led to a record influx of new arrivals, especially asylum cases. All that began to slow last June after he halted most asylum claims at the border.
It appears to have left Trump scrambling to try to boost deportation numbers. ICE has resorted of late to rounding up construction workers who have work permits, swooping in on Home Depots and sitting in wait at office check-ins.
In concern about this, six Republican House members last week started to get cold feet. They demanded to know, of the roughly 100,000 people deported so far this year, how many have been convicted criminals?
“While we do agree that we are a nation of laws, there are levels of priority that must be considered when it comes to immigration enforcement,” the six Republicans wrote to ICE. “Every minute that we spend pursuing an individual with a clean record is a minute less that we dedicate to apprehending terrorists or cartel operatives.”
In other words: Stop rounding up the gardeners, the nursing aides, the Walmart workers. Do deportation more like Biden did.
In the Spokane case, the arrests of Alvarez Perez and his friend were the opposite of what someone concerned about the rule of law would want to see. It sent a powerful signal that rules are for dupes — that the system is there not to reward merit or civic-mindedness, but to ensnare you.
“The basic framework of Trump’s interior enforcement is that it is whimsical and arbitrary,” writes David Bier, director of immigration studies for the conservative Cato Institute.
“Under President Biden, no one knew why people were getting into the country. Now no one knows why people are getting thrown out.”
Just those two detentions on one day in Spokane so inflamed parts of the town that 30 people got arrested.
Stuckart, the former City Council president, said he got out of jail at 1:30 a.m. Thursday and now is at home, feeling utterly confounded. Several times in our interview he choked up out of frustration.
Was his legal ward, Alvarez Perez, hustled away in part to incite controversy? Or was he just the collateral damage of a blundering attempt at hitting political deportation goals?
Both the Spokane mayor, Lisa Brown, and the state attorney general, Nick Brown, had cautioned Stuckart about his civil disobedience of sitting in front of the ICE van, he says. They worried he was poking the bear, giving the belligerent Trump reason to call out Washington state’s National Guard.
“But what are you supposed to do?” he cried. “Are you supposed to sit there and let it happen? Just let the ICE van sweep away people who have done nothing wrong? Or if you object, they’re going to call in the military?
“We’re in a terrible Catch-22.”
Biden’s border chaos has been replaced with Trump’s interior chaos. Does the public really want ICE now to round up people who work at nail salons and big box stores? With the border calm, Trump could go after criminal deportations alone and simply declare victory on immigration.
Unless of course what happened in Spokane this past week — the detentions and the backlash, the cruelty and the chaos, all of it — was the point.
Danny Westneat, Seattle Times. dwestneat@seattletimes.com. Danny Westneat takes an opinionated look at the Puget Sound region's news, people and politics.