Spokane Mayor Lisa Brown defends difficult decision to deploy police during Wednesday protests in order to avoid National Guard response

As immigration protests broke out downtown Wednesday night, Spokane Mayor Lisa Brown had to strike a balance, not wanting to appear to be assisting or condoning the actions of federal immigration agents while fearful President Donald Trump could use a weak police response to justify the deployment of the national guard, as he did recently in California.

“I think we’re all aware of the situation that unfolded in Los Angeles and the deployment of the National Guard troops and U.S. Marines to that city,” Brown said Wednesday night as the curfew she ordered took effect. “It was fairly clear to me that if there was no Spokane Police presence, that that could be used as a justification for the National Guard or other national agents to come in and take control of the situation.”

Her first response earlier in the afternoon had been to call Washington state Attorney General Nick Brown to see if there were any legal steps that could be taken to assist 21-year-old Cesar Alexander Alvarez Perez, who is seeking asylum from Venezuela, and Joswar Slater Rodriguez Torres, a Columbian national , and to connect the attorney general with former City Council President Ben Stuckart, who spurred the initial protest.

She insisted that Spokane police were not deployed to “assist” Immigration and Customs Enforcement in their detention and transport of the two men.

Once protesters surrounded the Cataldo Avenue ICE office and blocked the exits, and unknown activists spray-painted an ICE vehicle’s windshield and slashed another’s tire, they were violating city law, requiring local police response, she argued. City spokeswoman Erin Hut noted that some protesters began to remove park benches to use them to add to the barricade, which “could be seen as an escalation.”

The mayor had reiterated throughout the evening, including to Stuckart, that the city would keep the peace while abiding by the Keep Washington Working Act. Often referred to as Washington’s “sanctuary state” law, the 2019 state law prohibits local law enforcement from collaborating with federal immigration agencies, including by sharing nonpublic information, holding people on ICE’s request or arresting someone solely for a civil immigration offense, among other prohibitions.

Facing criticism from some activists for ultimately creating the space for ICE officials to leave the facility with the two detainees, transporting them to the state’s central ICE holding facility in Tacoma, Brown argued her office was duty-bound to respond to the obstruction of any facility’s public access and that it was unrealistic to imagine the situation would end any other way.

“I think it’s pretty clear from the observations I had of what was occurring there, and frankly from my communication throughout the afternoon with some of the protesters, that they did not expect that they would be successful in stopping ICE, a federal agency, from completing their mission,” Brown said Wednesday night. “I think anybody who’s observed that agency and its actions and the actions of this (federal) administration could reach the same conclusion.”

Stuckart and the initial protesters, before they were joined by hundreds from a separately, previously scheduled anti-ICE protest, had expressed clearly that they expected to be arrested, she added.

Once Spokane police did arrive en masse and protesters refused to disperse from the immediate area surrounding the ICE offices, continuing to attempt to blockade the entrances, the use of limited crowd dispersal munitions such as smoke grenades and pepper balls became necessary, as did the eventual curfew order, she argued.

Notably, the curfew was announced shortly before 8:30 p.m. and wouldn’t take effect for nearly an hour, giving protesters time to disperse, and it was not aggressively enforced when it began at 9:30. The area where the curfew took effect was limited, as well – so much so that a small group of protesters gathered outside the doors of City Hall just a few blocks away, visible and audible from a 10 p.m. news conference Brown held to debrief the events of the evening.

Broadly, Brown has stood behind the police department’s response, but has also stated her office would review the incident to determine whether any mistakes were made and planned to be open about their assessment.