Man without a country: ICE arrests Spokane resident brought to America as toddler
A rainy morning in a North Spokane neighborhood erupted Tuesday with the kind of legal reckoning that’s uprooting families across Washington and the country.
A series of videos captured the confrontation that started when 35-year-old Martin R. Diaz pulled his SUV in front of his home a few blocks south of Hays Park. Diaz sits in his vehicle for a moment before another vehicle arrives.
Diaz then exits his vehicle and runs into his own yard. He ditches what appears to be a coffee mug as a man gains ground and catches Diaz as he tries to enter the fence gate into his back yard.
“I caught you, (expletive),” said a man who was later identified as a federal agent, as two more run into the yard to take Diaz into custody.
The next video shows Diaz’s roommate, Douglas Young, on a camera in Diaz’s back yard as the agents struggle with Diaz off camera.
“What are you guys doing?” Young asks as the agents wrestle for control over Diaz.
One of the agents says, “Get back, get back,” as Young replies: “You have no right to come onto my property. This is his house. YOU get the (expletive) back.”
An agent, who is wearing black civilian clothes and what appear to be long shorts, warns Young again to back away. “Do not interfere with us right now.”
Young, the roommate, tells the agents to get off Diaz. “He’s a good guy.” The agent responds: “No, he’s not.”
The arrest is the latest chapter of a decades-long attempt by Diaz to become a U.S. citizen after his family brought him here from Mexico when he was not quite 2 years old.
“He’s been dealing with this since he was 18,” said Kendall Diaz, who married Martin Diaz in 2018. He “has lived here his entire life. And, he’s done amazing things servicing our community.
“He’s tried his best to be a good human,” she said. “He’s just living the cards he was dealt.”
Roar of silence
Kendall Diaz, 31, a real estate agent, wasn’t home when the federal authorities arrested her husband on Tuesday. She watched her husband being taken down on her Ring Home Security cameras.
She later learned from U.S. Border Patrol agents that her husband had been sent to the Kootenai County Jail in Coeur d’Alene. As of Friday afternoon, she had not been able to see Diaz since his arrest.
“He called me on Wednesday and said he had been placed in medical holding. I asked him why. He started crying and then our phone cut off,” she said. “All I got was that he had something that placed him in medical holding. I have no idea still to this day what happened.”
Diaz, who is also known in legal documents as Martin R. Diaz-Amezcua, then texted Kendall on Friday.
“So, essentially, he messaged me that he was still in Kootenai County and that he wasn’t sure when ICE was going to transfer him. They have now given him privileges to contact me and has been given a book to read,” she said.
Kendall Diaz has also been in contact with their attorney, William Frick of Seattle, about what comes next.
Frick “is still trying to formulate a game plan, to be honest,” Kendall Diaz said. “He is going to try to push forward with the pending case with the Board of Immigration Appeals so that we can prove that we are working as efficiently and quickly as we can to get him legal status.
“Things are so different right now in this political climate.”
Immigration crackdown
President Donald Trump has promised to swiftly and aggressively deport immigrants with criminal records during his campaign and after the election, although some deportations included a child with cancer and a man, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, mistakenly deported to El Salvador that the administration has refused to bring back.
Regardless of numerous reports showing some people deported were not criminals or gang members, the president has refused to acknowledge it in prior interviews and press conferences, and said he “could” bring back Garica, but hasn’t.
Trump has also raised the idea of deporting not immigrants, but U.S. citizens, to the mega-prison in El Salvador. He was overheard in a meeting with the country’s president, Nayib Bukele, saying “The homegrowns are next.”
The Trump administration claimed “record breaking” immigration enforcement levels this month, a news release from the Department of Homeland Security said.
In the Inland Northwest, it appears ICE arrests have increased in the Kootenai County Jail where Spokane detainees are held before being transferred to the immigration detention center in Tacoma, according to previous reporting from The Spokesman-Review.
An effort to interview Diaz in the Kootenai County Jail was not successful on Friday.
More sightings of ICE are being posted online, and Spokane County citizens are reporting federal officials have come to their homes, usually looking for someone in particular.
Immigration agents came to a family’s home in Spokane Valley in April. They were looking for a 16-year-old Honduran immigrant for a “welfare check,” as part of a new policy under the Trump administration, The Spokesman reported.
In March, ICE agents smashed a window of a car with a pregnant woman inside to try to get to her husband and his brother, who had criminal records and were on their way to the Spokane County Courthouse for a hearing.
Jennyfer Mesa, executive director of Latinos en Spokane, has witnessed numerous immigration arrests, but believes the heightened awareness and increase in ICE presence is “the new normal.”
”We’re seeing how the Trump administration has ramped up this mass deportation – and is laying the groundwork to use branches of government that have not been involved in immigration … We’re seeing them use the IRS, the Health and Human Services and other agencies,” Mesa said in a previous interview.
As for the case against Diaz of Spokane, efforts to reach his attorney, Frick, were unsuccessful last week.
Longtime Spokane defense attorney Jeffry Finer said he is not representing Diaz, but is representing other clients who face many of the same challenges after federal prosecutors recently began taking a harder line on laws that have been on the books for decades.
Given a synopsis of the case for Diaz, Finer said it doesn’t look good for the Spokane business owner.
“It’s very dark at the moment,” Finer said of the federal actions. “I am afraid for people and their families. It’s the darkest I’ve ever seen this country.”
The crossing
Kendall Diaz said her husband’s family brought him to the United States from Mexico when Martin was a toddler.
The family fled persecution and gang violence in their Mexican city and attempted to seek asylum, Kendall Diaz said. Her husband even has a letter from a Michoacan government official explaining the dangers the Diaz family faced.
“His family members have been hunted and slaughtered. It’s not safe for him to be there,” Kendall Diaz said. “That’s not an option.”
The family initially lived in the Yakima area.
“His parents don’t speak English. His family still doesn’t have a lot of resources. It’s taken him all he has. His mother just got her green card and his sister got citizenship, but it took so much time,” Kendall Diaz said. “So when he turned 18, he saved every penny to try and get any legal filings paid.”
But a week after his 18th birthday, Martin Diaz got arrested in a case that continues to complicate his efforts to achieve legal status.
On Nov. 1, 2007, Diaz was initially charged with third-degree rape when a girl alleged that the couple had sex without her consent. Diaz later pleaded guilty to third-degree assault and was sentenced to a couple months in jail.
That prompted what’s called an “order of removal” regarding his legal status. In an effort to continue his efforts to get legal status, Diaz and his attorney, Frick, sought to have the order of removal vacated, but have been unsuccessful.
Diaz filed for divorce from his first wife in 2015. But in 2017, he had another scrape with the law that landed him a second felony conviction.
Diaz was charged with felony domestic violence, but the victim was not his ex-wife. It was his ex-wife’s father.
Kendall Diaz explained that the ex-wife wanted Diaz to leave her house and he refused. She called her father to help, and he and Diaz got into a fight in the front yard.
That further complicated efforts to get legal status. While they met in 2016, Diaz married Kendall in 2018.
Kendall Diaz estimated that couple has spent more than $100,000 on efforts to have Martin Diaz stay in this country. But she said she feels the paperwork is a process “set up to fail.”
“We’ve been constantly filing legal documents. And it’s murky, it’s always changing,” she said. “One ruling happens in Texas one month, another ruling happens in Virginia and then everything changes. It’s a difficult process to navigate.”
Despite all that, the couple had filed their I-130 form that provides a pathway to citizenship through his marriage to a U.S. citizen.
Then something weird happened on Feb. 1.
Fake collision
On that day, Kendall Diaz said she was home with the couple’s roommate, Young, when she noticed a couple standing in her front yard looking at her vehicle. The couple appeared to be checking Diaz’s car for damage.
“They were standing in my front yard, looking at my house,” she said.
Kendall Diaz walked out to investigate and asked the couple why they were there.
“They explicitly told me, ‘We hit your car.’ I’m like, ‘What is going on? How bad is it? Can I get your guys’ information,’ ” she said. “They said they slid on ice. It was a woman and a man.”
As the unknown woman and Diaz walked around her car looking for damage, Diaz noticed that the man was staring into her home’s windows.
“I said, ‘What is wrong with him?’ She said, ‘I think his meds are acting up,’ ” Diaz said of the woman’s comment.
About that time, Young walked out the front door. Out of nowhere, two vehicles quickly approached, and Border Patrol agents with AR-15 rifles swarmed Young and got him onto the ground.
“I told them over and over again, ‘This is a U.S. citizen.,’ They ended up leaving after I told them to get off my property,” she said.
Kendall Diaz now believes the agents were there for her husband, who was not home at the time.
She noted that the agent with black shorts from the arrest video from April 29 was the same man who was posing as the husband on Feb. 1 during the fake-collision incident.
Despite that earlier encounter, the couple kept up its effort on the I-130 form and finally had a breakthrough. On April 22, the couple got a letter from immigration officials asking them to apply for a visa.
Then a week later, the Border Patrol agent showed back up with other agents.
Takedown
On the April 29 arrest video, Young argued during the incident that the agents were violating Diaz’s rights by coming onto his property.
But Finer, the defense attorney, said that it appears the agents were within their rights for the actions as they were described to him.
“When you have an order for removal, there’s not a lot of protections … against arrest and seizures,” Finer said. “This guy was arrested in public. When he was running to the house, that might fall under the doctrine of ‘hot pursuit,’ which allows law enforcement in an active chase to go into a private home to make an arrest.”
As for the efforts to keep Diaz in the country, Finer said Diaz faces long odds.
“But for the accident of birth, he’s American. He’s in all respects Americanized,” Finer said. “The offenses he committed are common. They are street-level minor in the world of big offenses. It’s who he was on the two worst days of his life.”
But, those felony convictions will label him as “undesirable, even though a lot of young folks have engaged in similar behavior and become solid people,” Finer said.
If deported, Finer expects Diaz will be sent to Mexico.
“He’s not alone. A lot of people came over as children and never got around to it, or got around to it slowly, or they are like him, they have a record,” he said. “But his circumstances reveal a broad pattern throughout the country.”
The current fear and shock caused by the shift in immigration enforcement is personal to an attorney whose grandfather came to the U.S. as a refugee at age 14 and lived his entire life in fear of being removed, Finer said.
“This experience is close to my family. It wasn’t just a generation or two ago that my forebearers were trying to get to America to escape tyranny or the Holocaust,” he said. “It’s shocking.”
For Kendall Diaz, the young wife faces an ocean of uncertainty.
“There are U.S-born citizens murdering, raping and terrorizing our community, and they get to stay, because they are on this side of the border,” she said. “People will say he is a criminal and should be removed – but how can he go back to a country he hasn’t stepped foot in since he was a year old?”
The family has no ties in Mexico, but Martin Diaz’s siblings have a friend-of-a-friend with an apartment available if he ends being deported to Mexico, she said.
In the meantime, she will continue the fight the only way she knows how.
“My husband doesn’t have a voice or any rights. But I do,” she said. “It’s my job and my duty to stand up and say what is happening to our neighbors and explain why they are going missing.”
The Yakima Herald-Republic contributed to this story.