Federal trial for 9 Spokane ICE protesters moved to next year

Nine Spokane protesters arrested and charged with crimes against immigration authorities will face trial in May instead of this month.

A judge approved the extension of trial, originally set for Sept. 22, after most of the defendants’ attorneys requested more time to review digital evidence of the protest and speak to police and other demonstrators.

“There are hours and hours of video,” said Andrea George, an attorney for defendant Justice Forral, in a court hearing Monday. There are also more than a hundred witnesses given the size of the protest, attorneys said.

Nine people – former Spokane City Council President Ben Stuckart, Justice Forral, Mikki Hatfield, Erin Lang, Collin Muncey, Thalia Ramirez, Bobbi Silva, Bajun Mavalwalla II and Jac Archer – were federally indicted and arrested in July for their alleged role in a mass demonstration against U.S. Immigration and Customs for detaining two legal asylum seekers at a routine immigration check-in.

The government claims most of the defendants “conspired” to use force or threat against immigration officers on June 11 to prevent them from transporting the two asylum seekers to a detainment center in Tacoma, and that two of them assaulted an ICE officer amid the chaos.

Four of them were first charged in Spokane County District Court with failure to disperse, a misdemeanor. It took nearly a month for the government to pursue federal charges against those four, as well as the other five, who never were charged in county court, including Mavalwalla, an Afghanistan War combat veteran.

The trial, now set for May 18, is expected to last two weeks or more, with four or five days dedicated solely to the government’s presentation of evidence. U.S. District Court Judge Rebecca Pennell said she wanted to prepare for an entire day of jury selection as opposed to a half-day due to the pretrial publicity and how attitudes about immigration enforcement likely will be a reoccurring topic.

Lang’s defense attorney Sandy Baggett in court Monday floated the idea of switching the venue given how large the protest was and how much media attention it had received. If the trial stayed in the same district but was moved out of Spokane, it would take place in Richland or in Yakima. It would be much harder to gain approval to move the trial out of its own federal district, however, Pennell noted.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Lisa Cartier-Giroux opposed the idea Monday and also opposed the idea of a trial continuance past May.