Spokane council accepts federal police funds but claims continued defiance of Trump

The Spokane City Council voted 5-2 in a Thursday special session to accept $1 million in federal funds to hire police, while maintaining that the city will not assist immigration detention efforts or be forced to comply with presidential executive orders members believe are immoral.

If that changes, supporters on the council argued the city should be willing to fight in court to keep the funds or, at worst, return them, and in no case should assist a “fascist” federal government, as Councilwoman Kitty Klitzke described it.

The Spokane Police Department applied last year to a hiring grant from the Department of Justice and was awarded $1 million in October to hire eight new officers focused on gun violence prevention. The City Council was asked to accept the funds Monday and told the city had no more than a week to make up its mind before the funding offer was withdrawn.

But activists raised broad concerns ahead of a vote Monday about conditions the Trump administration had placed on the grant funds, including an anti-sanctuary stipulation that requires local police to be able to share immigration information with federal officials, though doing so would violate state law. Another condition requires the city to comply with all presidential executive orders. Looking for clearer answers to these questions, the council punted the decision to Thursday.

In a presentation Thursday afternoon, Police Chief Kevin Hall said that neither his department nor City Hall had any interest in assisting with federal immigration actions or fostering further distrust between officers and police accountability activists or the broader community. Despite the language of the grant, Hall said he did not believe accepting the money would force compliance with the Trump administration.

Even before state law prohibited law enforcement in Washington from cooperating with federal immigration officials, the city police department had a standing policy prohibiting the collection of immigration status information during arrests. The grant may require the city to allow officers to share that information if they have it, but the police department and the city attorney’s office argue it does not require them to start collecting it.

As for the president’s executive orders, Hall similarly argued accepting the federal funds would not change the city’s policies.

“In the past 12 months, this presidential administration has administered 225 executive orders,” Hall said. “I have done my best to go through as many as I possibly can … and I don’t see anything that would put us at odds with those. That vast majority, particularly those geared towards immigration and DEI initiatives, are focused on the federal government itself.”

If circumstances changed, such as through a future executive order that the city believed it could not comply with, Hall argued the department would be willing to give up the funds. The department already intended to hire these additional officers, he said, and if it had a chance to defray the costs, it was worth taking that chance. Alternatively, if the funds were withdrawn, it was not an irreplaceable loss, he argued.

City staff estimated the cost to fund eight new positions for five years was over $6.1 million, of which the grant would only offset $1 million. All but $250,000 of the city’s portion of that funding was already approved, Hall said, and the department could find the space in its budget if it had to replace the $1 million in federal funding.

The city applied for this grant shortly following the end of the White House’s funding freeze during the review by the Elon Musk-associated Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, Hall said. More recently offered grants have had “strengthened” compliance language that the city couldn’t agree to, but Hall and other City Hall officials felt this hiring grant had enough wiggle room.

“When this came out, we went through it with a great deal of scrutiny, because I’ve been through this before with the first term of this president … we looked at all of the conditions, particularly those around Title Eight and immigration enforcement,” Hall said. “Subsequent grants that I would have been interested in, that I received in the past … they considerably strengthened the language where I didn’t think we would be in compliance and never even attempted to submit.”

City Council chambers Thursday were unusually packed for a midweek meeting, with many of the same activists and community organizers who spoke Monday in attendance. Every person who testified remained opposed to accepting the grant, whether due to general distrust of the police department, disgust with the federal government or disbelief that the city had done enough due diligence to ensure it wouldn’t get tangled in the strings attached to the money.

“The Chief said he went through 225 executive orders,” said police accountability activist David Brookbank. “He did his best, he said. Not good enough.”

Some also questioned whether the police department could be trusted to keep Hall’s promise to give up the funds if necessary. Others worried local police would have access to immigration information through interactions other than arrests.

“The language … opens the door for individuals to communicate, even informally, anything they learn while out in the field,” said Sebastian Ruiz, community policy liaison for Mujeres in Action, an organization that supports domestic violence and sexual assault survivors. “Keep in mind, for immigrants in a domestic violence situation, their citizenship and their immigration status can be an important factor in their case.”

“This prospect of rogue individuals is a common fear for people who experience domestic violence, and for immigrants in general, and this language facilitates that behavior,” Ruiz added.

In the end, the grant required five votes from the council to be accepted due to the rapid process through which it was introduced, and it got exactly five votes. Councilmembers Michael Cathcart and Sarah Dixit voted against accepting funds, both expressing concern that it opened the city up to liability.

Cathcart, like Ruiz, worried that Spokane police would incidentally obtain immigration status information, and argued that the city could be found to be out of compliance with the conditions his colleagues found so odious.

“As a city council and as a state, I think we made that choice by passing Keep Washington Working and the resolutions affirming it,” he said. “I think we made the conscious choice that we’re willing to forgo federal dollars if that’s what it takes, because this council – I had some different views – but this council believes so strongly in that perspective.”

Councilwoman Klitzke, on the other hand, argued that the grant conditions were “fascist” but also argued that failure to accept any federal funds would severely hurt Spokane residents who are paying the federal taxes that fund grant programs like this.

“I heard someone say that we should apply these grants to rental assistance,” she noted. “Guess what? These conditions are on our grants for rental assistance already. The pretext is there.”

The city’s residents are not wealthy, she argued, and Spokane needed to find ways to thread the needle in order to obtain what federal funding it could whenever it felt it could avoid assisting the Trump administration. If it couldn’t avoid doing so, she and other council members said they were prepared to fight for the funding in court if the Trump administration attempted to claw it back.

“We have the legal tools,” Klitzke said. “We have an attorney general that’s willing to fight. … I do want you to know that, largely, I’m with you on the issues. It’s the way that we struggle and fight back that I’m disagreeing with.”