Martin Diaz came to the United States with his parents as a toddler in the early 1990s and he’s been here ever since. His entire family lives here. He works in construction and has owned a company in that industry with his wife, Kendall, since 2022.
Diaz has been trying to get legal status since he was 18. Currently, he is trying to get his green card and have a 2008 deportation order removed from his record. His green card petition was approved on April 11. This is what he needs to do to give him legitimate immigration status in the United States.
But as he parked his silver SUV at the curb in front of his North Spokane home on Tuesday at about 8:30 am, he knew he was in danger. Agents with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) had been watching him for months and on that day, he noticed unmarked vehicles following him.
One of the central ironies of the Trump administration’s deportation efforts is that because Diaz was going through those legal processes — trying to do everything right — immigration authorities knew where he lived.
Diaz pulled up to the curb, got out, looked around and sprinted across the lawn for the safety of his backyard, according to security footage Kendall Diaz posted to Facebook. A man in a Border Patrol uniform parked a gray SUV and gave chase. Two other men in unmarked vehicles — one a silver truck and the other a dark gray sedan — and plain clothes quickly followed.
Martin barely made it to his backyard, opening the gate and entering the patio, but it was not enough. The men — who’d been tailing him that morning in three unmarked vehicles, one in a uniform, two in plain clothes — sprinted behind him, slammed him against the gate and dragged him into his front yard.
As Martin screamed, “Get out of my house,” the Diazes’ roommate confronted the agents in the backyard.
“This is my house!” the footage shows the roommate yelling.
One of the plainclothes officers — a man with dark features, longish surfer hair and a beard that was going white — had lost his baggy shorts in the scuffle, and his butt was exposed. He was hiking the shorts back up as he entered the backyard, yelling at the roommate, “Get back!”
“Do not interfere with us right now,” he said, adjusting his waistband and acting like he’d not been pantsed. “He’s got an order of deportation. He’s going.” He told the roommate it was “none of your business.”
They showed no warrant but arrested Diaz nonetheless, cuffing him and putting him in one of the unmarked vehicles, to be processed for deportation to Mexico, where he was born.
As the agents processed Diaz, the roommate, recording cell phone footage of the arrest, confronted the officers, asking if the older plainclothes officer had a badge number.
“We’re working here,” the officer said, showing the roommate his right palm. He did not give a badge number.
This wasn’t the first time he had been at the Diaz home: on February 1, that same agent had pretended to crash a car into Kendall Diaz’s car, causing a scene that drew her and their roommate out of the house to interrogate them. They’d been there for Martin Diaz, but Martin was not home.
David Yost, a spokesperson for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, told RANGE it was unlikely the agents didn’t have a warrant, but he also said that in some cases agents don’t need one to make an arrest on private property. Sometimes, he said, there is a “foreign warrant,” meaning a warrant that was issued by the government of another country. Yost said the US Attorney’s Office for Eastern Washington may know if there was a warrant for Diaz. Rob Curry, a spokesperson for that office, said it could not comment on active cases.
“ I just worked on one of these this morning,” Yost said. “They presented a foreign warrant and that foreign warrant was presented to them following their arrest.”
Diaz does not appear to have a criminal record. RANGE searched local court records for Martin Diaz and found one for speeding in 2018.
Jennyfer Mesa, the founder of the local immigrant rights advocacy nonprofit Latinos en Spokane (LeS), said the way Martin Diaz was arrested was illegal but par for the course with ICE detentions in Spokane.
“ They need a judicial warrant signed by a judge to arrest you,” she said in an interview. “What we’ve seen is that they’re providing administrative warrants that don’t have the jurisdiction. … They have no rule of law.”
She said people have a responsibility to oppose such abuses of power.
“These are tests to our community to see how far we’re going to go,” Mesa said. “We need elected officials to stand up. We need the police to provide additional safety because this is militarization in our community. This is very dangerous. We’re living in a really difficult time where if we don’t fight back, a lot of more people are gonna be detained and families are gonna continue to be separated.”
Diaz’s immigration attorney, William Frick, did not return two phone calls requesting comment.
Happening everywhere
This same kind of thing has been playing out across the country: federal agents, many of them newly deputized by the Trump administration from other departments not traditionally used for immigration enforcement and wearing civilian clothing, nab people from yards, churches, university parking lots and grocery stores.
Martin Diaz’s arrest happened as President Donald Trump is administering a brutal, ongoing crackdown on immigrants, many of whom have been in the country for decades and have no criminal records. The administration is even deporting people who are in the United States legally, including American citizens, which congressional Republicans recently voted in support of.
Trump is not only deporting them, but disappearing many of them to draconian prisons and camps in Latin America and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where a military prison is run by the US Navy. Some of the people sent away are small children, including one who was battling cancer and accessing life-saving health care in the United States. Many of these people were denied any sort of legal process — a right established for all people in the Fifth Amendment of the US Constitution.
Mesa said the same is happening across the Spokane area.
“ I get calls every single day about a detained person, asking what they can do to get them released, where they are,” Mesa told RANGE. “Because once they’re detained in Spokane, sometimes they don’t even announce their whereabouts for 24, 72 hours. We’ve been helping people file police reports because they register them as missing. … They don’t know if it was a vigilante or if it was ICE. They’re in police uniforms or sometimes they’re just dressed up as casual people.”
Diaz was taken to the Kootenai County Jail, which has an operating agreement with ICE to house detained immigrants when federal facilities are too full. Many people arrested in Washington have been held there because Washington state law bars local governments from helping enforce federal immigration law.
As of press time, the jail listed Martin Diaz on its inmate roster, but those records often lag, so it’s uncertain where he is at any given moment. Diaz’s wife Kendall said she does not know where he is now, but she thinks he’s still at the jail. He will likely be sent to an ICE detention facility when space opens up.
Mesa of LeS said during a May Day march for immigrant and labor rights on May 1, that this cuts against due process rights, saying legal cases should be processed in the places where people live.
“We demand a full stop of Washington state residents being transported to the Kootenai Detention Center,” she said as the march stopped in front of the Spokane County Sheriff’s Office before a crowd of about 2,000 protestors. “Washington residents deserve to have their legal processes in Washington state.”
RANGE asked Yost for whatever information he could give about Diaz’s case, providing his full name and the circumstances of his immigration, which we got from documents provided by Diaz’s wife. But he said it would take a long time to gather specific information about Diaz without his Alien Registration Number, an identification number issued to everyone who tries to come to the United States from another country. It helps the government track immigrants.
He did not answer detailed emailed questions about whether Diaz’s arrest followed ICE policy.
‘I’m very mad, and I’m very scared’
Kendall Diaz, an American citizen, does not know what might happen to her husband. She was not at home when he was arrested. She’s been trying to help him get legal status since they were married six years ago.
On May 1, she stood framed by the front doors of the ICE Detention Center near Riverfront Park where her husband was processed. She faced the same crowd of 2,000 Spokanites Mesa had spoken to — they’d marched from the Sheriff’s Office to the ICE facility — and told the story of her husband’s arrest.
“I haven’t heard from him in two days,” she said. “I don’t know exactly where he is. It’s believed he’s in Kootenai County, which is not safe for a brown man. They have been using my tax dollars to take my husband from my home.”
She recognized the scope of the problem.
“I’m not the only one,” she said. “This is happening all over our community. They’re being ripped out of their homes, off their jobs, out of their trucks. Families are being destroyed.”
She thanked the crowd for being there.
“It is your responsibility to stand with me,” she said. “I appreciate every single one of you being here. It brought tears to my eyes just seeing how many community members came here and said that immigrants matter. That’s a big deal to my husband. That’s a big deal to me, and I appreciate each and every single one of you.”
In a phone interview with RANGE the day before the march, Kendall Diaz said, “I’m very mad, and I’m very scared.”
She said she and Martin had been trying to get him a green card for years. The first time they applied, she said, the government sent their paperwork to the wrong address, and they were in the dark about his status for three years. They later reapplied and Martin had been determined eligible for a green card last year. But when Trump was elected, they anticipated being targeted and scrambled to make sure the federal government was processing his case. They recently received a letter dated April 11 saying the government was processing his petition to have his deportation order removed.
Martin Diaz’s friend Jorge Guerrero, who is a senior organizer for LeS, had introduced Kendall to the crowd. Guerrero has known Martin Diaz since 2009 when they started classes at Spokane Community College together. After his remarks, he told RANGE Martin Diaz recently bought a bus at an auction to transport a group of alcoholics to a treatment retreat they would otherwise not have had access to.
“Martin is a really kind-hearted person,” Guerrero said, pronouncing his name Mar-teen. “He helps everybody. He has helped me in the past, so I testify about that.”
Martin Diaz was going to drive the people to the retreat next month. Now, that probably won’t happen, but Guerrero said he hopes he can fill in for his friend.
