Less than a month after he requested records on an immigrant transport van from Spokane County, Jim Leighty found himself on the phone with Joan Mell.
Mell is a well-known private lawyer, a board member of Washington’s most visible open government advocacy nonprofit and aspiring attorney of Keith Swank, the high-profile Pierce County sheriff who faces challenges to his certification. But Leighty had never heard of her.
Mell said to Leighty, “I’m making sure you’re not going to hurt my peeps,” he recalled in an interview.
Suddenly, it was clear why she was calling him. She also represents GEO Group, the prison contractor that runs the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention facility in Tacoma and the parent company of GEO Transport, which operates the van Leighty was interested in. Mell wanted to know if Leighty, an open government advocate, was piecing together the vehicle’s routes so he could ambush them.
“I would never do something like that,” Leighty recalled telling Mell. He smoothed things over with her.
But later, as Leighty thought about the call, something bothered him. How did GEO Group — which last year wanted to work immigrant detainees for $1 an hour at the detention center — know he’d requested the photos?
He emailed Mell, who replied that Spokane County had notified GEO Group of the request.
Public agencies are allowed to tell someone of a records request they’re named in, a practice known as third-party notification. But the Washington Coalition for Open Government (WashCOG) says some governments “weaponize” it to slow down the records release process.
Mell confirmed the county’s third-party notification to GEO Group in an interview with RANGE, saying it had sent a form letter to the contractor about Leighty’s request. She also confirmed she represents GEO Group, but she also sits on WashCOG’s board and spoke to RANGE strictly in that role, not as a lawyer representing a client.
WashCOG sent RANGE a statement, saying many of its 20 board members are lawyers and are free to represent whom they choose, but “when they are in WashCOG’s room, they and their
colleagues have the same objective: open government.”
“Joan Mell is a valued member of WashCOG’s board and its legal team,” the statement went on to say, noting that Mell has represented the coalition in successful open meetings litigation against the state Redistricting Commission. It also said that next week, she will represent the coalition “in the state Court of Appeals in Tacoma, where we are fighting the state Legislature’s claim of a secrecy ‘privilege’ to withhold records from the public. At stake is the transparency of the state Legislature, and likely every other legislative body in Washington.”
Mell: some third-party notifications are legitimate
Leighty thinks the county was trying to find a way around releasing the records — he’d requested photos of the van taken from automated license plate reader (ALPR) cameras, but didn’t have a legal reason. The letter would have enabled the company to seek an injunction: a court order that would stop him from requesting photos of the GEO Group vehicle, he said. That would amount to another way to stop the photos from getting out.
Such injunctions are not unprecedented. The city of Spokane Valley in 2024 won an injunction against a Spokesman reporter and two community activists who were seeking records related to a harassment investigation against Spokane Valley City Council Member Al Merkel. (See the records by searching case number 2420375332 here.)
Mell told RANGE that, given the heated political nature of current events, agencies increasingly use third-party notification, sometimes as a way to block information and sometimes as a way to limit their liability in case the third party is harmed by the release.
Speaking in her WashCOG role, Mell said she doesn’t always like it when governments notify third parties. She’s fought governments using different mechanisms to deny requesters information she thinks should be public, she said. She’s paid hundreds of dollars on behalf of reporters who couldn’t afford it to get records, sparking greater transparency, she told RANGE. She even authored a chapter in a WashCOG special report spelling out tactics to get around the various ways governments try to delay or hamper public records requests.
But, she believes the county’s third-party notification to GEO Group was a legitimate use of that practice.
RANGE reached out to Spokane County Sheriff’s Office, asking for a response to Leighty’s assertion that it was trying not to release the photo. We also asked how often the sheriff notifies people of records requests they are named in. The office did not respond by press time, but we will update this story if it does.
In the end, Mell was satisfied with Leighty’s explanation and did not seek an injunction. Three days after their call, Spokane County gave Leighty a single ALPR photograph of the GEO Group vehicle.
A ‘fishing trip’
Mell has represented Geo Group for years; she appears in an in-depth 2012 InvestigateWest investigation into the Tacoma ICE detention facility. She defended the contractor in an ongoing lawsuit the state of Washington filed against it in 2017, arguing minimum wage laws do not apply to immigrant detainees.
When she called Leighty to ask him whether he intended to do something nefarious, she was just being a diligent lawyer, she said.
“My role was to figure out what I needed to do legally,” she told RANGE. She said contractors who work for ICE are under threat, which echoes Trump administration rhetoric that immigration officers have faced a drastic escalation of violence from the general community. (Those assertions have been shown to be exaggerated.)
“If Jim wanted to start targeting my peeps and knocking them off, I should have the right to defend [them],” Mell told RANGE.
During their phone call, which took place January 6, Mell asked Leighty why he wanted the photos.
“I explained to her that it was partly a fishing trip to see what we can get. Also, it looks like they’re going to make changes to access,” Leighty told RANGE, referring to a proposed law that would restrict records requests for the images. Specifically, it would require departments to refuse records requests for images and search data from the public and from journalists. It would also require departments to delete the photographs after 72 hours. “I wanted to see, what are the changes gonna be? So kind of a benchmark.”
In recent weeks, public protests against ICE actions in local communities across the country, including in Minneapolis, have dominated national headlines. In cities across the country, ill-trained agents have brutally arrested, tear gassed, maimed and killed civilians and immigrants — men, women, children and babies — as part of the Trump administration’s crackdown on all forms of immigration.
ICE’s deployment in Minneapolis has sparked intense public protests, but they are largely nonviolent. Protesters blow whistles, yell at ICE officers to get out of their neighborhoods and mock them when they fall on the ice that covers the city’s winter streets.
On the national stage, ICE officers — many of whom wear masks and refuse to identify themselves when interacting with the public — have been named publicly in leaked rosters, as the public tries to learn who they are. (Sheriff Swank was named on one list as an ICE agent, but Pierce County Sheriff spokesperson Carly Cappetto said the list was “false.” She wrote in an email that “laws prevent any police officer working for two separate law enforcement agencies at the same time, and this could not be possible.”)
A detention facility & a rogue sheriff
GEO Group might seem an ill fit for an open government advocate like Mell. The company has sought to limit government oversight of its Tacoma facility, despite evidence that a tuberculosis outbreak surfaced there last year and allegations that the facility is overcrowded and beset by inhumane conditions.
Another unlikely ally of Mell’s: Pierce County Sheriff Keith Swank. His jurisdiction includes GEO Group’s detention facility. The openly transphobic sheriff really wants Mell to represent him in his normal duties as sheriff, which is normally the province of the elected county prosecutor, rather than a private attorney. But a King County judge said no, ruling that Mell never established an attorney-client relationship with Swank and that he must be represented by Pierce County Prosecutor Mary Robnett.
Swank has been a hot topic in the news. He is accused of altering text messages requested under the state’s public records law. And the state Criminal Justice Training Commission is investigating Swank for posting to Twitter “Do you think it’s time to ban trans people from owning guns?”
He aggressively chided the Washington House of Representatives last week during a transphobic testimony on a bill that would enshrine stricter oversight of law enforcement leaders in Washington. It was all lawmakers could talk about during a recent lobby day by the Washington Coalition for Police Accountability, deriding the rant to the police reform activists. Meanwhile, the Washington State Republican Party posted footage of Swank’s testimony to its official Facebook page, referring to it as “passionate and powerful.”
“Citizens reach out to me all the time regarding overreach of the government by you,” Swank read from prepared remarks, pointing at members of the Senate Law & Justice Committee. His voice quivered with anger, and he took in shaky breaths. “Some say they finally have a voice because of me, and you want to silence it because I said transgender women are men.”
In doing so, Swank put himself in the crosshairs of the Washington Association of Sheriffs and Police Chiefs (WASPC), which now wants to expel him from membership because of his comments. Not only that: Swank has reportedly come under scrutiny by the state Criminal Justice Training Commission over complaints levied against him during his time as a Seattle police officer.
When Swank reached out to Mell to ask about representing him as sheriff, Robnett’s office filed a lawsuit asking the court to bar Mell from representing Swank. Mell countersued in a King County court, arguing that her representation of Swank is protected by the state’s anti-SLAPP law, the Uniform Public Expression Act (UPEPA) and that she had a First Amendment right to represent Swank.
Despite the King County ruling, Mell told RANGE, “I currently consider myself his attorney.”
