If Spokane Valley City Council Member Jessica Yaeger had her way, local police would help federal agencies round up immigrants for deportation. So Yaeger — best known for having started the local chapter of a national anti-queer group in Spokane County — had city staff draft a resolution saying they should.
The council passed it Tuesday night in front of a packed house.
But there’s one small issue with Yaeger’s resolution: Spokane Valley police still can’t enforce immigration law. It’s illegal by state law, which the resolution acknowledges. And folks who showed up to Tuesday night’s city council meeting to weigh in on Yaeger’s item don’t like it.
“Do you know how many migrants are here working and boosting the city’s economy?” protested Michelle Cantin of Spokane during a public comment session before the council approved the resolution on a 5-2 vote. “You want to tear families apart and send them all to detention centers like they’re trash, as if they’re not human beings, as if they don’t contribute anything.”
Spokane Valley Police Chief David Ellis told the city council the resolution would not alter the way the Spokane Valley Police Department (SVPD) works, saying his officers would comply with state law by not helping federal agencies enforce immigration law.
“We’re just trying to keep the community safe, and that’s all we want to do,” said Corporal Mark Gregory, the spokesperson for the Spokane County Sheriff’s Office, which contracts with the Spokane Valley Police Department, in a short interview with RANGE before the meeting. Gregory noted that in his 30 years working as a local police officer, he has never reported anyone to federal agencies for being in the country illegally. That’s just not what local cops do, he said.
(Some police departments do help federal agencies enforce immigration law. Just across the border, Kootenai County warehouses migrants arrested in Washington in its jail.)
The Trump threat
Yaeger defended the resolution at the meeting and in an interview with RANGE, saying she was trying to preserve federal funding for the city that President Donald Trump — who Yaeger supports — has threatened to cancel if they don’t toe his hardline stance against communities that are home to immigrants.
“Us girls” — meaning Yaeger, Mayor Pam Haley and Council Member Laura Padden, the women on the city council — “were actually talking to the White House about this actual resolution,” Yaeger said in the meeting. “ I want the White House to know that number 1, we are already not a sanctuary city.”
The term “sanctuary city” is a loaded one, but it basically means that a city’s police department will not devote resources to enforcing immigration law. Yaeger — along with the rest of her mostly conservative colleagues on the Spokane Valley City Council — knows this, but the facts didn’t stop them from claiming in an essentially meaningless resolution that they really aren’t a sanctuary city.
She told RANGE they’d been in Washington DC to meet with the Eastern Washington delegation and officials from the US Department of Intergovernmental Affairs, though she didn’t remember specific White House officials the women had met with. Padden and Haley didn’t return requests for comment on this story.
Yaeger also said she didn’t want anyone in Spokane Valley to be harmed or killed by an immigrant. She said she was not “as familiar” with the well-documented cases of legal immigrants now being arrested by the Trump administration as she was with the high-profile case of Laken Riley, a woman who was murdered in 2022 by José Antonio Ibarra, a Venezuelan man who had entered the United States illegally in September of that year.
Speaking to RANGE, she brought up a Venezuelan gang called Tren de Aragua (TDA), a Venezuelan gang the Trump administration has accused immigrants of being members of based on tattoos they have that have nothing to do with the gang.
“Our citizens should be safe and free from TDA members,” she said. “They’re criminals. They’re violent, violent murderers.”
Two Nicaraguan men were violently arrested in Spokane Valley by Immigration and Customs Enforcement just last month, accused without evidence of being members of TDA. The wife of one of the men said she had no idea what the gang was and denied that her husband, Jeison Ruiz Rodriguez, was part of it.
The agents, who didn’t have a warrant, shattered the windows of a truck the men had been driving on their way to a court hearing. Yaeger told RANGE if it was her, she would have simply complied with the officers. The Fourth Amendment of the US Constitution grants people — citizen or not — the right to refuse a search without a warrant. Research shows immigrants in the US commit far less crime than citizens.
The Trump administration has deported many people on accusations of being members of TDA with no due process, sending flights full of them to work prisons in El Salvador against a judge’s orders, including, mistakenly, a Maryland father.
A resolution with a history
At the Tuesday meeting, Mayor Pam Haley said the resolution had a different purpose than the one Yaeger promoted.
“ I don’t think this has anything to do with politics,” she said before she voted in favor of the resolution. “What it has to do with is making a resolution that we passed in 2016 comply with the,” state sanctuary law. “It is not an intent to have any immigrants arrested and taken anywhere.”
In 2016, the city council had approved a resolution directing police to help federal officials enforce immigration law. But in 2019, Washington passed the Keep Washington Working Act (KWWA), which barred that practice.
The resolution the city council approved Tuesday night repeals that former resolution, saying Spokane Valley police can help federal agencies enforce immigration rules “to the maximum extent allowed under Constitutional, Federal, State, and local laws.” Given the KWWA, that means they can’t help federal agencies enforce them at all.
But people who commented on the resolution at the Tuesday meeting saw the resolution as racist and unproductive. In her public comments, Cantin noted that immigrants paid $96.7 billion in taxes in 2022 and singled out Yaeger for criticism.
“Jessica, you specifically are so worried about footing the bill for the housing, food and medical expenses, but have you stopped and thought about how much revenue they’re bringing to Spokane Valley?” Cantin said. “Have you thought about how much money your city’s going to lose when you deport everyone?”
Deputy Mayor Tim Hattenburg and Council Member Ben Wick broke from the majority and voted against the resolution.
“I believe we’d be in violation of the state constitution as well as federal constitution,” said Hattenburg, who noted he used to teach the state and US constitutions to primary school students.
He got personal: “My oldest son is 46 years old, and we adopted him at two years old. He’s Hispanic. He’s been profiled over the years. And if you wanna go through a very uncomfortable experience, have your son profiled because of the color of his skin.”
Yaeger denied the resolution was racist, saying she would feel the same way if the Trump administration was deporting people “ from Britain who are as white as I am.”
Can immigrants trust local police?
Some who spoke Tuesday night argued the resolution will have a substantive effect: to create distrust among immigrant communities for local cops.
Miguel Valencia — who unsuccessfully campaigned as a Democrat against Republican Leonard Christian for the Senate’s 5th District position representing Spokane Valley — called in to chide the council for considering the resolution.
“This can damage trust between law enforcement and immigrant communities when residents, regardless of their status here, think local police may act as immigration agents,” Valencia said. “They are less likely to report crimes, serve as witnesses or cooperate with investigations.”
Speaking to RANGE, Yaeger called the idea of immigrants not calling local police “rinse-and-repeat whining.”
Commenters also worried about legal action from the state, citing a lawsuit Adams County is facing that says it had held people “based only on their immigration status, helped federal agents question people in custody and routinely given immigration officials confidential personal information of hundreds of Washingtonians.”
Another irony that speakers at the meeting pointed out: the council had just decided to ask voters to approve a new sales taxes to hire more police.
“We’re asked about getting more police and being able to find funding to get a proper police department to be able to help out with things like the drug abuse and homeless issues,” said Bailey Young of Spokane Valley. “My question for you is, how would they be able to do that and not bankrupt our city by trying to pass with this new thing?”
Of 31 people who voiced their opinions on the resolution, 29 opposed it. Many were from Spokane rather than Spokane Valley, and Council Member Al Merkel voted for the resolution because, he said, he’d received much support for the resolution from his constituents. (He told RANGE he would have voted against it had he not received feedback from voters supporting it, because didn’t think it had any purpose.)
“I am saddened to hear that we were discussing this with the White House, because if this is what the White House thinks we spend our time on, that’s a little disappointing,” Merkel said during the city council meeting.
