[The Border Patrol agents “have been present at the station for
a long time,” Mesa said. “They’re friends with the employees,
they’re in the waiting rooms, they’re in the employee rooms, they
have access to all the employee areas. It’s full teamwork. ]
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SPOKANE VS. THE BORDER PATROL: HOW IMMIGRATION AGENTS STAKE OUT A
CITY BUS STATION  
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Amy Martyn
December 10, 2019
The Intercept
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_ The Border Patrol agents “have been present at the station for a
long time,” Mesa said. “They’re friends with the employees,
they’re in the waiting rooms, they’re in the employee rooms, they
have access to all the employee areas. It’s full teamwork. _

A Border Patrol agent questions passengers in line to board a
Jefferson Lines bus to Montana at the Spokane Intermodal Center on
Oct. 16, 2019., Video still: Amy Martyn for The Intercept

 

“The whole wall thing, I think that’s what really beefed it up,”
the Greyhound bus driver told me at the end of her shift. She was
referring to the sudden increase in Border Patrol agents boarding
buses and pulling passengers off for questioning in Spokane — a
friendly, midsize city on the eastern edge of Washington state, and
nobody’s idea of a border town.

Amid the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement crackdown,
the Border Patrol has stepped up raids on Greyhound buses nationwide,
combatting what the agency claims is a “growing threat” of
“alien smuggling and drug trafficking organizations to move people,
narcotics, and contraband to interior destinations.”

The Spokane bus station would hardly seem to be a hotbed of such
activity. Next door to an Air Force base and home to Gonzaga
University, Spokane is predominately white and politically
conservative compared to stereotypes of the Pacific Northwest. Ask
about life along the border, and people may assume you are referring
to the border with Idaho.

Nonetheless, three or four days a week, Border Patrol agents from the
Spokane sector — a unit tasked with guarding 300 miles of “rugged
and often remote” frontier between the U.S. and Canada — cruise
through downtown Spokane a little after 4 p.m. They’re on their way
to meet evening buses from the Spokane Intermodal Center, as the bus
depot is called.

Three or four days a week, Border Patrol agents cruise through
downtown Spokane on their way to meet evening buses.

Border Patrol agents are drawn to the bus station “because they’re
harassing people of color and low-income,” people, said Jennyfer
Mesa, who founded a networking group called Latinos en Spokane. She
pointed out that Washington is an agriculture state that brings in
tens of thousands of seasonal workers each year, many of them from
Mexico, for apple-picking and other jobs. Mesa and other volunteers
have come to the bus depot to warn riders about the immigration raids,
only to be pushed out — sometimes physically — by hostile bus
depot employees.

The Border Patrol agents “have been present at the station for a
long time,” Mesa said. “They’re friends with the employees,
they’re in the waiting rooms, they’re in the employee rooms, they
have access to all the employee areas. It’s full teamwork.”

The bus station is owned by the city of Spokane, which rents the land
out to Greyhound and some regional bus companies. None of the buses
that stop there are arriving from Canada. In response to public
outcry, last year the Spokane City Council passed an ordinance
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restricting the Border Patrol’s access to the bus depot. But the
Border Patrol successfully argued that city officials couldn’t kick
the agents out because Spokane is 97 miles — as the crow flies —
from an international border. That puts it within the 100-mile
interior enforcement zone where Customs and Border Protection, the
Border Patrol’s parent agency, claims heightened powers over
residents and travelers alike.

Since the city’s attempt to rein it in, the Border Patrol has only
increased enforcement actions on buses: Agents have arrested 71 people
at the Spokane bus depot this year, more than twice as many as they
averaged in prior years. None were “alien” smugglers or drug
traffickers, as the Spokane Sector’s press office admitted in an
interview. An unknown number of people have been pulled off buses and
interrogated in the effort.

The surge in arrests points to the indiscriminate nature of
immigration enforcement under President Donald Trump. One local
immigration attorney, who didn’t want their name printed so as not
to affect their working relationship with CBP and Immigration and
Customs Enforcement, said that about a third of their client base
comes from the bus depot. They said that whatever orders come down
from the federal government, agents on the ground, like those at the
bus depot, should use their judgment.

“What are we going to do? Are we going to use our discretion to
target big offenders, or just go after everybody?” the attorney
said. “Right now, it seems like we’re going after everybody.”

Despite the ongoing controversy, including several lawsuits accusing
agents of racially profiling and harassing Greyhound riders, the
Border Patrol continues its bus raids, relying on complicity from bus
company personnel and passengers. For riders who can answer “yes”
when asked if they are U.S. citizens, the armed federal agents can
seem courteous or charming. The passengers in line for a bus to
Montana this October didn’t appear concerned about the agents
waiting to interview them before they boarded. One rider recalled how
a bus full of white passengers started laughing when someone jokingly
told an agent that he was “a fucking illegal.” But for nonwhite
passengers, and those without citizenship, meeting an agent in Spokane
can be traumatic and humiliating — or lead to deportation.

On the three occasions that Border Patrol agents boarded his bus to
Seattle, Martin Negrete refused to talk to them, but he said it
wasn’t easy. A professional organizer for the advocacy group United
We Dream, who has legal status in the U.S. under the Deferred Action
for Childhood Arrivals program, Negrete knew that agents needed his
consent to interview him. He told them that he had a right to remain
silent. “I had to literally say it four or five times,” he
remembered. He stopped riding the bus after his last trip, when he
witnessed Border Patrol agents escort two foreign exchange students
from China and one man from El Salvador off his bus. (They were let
back on after about half an hour, he recalled.)

“I have lived in a border town before,” Negrete said. “They’re
treating Spokane like it’s a border town, which it’s not.”

The law would have stopped the Border Patrol and ICE from boarding
buses without a warrant or written permission from the city.

In 2017, Border Patrol agents in Spokane stopped Andres Sosa Segura,
who had already been arrested and released on bond over his
immigration status. He handed the agents a card stating that he had a
right to remain silent. The Border Patrol agents ignored it, as well
as the fact that he was wearing an ankle monitor — proof that he had
bonded out. They took him to federal detention and held him for four
hours before finally letting him continue his trip, according to a
lawsuit filed
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by the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project. (CBP declined to comment on
litigation).

In January 2018, Martin Vera and his teenage son were arrested
together during a bus transfer in Spokane. “I had DACA. They said it
expired. They said Trump already took that away,” his son Sergio
told a Seattle news station
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Sergio was eventually released, but Vera was sent to federal
detention, pending a deportation hearing. He hadn’t so much as
received a speeding ticket during his 19 years in the United States,
his family said.

And in August 2018, Juan Santos-Bonilla accompanied his American wife
on a drive from South Dakota to Seattle, for a new job she was taking
on the West Coast. He was detained
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in Spokane on the bus ride back home. Santos-Bonilla is a woodworker
from Mexico with a small YouTube following for his instructional
videos, and he had been in the U.S. for 10 years. Though he was
deported last November, his case has helped galvanize a local protest
movement against the bus raids.

“Border Patrol’s activities are just a waste of taxpayer resources
here in Spokane,” said Jim Dawson, an organizer and co-founder of
the Spokane Immigrant Rights Coalition.

Nearly 300 people packed the Spokane City Council chambers last
October, with most there to support an ordinance crafted by then-City
Council President Ben Stuckart, another councilman, and local
advocacy groups. As it was written, the law would have stopped the
Border Patrol and ICE from boarding buses without a warrant or written
permission from the city. It passed 6 to 1. But shortly after,
Spokane’s mayor, a Trump supporter, announced that he would not
enforce the new law because of the station’s proximity to the
border.

“They do not have to ask for our permission. And conversely, we
cannot impede their work,” Mayor David Condon said in a prepared
statement at the time.

This fall, Stuckart ran for mayor against Nadine Woodward, a former
television anchor who has defended the agents as “doing an
incredible service at the intermodal station when you see the arrests
that they’re making with the illegals and especially in the drug
trade.” Woodward won with just over 50 percent of the
vote; she’ll be sworn in on December 30. (Her office has not
returned messages about her policy going forward.)

Portland comedian Mohanad Elshieky (who is now a digital producer on
“Full Frontal With Samantha Bee”) told his Twitter followers that
he had been ordered off a Greyhound bus in Spokane after he had told
agents that he is a refugee from Libya. Elshieky had his work permit
with him, but that didn’t seem to help. In the freezing weather, he
said, the agents accused him of faking the paperwork and interrogated
him for 20 minutes before allowing him to get back on the bus.
Elshieky is now suing for wrongful detention.

The lawsuits from Elshieky and Sosa, both filed with the help of the
Northwest Immigrant Rights Project, argue that Border Patrol agents
are engaging in a pattern of racial discrimination at the bus depot.
Local advocates say it’s obvious that the Border Patrol subjects
people of color to more scrutiny than it does buses full of white
folks, but statistics are hard to come by. The Border Patrol’s
Spokane sector doesn’t regularly publicize the arrests they make,
citing “privacy” concerns. The agency provided a list of the
nationalities of people they had arrested at the bus depot this year,
but declined to specify how many people from each country were
arrested.

Greyhound isn’t the only company that operates out of the Spokane
Intermodal Center, but as the largest bus company in the country, it
sets the standard for interactions with immigration enforcement. And
around the country, Greyhound has come to play a particular role in
today’s immigration politics. Along the Southern border, the Border
Patrol has been known to drop
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recently arrived asylum-seekers en masse at Greyhound stations, and
the recent increase in migrants from Central America has been an
unexpected source of revenue
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for the company. At the same time, its passengers have been regularly
targeted for random immigration checks.

In numerous statements to the press, the company has claimed to be
unhappy about the Border Patrol searches, saying that “Greyhound
does not coordinate with CBP in regard to these checks, nor do we
support these actions.”

But the American Civil Liberties Union and other legal experts say
that without a warrant, Border Patrol agents need Greyhound’s
explicit consent to be on Greyhound property. The agency appears to
confirm this. “We work with consent from Greyhound when we board
their buses,” Bill Kingsford, the Border Patrol Spokane sector
special operations supervisor, told me in an emailed statement.

Around the country, Greyhound has come to play a particular role in
today’s immigration politics.

Greyhound is now under investigation by the Washington State Attorney
General’s Office for allowing agents to board without warrants. In a
May letter to the company, Attorney General Bob Ferguson demanded that
Greyhound issue a statement clearly saying it does not and has never
consented to the immigration sweeps. He also wanted Greyhound to post
stickers on its buses saying the same, and to provide drivers with
training and laminated cards that give notice of non-consent to
searches. Passengers should receive a clear warning at ticket counters
that border agents may interfere with travel, he added.
(Greyhound said that the company offered to send a letter to the
CBP as a “compromise” with the attorney general.)

On October 1, under pressure from the attorney general’s office,
Greyhound sent two corporate attorneys and a local manager to Spokane
to meet with community members, many of whom had been kicked out of
the bus station when they tried to distribute “know your rights”
cards to riders or record agents. One volunteer activist, Karey White,
recounted how local Greyhound employees slapped his phone out of his
hand while he was filming the Border Patrol. In a video he captured, a
ticketing agent who contracts for Greyhound tells him on camera, “If
you film a Border Patrol agent, it is against federal law.” She
later says that he is not allowed to film Greyhound’s buses.
(Neither of these things are true, but filming in the station seems to
touch a nerve. When I visited Spokane in October, a private security
guard who saw me filming agents demanded to see my bus ticket and
tried to place me in handcuffs.)

During the October meeting, Greyhound attorney Jesse Miller said it
was the first time he had heard about local employees appearing to
conspire with the Border Patrol. He said that there is a poster at the
station that warns passengers about the Border Patrol and notifies
them of their rights. (In early October, that poster was behind a
barred ticket window, in a font too small to read. Greyhound said it
recently added two larger posters at the station.)

“There is kind of a high population of agents here in the Spokane
area, and they aren’t leaving or going elsewhere in the United
States,” Miller said at the meeting. “Do we think they need dozens
of agents here? I mean, I don’t know. Probably not.”

Border Patrol spokesperson Bill Kingsford confirmed that an increase
in manpower is the most immediate reason for the uptick in arrests.
The Spokane sector opened a new office within city limits at the end
of 2018, transferring 30 agents to town.

In an interview, Kingsford said that the arrests at the bus depot have
primarily been visa overstays and “regular people” that came to
the United States without authorization. “We haven’t seen an
increase of smuggling, drugs, of humans. It’s basically been a lot
of the same that we’ve been having,” he said. “We’re doing it
as, for lack of a better word, a preventative.”

The Greyhound bus driver finishing her shift in October joked about
flirting with the agents, but she denied that drivers were sharing
passenger information or otherwise coordinating with the Border
Patrol. (She declined to give her name because she was not permitted
to speak to the media.) The driver said that she likes the agents
because they made her feel safe. At the same time, she said that the
agents rarely arrest the people whom they pull off her buses. She also
insisted that she had no choice but to allow them on board.

“My guess is they’re usually looking for someone, that’s my
guess. But they never ask me who’s on my bus, they never ask
anything like that. In fact, I always tease them — in fact, I think
I sexually harass them. But, you know, they’re a great group of
guys, they’re just doing their job,” she said. “As an employee,
there’s not much I can do. I can’t say, ‘No, you can’t come on
my bus.’”

Asked why, she said, “You can’t tell the federal government,
‘No.”

In an interview at a student dorm near Gonzaga University, fourth-year
political science major Genesis Yanez said she wasn’t paying
attention to the local controversy over the bus station when she
booked a last-minute trip home to Seattle via Greyhound on September
19. She is a green-card holder who came to the United States with her
family when she was 8. Her experience on the bus left her faith in her
secure immigration status shaken.

After settling in her seat that day, Yanez noticed three men in green
uniforms step out of what appeared to be an office at the station.
They boarded the bus. An agent politely interviewed the intoxicated
passengers sitting behind her, she said. When it was her turn, she
showed him an expired work visa and several ID cards. About five
minutes later, the agent returned. “I need the girl for further
questioning,” he told her driver.

Outside on the bus platform, three more agents stepped out and
surrounded her on all sides. They started talking to her all at once,
in what seemed to her to be an intimidation tactic. One accused her of
faking her work permit, she said. Another said they couldn’t find
her in the system.

“We’re going to take you in, we’re going to detain you, and
we’re going to give you a court date,” she remembered the man on
her left saying. Then, she said, they all started to laugh.

One of the agents left to make a phone call. He returned and said she
could get back on the bus, over the protests of the agent who insisted
that she had a court date. Yanez re-boarded before the agents could
change her mind. She remembers the passengers staring at her. The
interrogation lasted 15 minutes, she thinks. (Kingsford, the Border
Patrol spokesperson, said that the agents remembered the incident
happening differently but added, “They’re not going to say that
her perception is wrong.”)

“That’s what happens to me, and I’m authorized to be here,”
Yanez said. “Can you imagine the people that aren’t? There are a
lot of people that wouldn’t go back on that bus.”

CORRECTION, DECEMBER 10, 2019, 10:30 A.M.:
_A previous version of this story included an incorrect driving
distance between Spokane and the Canadian border._

CORRECTION, DECEMBER 12, 2019: 
_This story has been updated to clarify Mohanad Elshieky’s job title
and to reflect that he was carrying his work permit on the bus when
Border Patrol stopped him, not his asylum papers. _
 
_Amy Martyn is a writer and journalist who specializes in
transportation, consumer news and environmental health stories.
Originally from Los Angeles, she is currently based in Dallas, TX. _

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