ICE agents smash windows of vehicle, drag two people out in front of pregnant wife

Screams pierced the air in new Facebook videos from Spokane Valley that captured the moment federal law enforcement agents swarmed a vehicle, shattered its windows and dragged two people into custody early Monday morning.

“She’s pregnant! She’s pregnant!” male voices scream in the background.

Kayla Somarriba, 25 years old and seven months pregnant, was in the vehicle when six unmarked cars surrounded them just a block from their home on Monday. Her husband, Jeison Ruiz-Rodriguez, 26, and brother-in-law, Cesar Ruiz-Rodriguez, 22, were on their way to a court hearing at the Spokane County Courthouse. The brothers had been earlier charged with threatening to kill a family member in December, according to court documents.

Those charges prompted the arrest captured on video, according to U.S. Immigration Customs and Enforcement.

As Somarriba rolled down her window to ask why they were being stopped Monday morning, she sensed the agents already knew who they were and where they were headed based on their answer.

“They immediately said Jeison and Cesar have to get out of the vehicle, so then I asked, ‘Why do they have to get out of the car?’ and they said, ‘It’s because we have a warrant,’ ” Somarriba recalled in Spanish. “I demanded they show me the warrant, and they wouldn’t show me anything.”

She said at least 12 agents, including those from ICE and Homeland Security Investigations, repeatedly ordered Jeison and Cesar to get out of the vehicle, threatening to break the windows if they refused.

Scared, they all pulled out their phones to record, shouting “This is illegal” over and over again.

The federal agents then can be seeing shattering the windows, opening the car doors and grabbing the arms of Somarriba, Jeison and Cesar.

“I am an American citizen; I know exactly how the law works, and what they did was illegal,” Somarriba said.

Jeison and Cesar are being held at the Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma. Their arrests come as the second Trump administration has vowed to crack down on undocumented immigrants, leading to widespread fear in some communities.

What led to the arrest

Somarriba explained to the agents at first that she was driving the men to a court hearing regarding an altercation that happened with a family member in December that led to their arrests.

Court documents state that Jeison went to Yelbin Velazquez-Maldonado’s house, who Somarriba said was his cousin, threatening to kill him. Jeison arrived with his brother David Ruiz-Rodriguez and three other men.

Velazquez-Maldonado saw one of the men show a gun and shoot it in the air while standing behind Jeison’s truck. He doesn’t know who it was, according to court documents. Soon after, Jeison, David and the other men, who have not been identified, fled .

Jeison and Cesar were arrested on Dec. 16 and spent about two months in jail before being released on bail. Jeison’s bond was set at $7,000 on Feb. 6, while Cesar’s bond was set at $15,000 on Feb. 20.

Aside from that recent incident, Somarriba said Jeison’s record is clean.

Her husband, originally from Nicaragua, was on the verge of obtaining his green card through his marriage to Somarriba, a U.S. citizen.

She said her husband filed his immigration case in 2015 for approval of a green card, and it wasn’t until last year, when they filed additional paperwork from their marriage, that the process started to speed up.

“I even offered to show them my passport, my husband’s work permit and social security number, but they didn’t want to see it; they just kept saying they are criminals and that they can’t be in the United States,” said Somarriba, who has resided in Spokane Valley for the past four years.

Somarriba added that her brother-in-law, Cesar, is undocumented but was in the process of obtaining a work permit and a social security number.

Cesar was arrested a year prior and was charged on suspicion of burglary and theft. He was still attending court hearings for that case when the harassment case occurred.

Although she explained their situation to the agents, it quickly escalated as she watched in shock as Cesar was pulled from the car by his legs and forced to the pavement.

Moments later, she said she saw her husband’s seatbelt unbuckled before an agent shocked him with a stun gun near his waist. He screamed in pain and collapsed to the ground.

“I just kept asking why they were doing this,” Somarriba said. “They took them after that.”

ICE responded to a request for comment stating its agents arrested Jeison and Cesar based on the active felony charges. ICE had sought a hold for Jeison in the Spokane County Jail that “was not honored.” So agents found him, detained him and transported him to the federal detention center in Tacoma.

“The aliens resisted officers during the arrest and failed to obey a lawful order to exit a vehicle, which resulted in forced entry by ICE officers,” the statement reads.

“Both individuals were evaluated by medical personnel, and no issues were found; they were then transported to the NWIPC where they will remain pending their immigration proceedings.”

ICE said in the prepared statement that a federal judge has ordered Jeison to be deported. Kyle Madsen, senior attorney at the Spokane County Public Defender’s Office who is representing Jeison following his December arrest, said he’s seen no records ordering his client deported.

“If he did have a detainer in place at that time, the jail would not have released him,” Madsen said.

Somarriba has contacted a lawyer to ask whether there was a warrant that they weren’t aware of, as the ICE agents had claimed. The lawyer said there was no warrant filed in the court system.

Madsen said that while the charges remained active related to the altercation, there was no warrant for their arrest.

Madsen has been working with Katelin Sadler, who is Cesar’s public defender for his case

ICE also claims it had a suspicion that the two men are part of the Tren de Aragua gang, among other prior criminal histories. They declined to provide additional information for proof of the suspected gang affiliation.

“They have nothing to do with that; I don’t even know what that is,” Somarriba said.

Founded in Aragua, Venezuela, the Tren de Aragua is believed to have more than 5,000 members. They have become primary targets under the Trump Administration’s deportation efforts.

Luis Cortes, attorney at Novo Legal LLC, said the gang is composed mostly of Venezuelans, but he was unsure whether it’s exclusively made up of Venezuelans.

“What I do know is that Washington’s ICE has a history of lying about people being associated with gangs to justify their detention,” Cortes said.

ICE was involved – but who else?

With multiple law enforcement agencies and departments seen in the video, Cortes said it raises questions on what warrants are needed – or if they are needed at all.

“There are two different components of ICE. There is one section called Enforcement and Removal Operations, oftentimes called ERO, and they’re the ones who are mostly in charge of going out and arresting people, to detain them, to figure out their immigration situation,” Cortes said. “They usually carry what they call an administrative warrant.”

What that means, he said, is that it’s not a warrant at all, because it’s not signed by a judge or by a neutral person. It just means that they did the investigation beforehand to find out that this person was undocumented.

“If these are the ERO section of ICE and they only have this administrative warrant, then things like smashing out the windows and going into the car and all of that without a judicial warrant is not something that they could be doing,” Cortes continued.

But Cortes noted that the video shows another division of ICE called the Department of Homeland Security Investigations.

“They usually focus on the criminal side of things.”

He said this part of ICE investigates cases like human trafficking or crimes that are punishable in criminal courts.

Still, they need a warrant, even if it’s to get into a vehicle.

‘This isn’t the first time it’s happened in Spokane’

Jennyfer Mesa, executive director of Latinos en Spokane, said in the years she’s lived in Spokane, she’s witnessed various immigration arrests, some of which have included family separation and video footage of ICE agents pointing guns at a car.

“I don’t understand why people are shocked – this has been the new ‘normal,’ ” she said. “But I think under this new administration, we’re seeing how the Trump administration has ramped up this mass deportation – and is laying the groundwork to use branches of government that have not been involved in immigration.

“… We’re seeing them use the IRS, the Health and Human Services and other agencies.”

Mesa said she doesn’t believe Jeison and Cesar’s arrest was a coincidence and suspects they had been under surveillance for days or even weeks, considering President Donald Trump’s plan for mass deportations since before he took office.

“All the passengers did everything correctly. They complied with the agents, they asked for information on what was going on, they asked for a warrant,” Mesa said. “When they didn’t provide the evidence on why they were being stopped or of the warrant, they told them, ‘This is illegal; what are you doing?’ So they are questioning the agents and having them comply.”

She said that with Congress passing the Laken Riley Act – the first major immigration legislation in 20 years – immigrants’ rights have been stripped across the country, fueling trauma, fear and family separation.

Given that Spokane County is about 100 miles from the Canadian Border and a few miles from the Idaho border, she added, the immigrant community is more vulnerable.

Less than a month after Trump took office, border detainments in Kootenai County’s jail grew.

In the first 29 days of January, the jail reported 22 ICE holds, with five in one day – many of them from Washington state. The numbers jumped 450% from December, when the jail recorded just four holds. The number was slightly higher in November, with 10 recorded Border Patrol and ICE holds.

Yet, while the call for mass deportation was to arrest those with criminal records, many of these arrests have included community members who either have a work permit or are working through an immigration case.

In a Feb. 1 video circulating on social media, a Spokane woman named Kendall Diaz posted that her roommate was questioned by Border Patrol agents after people pretended to hit her car.

In her Facebook post, she said the agents were driving unmarked vehicles, a silver Dodge Caravan and white Nissan Titan. Two of the agents were dressed in regular clothing while the others were in their uniforms, according to her post.

“These people pretended to hit my car, which pulled me out of my house. The man asked me repeatedly who else was home and who owned my truck (I’m the legal owner) and then when my roommate came out, they surrounded him with AR-15s pointed at him,” Diaz wrote in her post from early February.

In another instance on Feb. 4, a formerly enrolled student was arrested by ICE officials on the Spokane Community College campus, due to a violation of their international visa, according to an SCC news release.

Surveillance footage obtained by The Spokesman-Review and Spokane Public Radio shows the student was stopped by an immigration official.

Three other immigration officers surrounded the student, and a vehicle pulled up alongside them. The interaction, lasting no more than one minute, showed them putting the student in the back of the vehicle and all driving away.

The college states that the Office of Campus Security was notified by an ICE agent just prior to the arrest. Surveillance footage confirmed the arrest occurred near the entrance of the college’s student parking lot.

“People are seeing the realities and the experience of what it feels like when you are an immigrant being targeted and you are trying to do the right thing,” Mesa said. “You have gone through all the processes and hoops that immigration has given you. You’re showing up to court – and this is the treatment that they’re getting here.”