Immigration agents arrested two Mexican contractors who helped address a forest fire in the Olympic National Forest in Washington, a supervisor who supervises the crews said Thursday.
It was one of the first times that it is known that federal immigration agents entered a fire zone to carry out the mass deportation orders of President Donald Trump, said the veterans firefighters.
Two work teams, with a total of 44 people, gathered in a staging place near Lake Cushman around 9 am on Wednesday when federal agents appeared, said the chief of the crew, David Díaz.
They were just one mile of the Bear Gulch fire line and planned to spend the day cutting the wood, Diaz said.
The cause of the fire, which began on July 6, is still under investigation. He has burned almost 9,000 acres and was contained 13% on Thursday night, according to the incident command team.
Twenty of the contracted workers were Mexican, and all carried work visas and passports, he said. But federal officials arrested two of them on suspicion of being illegally in the United States.
Governor Bob Ferguson said in a statement on social networks that he was “deeply concerned about this situation with two people who helped fight fires in the state of Washington.”
Díaz immediately recognized one of the black trucks that he had seen the previous week in Walmart, where his crew had gone to collect supplies after he arrived in Washington, he said. The truck followed him with a hardware store and then to a service station, he said.
“We saw the black truck literally make a U turned in front of us while we are in the store.” said. “We just followed all the time.”
The videos recorded by Díaz and published on social networks seemed to show the border patrol agents stopping two crew members. Other videos show the crew members aligned from side to side in front of the border patrol agents.
Customs and border protection of the United States.
Companies also did not respond to comments requests.
BLM, which supervises 245 million federal land acres, requested the help of the United States border patrol to verify the identities of all members of the work crew, immigration officials said. They said that one of the two arrested had a previous extraction order in their history.
The contracts with the two fire -fighting companies, according to customs and border protection, were completed.
“The termination of the contract and the compliance action did not interfere with fire extinguishing operations or the response to any active fire in the area, nor represented any danger to the surrounding community,” said the agency in its statement.
The application action left a sour feeling among crew members, Díaz said. They were not allowed to say goodbye to the two men who were arrested, and were forced to stand for about three hours while federal agents reviewed their records.
Díaz said that all he could do was deliver to one of the men arrested a mango cream soda.
“With private contractors, it is difficult for us to even go to a fire. I mean, we are lucky that we even get this type of work,” he said, adding that once a crew member is deported, it is impossible to recover it.
“There is already a lack of resources,” he continued. “Forest fires could get out of control, larger than anyone expects.”
Washington and Oregon are increasingly trusted in contract teams such as Díaz’s due to a federal firefighters. Unlike California, which invests to a multipleGENCY approach that includes state, local and federal resources, the contracts of the Northwest of the Pacific with private companies to fill open spaces in fire crews.
The situation leaves more margin of error, said Steve Gutiérrez, a union representative of the National Federation of Federal Employees.
“This would not happen with the forest service,” he said, which requires strict background verifications, including citizenship.
That happened during an active fire, he said, was especially worrying. Immigration application actions generally do not occur near the lines of fire, said Díaz and Gutiérrez, and on Wednesday they could mark a new chapter on how the Trump administration manages natural disasters.
Trump terminated this year a policy of the Biden era that prohibits the application of the immigration law in the so -called sensitive places such as schools and churches. That was also applied to natural disasters, but it seems to have changed with arrests on Wednesday.
“This is the first time this happens in my 26 years” in the fight against fires, said Díaz. “They could have done this in a more human way.”
