People who protested the detainment of three Colombian asylum-seekers in Durango continue to voice outrage, disbelief, and disappointment at how they were treated by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents at the demonstration earlier this week.
A special meeting held by the Durango City Council on Thursday afternoon did little to clarify the situation, with the Durango police chief and a number of local residents offering widely different views on what happened.
Police Chief Brice Current characterized the event, which took place Monday and Tuesday at an ICE facility in Durango, as a riot However, numerous people who gave public comments at the council meeting disputed that picture, saying it was ICE agents who initiated the violence.
Several people who were at the protest and later spoke with KSJD, including some Montezuma County residents, also disagreed with the chief’s view.
The council chambers were packed for the Thursday meeting, another 80 or so people were jammed into the City Hall lobby, and a large crowd stood outside the building, listening to the meeting on a speaker or on their phones.
The protest has generated statewide attention and the Colorado Bureau of Investigation has said it will investigate whether ICE acted illegally when a federal agent threw one demonstrator to the ground.
Current gave a lengthy statement at the beginning of the meeting, offering a chronology of the events. He said he learned at 9:16 a.m. Monday from Durango School Superintendent Katie Cheser that two schoolchildren had been detained by ICE.
Current said he called the local ICE agent, who was holding the father and children in his facility in Durango, and asked if the police department could facilitate the transfer of the children to their mother, but was told they could not.
The individuals are reportedly Fernando Jaramillo Solando, 55; his 12-year-old daughter; and his 15-year-old son. According to numerous reports, they are asylum-seekers who have been in the state for more than a year.
The police department later responded to the scene at the ICE facility after a call from the fire department complaining that vehicles were illegally parking on both sides of the road to the fire station, which is near the ICE facility, , Current told the council. He said protesters voluntarily moved their vehicles after police told them to.
Current said he repeatedly asked ICE by phone whether the police could transfer the kids to their mother, or do a welfare check on them, but was told that was not possible.
The father has no criminal history in the local database, Current said.
He said there were about a hundred protesters on the scene Tuesday, with about 20 linked in a human chain near a gate outside the facility. Protesters had put a chain and lock around the gate.
Current said among the protesters, there were “probably ten agitators throwing full plastic water bottles and milk jugs at agents and [Colorado] State Patrol” and some were “engaging agents and officers physically.”
When ICE cut the lock off the gates and took the detained people away, Current said, the police and fire departments planned to provide medical attention to protesters in need. But when they left the fire station, about ten people converged on them and they decided they were just escalating the situation, so they backed out, he said.
Current told the council he fully supports the First Amendment, which includes the right to peacefully assemble.
“I want to stress peacefully assemble,” he said, adding that Durango has had two very large protests recently that were peaceful.
He then quoted Martin Luther King, saying, “It is wrong to use immoral means to attain moral ends.”
“The event Monday was not a peaceful protest, it was an unlawful protest that turned into a riot,” Current said.
The crowds in the lobby and outside the building shouted and booed so loudly in reaction to his statements about the protest being a riot that Current had to stop talking until the crowd quieted down.
Montezuma County resident Angela Atkinson, who was at the protest, disagrees with the idea that the demonstrators were somehow responsible for the violence.
She told KSJD in a phone interview that she arrived about 7 a.m. Tuesday.
“We were there just waiting around,” she said. “Some folks were watching for the [ICE] vans. We knew they had been spotted in the Albertsons parking lot. . . we knew the pickup [of the detainees] was impending. We were organizing and getting ready.”
By then there were about a hundred protesters, she said. “Organizers were very clear about the purpose, which was to be a peaceful protest, to delay the deportation.”
They warned that anyone who was part of the human chain blocking the gates had to be prepared to be arrested, she said.
Things were very mellow then, she said, with people playing guitar and banjo and singing Woody Guthrie songs.
Atkinson was part of the “support line,” she said, meaning she was there to observe and to help people “bearing the brunt of whatever force” might occur.
“We knew there would likely be pepper spray, rubber bullets, and tear gas,” she said.
After two ICE vehicles arrived, things deteriorated, she said.
“Then it turned violent,” she said. “It was initiated by ICE. They started pulling people off the line. . . . They immediately started pepper-spraying the whole row [at the gate] indiscriminately. Some were wearing masks or goggles trying to protect themselves. I saw ICE officers pull back the masks and spray directly into the eyes of protesters. They were dragging people by their legs. There was no attempt to arrest anyone, it was immediate violence and immediate attack when the protesters resisted. They [protesters] were inhibiting a federal process, yes, but it immediately escalated to violence.”
She began pulling people out and trying to get them medical assistance.
“There was a young high-school boy who kept saying, ‘I can’t see, I can’t see,’ so I just went into the chain and started pulling people out to get them to a place where medication could be given.”
Organizers hadn’t been prepared in terms of first-aid materials, she said. Another woman was attending a young man whose nose was broken, and there was no gauze, “just a bloody sheet to soak up the blood,” she said.
Other protesters who had been pepper-sprayed were saying they couldn’t see, and people went around helping them, washing out their eyes with water or milk.
Atkinson said she did not see any initiation of violence by protesters, though she knew there would be trouble after they locked the gate because it was a defacement of federal property.
“I saw a young girl leave the front line clearly in agony and a guy just pushed her from the back,” she said. “It was a Homeland Security officer and she turned around and pushed him back and he violently pushed her to the ground. She was trying to get medical help.
“They were animals. I have never seen anything like it.”
Finally, ICE cut the chains off the gate and the van carrying the detainees left. Then some protesters did throw things, she said.
“The protesters got really angry, throwing water bottles and maybe oranges at the vehicles,” she said.
“You could see the rage of the protesters seeing the kids leave, knowing they had failed in their fruitless mission, and people started chasing the vehicles, throwing water bottles.”
She began shouting “Peace! Peace!” but she saw young men grow angry. “This what they’re wired to do – protect. I saw them lose control a bit. They weren’t throwing rocks or Molotov cocktails but it was something I felt uncomfortable with because this is what they [ICE and Homeland Security] want. They’ll incite, they’ll ignite, they’ll provoke until there’s a reaction, and that’s the gotcha.”
She stressed that she saw no attempt to arrest the demonstrators before the pepper-spraying and shooting of rubber bullets began. “The protocol is arrest, it’s not warfare on citizens, and it just seems like our present government has forgotten a pretty crucial step. We don’t attack our fellow citizens when they’re engaged in peaceful protest.”
After the detainees were taken away, Atkinson said, there were still two people who had been pepper-sprayed who remained sitting and trying to block the gate.
“It was such a poignant scene. There were two people, an older gentleman and a young man probably in high school, the only two left, still with linked arms trying to block the van leaving. They were in agony, they couldn’t see, they were covered in milk. The only thing they said to me was, ‘Did we save the kids?’ And I said no, and they started weeping.
“ The commitment to withstand torture for a family that you don’t even know, it’s the best of humanity,” she said. “That’s what I saw – the worst of humanity and the best of humanity in this ten or twenty minutes. I lost track of time.”
She said she understands that local police officers are not supposed to interfere with federal agents, but she can’t completely understand how they could stand by while seeing young women being pulled off the line by their hair and other people being shot with rubber bullets or pepper-sprayed.
“There was no one representing the city there, no ambulances, they were parked down the street, no paramedics except for protesters. I don’t understand that part.”
Another Montezuma County resident, who asked to be identified only as Joe, said he was among the protesters and was shot four times with the rubber bullets, which weren’t exactly made of rubber.
“They were like weird capsules, like in a paint-ball gun. They exploded in white like salt,” he said. “I got hit four times, two on the arm, two in the stomach. The two in my stomach hit hard. One broke the skin a bit.”
The agent who shot him was about 20 feet away, Joe said.
He likewise said ICE initiated the altercation. “After ICE started pepper-spraying people, it kind of escalated from there.”
Joe said the incident made him aware of what is happening nationwide.
“For me, just being there for this whole protest, it’s really made me become, like, very in tune with what ICE is doing now,” he said. “It makes me feel really strongly that we need to stand up to what they’re doing because it’s really f**ked up.”
A Montezuma County woman, who asked to be called Elena, agreed that the incident turned into a melee after ICE began pepper-spraying.
“When ICE started pepper-spraying people and taking people’s masks off, knocking them off, the effect would be immediate. That’s when the chaos started happening, because people were running from the front lines screaming and crying that they couldn’t see or breathe.
“There were no initial conversation like ‘we need you guys to move’,” Elena said. “Once the front lines had been broken and cars were on their way out, people felt like it was a last-ditch effort and that’s when the protesters retaliated in a way like throwing water at the cars to get them to stop moving.”
Elena, who is a first responder, said she saw many people affected by pepper spray or tear gas who had trouble breathing or couldn’t open their eyes for 20 minutes.
“I treated a broken nose,” she said. “Somebody got tased and I saw the burn marks, but they were okay. Somebody had an asthma attack due to the tear gas and pepper spray. We treated them with inhalers.”
Many people also had welts or bruising from the rubber bullets. “A lot of people were hit on the back, the shoulders,” she said. “Sometimes the shots broke skin. They were firing at pretty close range.
“You see it on TV and you’re like iit’s happening elsewhere’ but when it hits home it’s pretty nauseating. It was traumatic,” Elena said. “I felt like there was not enough medical personnel on scene. We did not have enough medical personnel or gear to help the amount of people that were hurting. Ambulances couldn’t come on scene because it wasn’t safe. It was really, really overwhelming.
“People need to be aware of ICE’s capability and what they are allowed to do at this point in time because it’s horrendous and it’s really traumatic.”
Wayde Hall of Durango, who went to the city-council meeting, told KSJD he was at the protest from Monday afternoon to when it ended on Tuesday, except for an hour from 5 to 6 a.m. Tuesday when he left on an errand.
He said the statement given by Current was inadequate and was “not a good representation of Durango at all.”
“He said the protesters got violent, and then he tried to use that Martin Luther King quote to almost shame us for not being like Martin Luther King. It was super cringey.”
Hall also said the violence was initiated by ICE, not protesters.
“They were shooting rubber bullets point-blank. These weren’t people who were touching ICE officers or trying to fight them who got shot in response, this is just them shooting and pepper-spraying people, and through it all there was no communication to people. No one came out to explain anything to us. It’s just them imposing their will and that’s super frustrating. Young girls, older men and women got the worst of it.”
Hall said it might have helped if someone had tried to talk to the crowd.
“It would have been interesting if ICE came out with a megaphone and explained, or even the police chief. If you have this insane event going down, for him to come out and check on his people, explain the situation, I think that would have built a lot of trust, but none of us saw it. This was the shadiest thing possible going on. Nobody was explaining what might happen, why this is happening, what’s going on.”
He was critical of the Durango police’s actions.
“All we saw was fear from them, they didn’t want to step on any toes,” Hall said. “The only interaction I saw from Durango police was ticketing cars. They said one side needed to be moved, we said fine, then they said the other side needed to be moved. They got completely owned by ICE, in my opinion. . . . I talked to a lot of people and it was kind of the same sentiment. They were more concerned about ticketing Subarus than protecting the community. . . .
“I did not see one person in a badge or an outfit help a civilian,” Hall said.
He added that he thought it silly that Current spoke about police being hit with milk.
“He brought up the milk hitting officers, which was hilarious.”
Hall said, “People behind the front lines had water and milk. They have people pouring it all over as quick response to irritants. It just escalated extremely fast. Pepper-spraying people’s eyes, videos show it very clearly. As much as people wanted to, including myself, nobody laid a hand on an ICE agent unless a video shows otherwise. It’s all just us taking it.”
He said ICE officers were holding people who were getting tear-gassed or pepper-sprayed, “so people are throwing milk and I’m sure some got on the officers but not to attack an officer.”
When the vehicle carrying the detainees, who reportedly were taken to Texas, went through the gate, Hall said, “nobody’s fighting an ICE officer, nobody had a weapon, no threats, it was just a line of defense to stop them taking the kids. But after they got into their vehicles, a couple milk jugs and water bottles were thrown at the vehicles and that was it. To see a milk jug hit one of their Tahoes is really silly to bring up.
“It’s milk vs. AR-15s and rubber bullets and pepper spray.”
The La Plata County commissioners and aides for Sen. John Hickenlooper, Sen. Michael Bennet, and Rep. Jeff Hurd gave statements expressing concern about the incident at the Thursday council meeting.
