It is hard, but necessary, to take in the venality of what we are up against: ICE, with the help of fire management, setting a trap for firefighters in order to check their immigration status. The predicate? a time card with 30 minutes unaccounted for.
"Multiple wildfire sources said the crews would not have been sent to the staging area where they were ambushed without the knowledge of top leaders on the fire’s management team."
This story is so many kinds of fucked up
The fire was 13% contained
Fire chief pulls two crews off the fire, the two crews with the most brown-skinned people
Sends them away from the fire, tells them a boss will meet them there, and they are supposed to cut firewood for the community
Now, cutting firewood is the kind of thing that Forest Service crews do during the offseason, to keep in shape and because they are paying people. Contractor crews are different. They only pay people when they are working, when there is a fire. But...
As a former contractor wildland firefighter, I have never heard of a contractor crew cutting firewood. I'm not saying it didn't doesn't happen, but it is sus. And during an active fire? It's downright bizarre
The crew apparently thought it was sus too, because they didn't cut the firewood
They said they were concerned the logs they saw there might belong to a private corporation. Article doesn't say why they thought that, but maybe there were paper signs stapled to the logs. That would be typical
I think this was entrapment
And then ICE turns up
If you haven't spent time in the PNW woods, you might not know what this means
Finding someone in the PNW forests is not like finding someone in a national park. There aren't any other people around. There aren't any trails
There are millions and millions and millions of miles of dirt road through rugged terrain. It would take years to search for a crew, if you didn't have very detailed directions and probably a latitude and longitude pin
Someone sent those brown crews to a remote spot, with a fake job to do, and then sent ICE after them
I bet the ICE people were upset when they didn't find the crews illegally cutting up the logs. It probably meant they couldn't arrest everyone, but only the few people who they could find immigration BS against
Here's hoping they didn't make their quota that day. And that they got lost on their way there, and spent the whole day driving around in the trees
@NilaJones @CindyWeinstein I don't know the details as I didn't read the article. But assuming the military is involved they could pickup an assembly of vehicles with awacs, providing all the targeting information ice would need.
The military has a set amount of time they need to be in the air for training. Not to mention the, us, military is infamous for bad allocations of resources.
California is within the 100(?) mile of the border where law enforcement can ask for assistance from the military. I doubt military culture would allow leadership to turn down any request, the military take a lot of pride in showing up when asked.
Event didn't take place in California, nor within 100 miles of the border
@ekg @CindyWeinstein
I mean, I guess they could? But would that be a reasonable use of resources? Does it work under dense tree canopy? How would they distinguish those couple of vehicles from any other couple of vehicles within a thousand square miles?