Firefighters claim their own management team set them up for DHS harassment and arrests

We're learning more about the bizarre Border Patrol raid disrupting firefighting efforts on the Bear Gulch fire in western Washington last month, and everything we're learning makes it worse.

It was the last day that California Incident Management Team 7 was in charge of the Bear Gulch Fire and they were rotating out, replaced by a team from western Washington. The fire wasn’t spreading much by that point, “just little pockets of growth all around the fire,” Travis Ederer, an operations section chief, said in an online update that day. The team of about 400 firefighters was gathering up equipment around National Park buildings and working on clearing roads, he said.

After getting their morning instructions, some of the contract and federal firefighters went to a drop point before starting their assignment to cut firewood for residents, which firefighters sometimes do on slow days. Immigration officials then showed up and started to ask for people’s identification, according to a person familiar with the events who asked to remain anonymous due to the sensitivity of the situation.

The Post's reporting leans too heavily on federal assertions that the raid didn't interfere with firefighting efforts, something the facts don't bear out, and everyone involved appears to know exactly how unprecedented and scummy the federal action was. Of the 400 firefighters of Team 7 that had dispatched to the still-growing fire, the federal immigration raid temporarily detained 44 and arrested 2, essentially disabling the operations of an entire firefighting drop point while DHS leisurely demanded the papers of, evidently, everyone they came in contact with.

The fire's growth had slowed, but hadn't stopped at that point—indeed, the Bear Gulch Fire was only 10-13% contained. And while "clearing roads" or "cutting firewood" does not sound like important firefighting work, at least not if you are stupid, they are tasks that need to be done in order to allow frontline firefighting to continue. The point of clearing roads should be obvious; the point of cutting up the trees downed to make firebreaks is to avoid leaving behind great piles of dry decaying wood.

Privately contracted firefighters are commonplace, and when they're not on the frontlines they're doing tasks like these so that the frontline firefighters do not have to be assigned to them. This is especially important as Donald J. Rancidboy and his crew hollows out federal firefighting efforts for no reason other than fueling their own appetite for illegal destruction.

So now, for some reason, we have immigration agents wandering through the scene of the fire looking for firefighters to deport. Not helping with evacuations. Not manning roadblocks. Not providing relief to any of the law enforcement officials doing any of that necessary work.

Nope, here comes a group of otherwise unassigned federal agents who decide that the highest and best use of their time is to detain everyone at a given firefighting drop point to check everybody's paperwork. They don't know whether a hotspot will flare up in the meantime. They don't know whether the crew will get sudden new orders. No, this group of federal shit-for-brains sees an active fire zone and can only see Quota.

Now, though, it looks like the raid might have been even greasier than it first appeared. Stateline reports that many firefighters believe that the fire management team set up the raid on purpose.

Stateline spoke to nearly a dozen firefighters, agency staffers and contractors familiar with the incident, who shared their belief that the top officials assigned to the fire deployed the crews to a remote location under false pretenses so federal agents could check their immigration status. Most of them spoke privately for fear of retaliation.

The raid has reverberated among fire crews, agency leaders and contractors. Wildfire veterans say the arrests have stoked fear and distrust among firefighters on the ground. They worry that crews may be scared to deploy if they may become a target for immigration raids.

“There’s really no way [the wildfire management team] could not have been involved,” said Riva Duncan, a former wildland fire chief who served more than 30 years with the U.S. Forest Service. “We’re all talking about it. People are wondering if they go on a fire with this team, if that could happen to them.”

Since the incident became public, the wildfire world has been abuzz with anger at that team — California Interagency Incident Management Team 7. Made up of federal, state and local fire professionals, the team was assigned to oversee the response to the Bear Gulch fire, which has burned 9,000 acres in and around Olympic National Park in Washington state.

One firefighter who was present at the raid said he is convinced that Team 7 leaders sent their crews into a trap.

“I felt beyond betrayed,” said the firefighter, who requested anonymity to protect his career. “What they did was messed up. They’d been talking in their briefings about building relationships and trust. For them to say that and then go do this is mind-boggling. It boiled my blood.”

As for evidence that Team 7 leadership set the raid up intentionally:

According to daily Incident Action Plans filed by Team 7 and posted online, the crews had previously been digging holding lines, working to protect structures and conducting mop-up work. The two crews targeted by federal agents had not been assigned to work together in the days leading up to the raid.

Then, on Aug. 27, both crews — workers from private companies contracted to help fight the fire — were told to deploy to a staging area where they would cut firewood for the local community. The firefighter who was present at the raid told Stateline that a division supervisor told the crews he would meet them at the site, but never showed up.

After arriving at the site, the firefighter said, the crews found piles of logs, seemingly from a timber operation. Not wanting to damage a logging company’s property, they waited for a management team leader to show up with further instructions.

After an hour, unmarked law enforcement vehicles pulled up to the site and federal officials began questioning the firefighters. Duncan, the former Forest Service firefighter, said immigration agents would not have been able to access the site without help from Team 7 leaders.

“Fire areas are officially closed, very secure and there are roadblocks,” she said. “Somebody would have had to tell these agents how to get there.”

So there wasn't even firewood to be cleaned up, there was no work to be done, their "team leader" never showed up and immigration agents somehow knew where to look and which roadblocks they needed to go through to find these teams? Yeah, that does begin to sound less like a rogue Department of Homeland Security operation and more like an intentional setup.

As for who did it and why, that's still being worked out.

Several wildland fire veterans also noted that the raid took place on Team 7’s final day in charge of the fire response, hours before a Washington team rotated in to take command. The California team headed home and left the new team to face the media scrutiny and angry firefighters in camp.

“If you’ve got ICE teams pulling your contractors out, you’d want to cut and run as soon as you can,” Polhamus said.

On a forum for wildland fire professionals on the social media platform Reddit, many expressed anger at Team 7. Firefighters also took issue with the assertion, shared by federal immigration officials, that the raid did not disrupt firefighting operations.

“It’s total bulls***,” said Duncan, the former Forest Service firefighter. “Whoever made that statement doesn’t understand the work. To take two crews off of a fire that’s only 13% contained, that seems ridiculous at that point in a fire. That does seem very unusual.”

Whatever the details turn out to be—and we may never know them—the effects on future firefighting efforts will likely be significant, and I sure as hell hope Team 7 managers aren't involved the next time my own California county has a major fire to contend with. The raid may have been planned to coincide with the last day of Team 7's command and they may have quickly vanished from the scene afterwards, but private firefighting companies aren't going to want to show up to work the lines for suspected saboteurs. And both public and private firefighters are now going to treat federal law enforcement with suspicion or outright distrust—and rightly so.

And so another major part of the government's most vital work is now jeopardized, yet again, by a fascist administration, by federal agents who appear to believe their job is to produce maximum harm to communities, by what appears to be unknown individuals using fascism's rise to fuel their own petty racism, and by rank incompetence all the way around.

None of this will get any better before it gets worse. If you told me next month that there was a spate of firefighting bulldozers "accidentally" flattening Border Patrol vehicles inside fire zones, I wouldn't pretend at being surprised. If you told me Washington or Oregon had to call up its own National Guard to protect fire lines from quota-happy federal agents, I'd believe that too.

When you've got a large percentage of government agents on a crusade to harm Americans rather than protect them, things start to play out very badly. And the Trump administration has been very insistent in their desire to hire only the worst of the worst.