It was before 7 a.m. on the Friday before Memorial Day weekend when the wife of Charlottesville public defender Donald Bellah, asleep inside the couple’s rural Albemarle County residence, was awakened by two FBI agents. They told her they wanted to speak with her husband.
Around that same time, other agents were arriving at other lawyers’ homes.
"There was no attempt to contact any one of us other than just showing up at our houses at the same time," Bellah told The Daily Progress. "I’m angry; it was intending to intimidate us."
Bellah represented one of the two men detained April 22 inside the Albemarle County Courthouse in downtown Charlottesville by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. That raid provoked widespread criticism after videos showed three ICE agents dressed in plain clothes refusing to show badges or arrest warrants to bystanders who questioned the men. One of the ICE agents wore a balaclava, masking his identity in possible contravention of Virginia law.
"Shocking," was how Abigail Spanberger, the Democrat and former three-term U.S. representative running for governor in Virginia this year, described what transpired to The Daily Progress.
The two detained men, Teodoro Dominguez-Rodriguez, a 41-year-old native of Honduras, and Pablo Aparicio-Marcelino, a 32-year-old native of Mexico, remain at the Farmville Detention Center, according to an ICE database.
While the Albemarle County sheriff who controls courthouse security asserted that the agents presented their credentials to her deputies in advance, Spanberger, whose career includes stints as both a CIA operative and a U.S. Postal Service inspector, joined Charlottesville and Albemarle County’s delegation to Richmond — state Sen. Creigh Deeds and Del. Katrina Callsen — in expressing concern. Deeds and Callsen have filed a public records request seeking more information about what happened at the courthouse.
On May 15, the Charlottesville Albemarle Bar Association approved a resolution condemning what happened as a threat to public safety. Now, news of the unannounced visits to the lawyers’ homes has fueled outrage from one of that resolution’s supporters: Doris Gelbman.
"This is precisely the thing our resolution was intended to address, the intimidation of attorneys and defendants," Gelbman told The Daily Progress.
Bellah works from the Office of the Public Defender in the former Daily Progress office on Market Street in downtown Charlottesville.
"Why not just go to the public defender’s office and say we’d like to speak with these people or call in advance?" asked Bellah. "Why would you go to our residences, which you had to have looked up?"
Bellah wasn’t impressed with the FBI’s explanation.
"They told my wife," he said, "that they wanted to catch me before I went into work."
As it turned out, the U.S. Army veteran was not at home because he was in Northern Virginia — in part, he said, to pay a visit to Arlington National Cemetery to see the grave of a military mentor.
"You had to have found each of our residences to hit us," said Bellah. "You had to coordinate it to get the same time."
Bellah said that he and two colleagues, whom he declined to identify, subsequently received phone calls from the FBI asserting the reason for the visits: that the agents wanted witnesses with information for an obstruction complaint against the two women seen questioning and at times blocking the ICE agents in the courthouse on April 22.
"The FBI’s policy is to neither confirm nor deny if we are conducting an investigation," FBI spokeswoman Leslie McLane told The Daily Progress. "As such, I can’t speak to if we are conducting the obstruction investigation you referenced."
Bellah stopped short of asserting that all three public defenders received residential visits, since one was not at home at the time of the other two visits.
"That’s not the way you normally do a witness interview," said Bellah. "That is the way you would do it if you wanted to talk to people that you thought were involved in a conspiracy."
Intrigued enough to violate his own advice to clients about refraining from speaking to authorities, Bellah subsequently accepted an invitation to confer last Wednesday at the FBI’s Charlottesville office at 2211 Hydraulic Road.
"I said, ‘Before we get started, am I a target, a person of interest or a subject of the investigation?’" recounted Bellah. "And they said, ‘Right now we look at you more as a witness.’"
Bellah said it was clear the primary targets were the two women seen during the courthouse confrontation, both of whom wore masks.
"They showed me a picture of one of them and asked me if I knew the person," said Bellah. "I asked them if they had done a national agency check or local agency check on me, and there was a delay."
The agents’ alleged refusal to answer that question gave Bellah some information.
"That was as good as a yes," said Bellah.
He said he then terminated the interview, shook hands with the agents and left.
After the courthouse raid, ICE scolded the two women who attempted to intervene and announced that the U.S. Attorney’s Office "intends to prosecute those individuals."
The spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Virginia, citing routine policy, has declined to comment on the existence of an investigation. But for Bellah, there’s evidence of a zeal to prosecute.
"What resources are they using to go after three lawyers in the public defender’s office?" he asked. "Why would you spend that kind of resources?"
This past week, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, published a list of "sanctuary jurisdictions" across the U.S. that it says are circumventing federal immigration laws. Both Charlottesville and Albemarle County made that list, which also included the nonexistent locality of Martinsville County. Both Charlottesville and Albemarle County have denied they are in any way skirting federal immigration law.
Source: www.dailyprogress.com