Anarchist/“Anti-Fascist” Attacks Detention Center - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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#15018064
Armed man attacking Tacoma’s ICE detention center killed in officer-involved shooting

    A protest outside the federal immigration detention center in Tacoma last year drew headlines when a 68-year-old man wrapped his arms around a police officer’s throat and shoulders in an apparent attempt to free another protester.

    When police got the man into handcuffs, they found a collapsible baton and knife in his pocket, leading to criminal charges.

    Early Saturday morning, that man, Willem Van Spronsen of Vashon Island, returned to the Northwest Detention Center, the holding facility for the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, this time armed with a rifle and incendiary devices, according to Tacoma police.

    Police said Van Spronsen tossed lit objects at vehicles and buildings, causing one car fire, and unsuccessfully tried to ignite a propane tank.

    Officers were called by an ICE employee who saw the rifle. Soon after they arrived, officers reported “shots fired,” said Tacoma police spokeswoman Loretta Cool, although it is unclear who fired first or if Van Spronsen fired at all. The Pierce County Medical Examiner’s Office classified his death as a homicide.

    The four responding officers all opened fire and then took cover, uninjured. After medical aid arrived, officers found Van Spronsen dead. He had multiple gunshot wounds, according to the Pierce County Medical Examiner’s office.

    Immigration is increasingly a flashpoint American politics, and Van Spronsen’s death came on the eve of Sunday’s planned national raid by ICE targeting thousands of undocumented immigrant families who the government said missed court hearings or who had received removal notices. Seattle is not among the 10 cities being targeted in the raids.

    Deb Bartley, a friend of Van Spronsen’s for about 20 years, described him as an anarchist and anti-fascist, and she believes his attack on the detention center was intended to provoke a fatal conflict.

    “He was ready to end it,” Bartley said. “I think this was a suicide. But then he was able to kind of do it in a way that spoke to his political beliefs … I know he went down there knowing he was going to die.”

    She and other friends of Van Spronsen got letters in the mail “just saying goodbye.” He also wrote what she referred to as a manifesto, which she declined to discuss in detail but predicted would be taken by authorities.

    Maru Mora-Villalpando, an activist with the group La Resistencia, which has frequently protested the conditions at the detention center and broader immigration policy, said she did not know Van Spronsen. Nor was La Resistencia involved with the June 2018 protest at which he was arrested, she said.

    However, the group believes, based on information provided to them, that Van Spronsen was targeting the detention center’s parking lot, which includes a fleet of buses that transports immigrants to the Yakima airport, where they are deported.

    Van Spronsen had worked as a self-employed carpenter and contractor, according to court documents. He was also a folk singer, playing shows on Vashon Island and around the Seattle area.

    The 2018 protest involved about 160 people outside the detention center. About 40 people blocked a police car that had arrived, prompting the officer to call in backup; about 25 officers responded.

    In court documents, Van Spronsen was accused of lunging at a police officer’s neck to help free a 17-year-old protester who was being detained. Van Spronsen refused to comply with officers’ orders, and as he was led through a crowd of protesters, police said he tried to pass the baton to another protester. Van Spronsen was punched in the face at least once during the altercation. Nine other people were arrested as well.

    He ultimately pleaded guilty in Pierce County Superior Court to one count of obstructing an officer, a gross misdemeanor, and received a one-year deferred sentence in October, according to court documents, which labeled him indigent.

    The four male officers involved in Saturday’s fatal shooting — ⁠ whose tenure with Tacoma police ranged from 20 years to 9 months — were placed on paid administrative leave per department policy. Their names won’t be released until further along in the investigation, according to Cool.

    ICE spokeswoman Tanya Roman confirmed the shooting incident and said no ICE employees were hurt nor involved. She referred questions to Tacoma police. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives’ Seattle division said it will be supporting the investigation.

    La Resistencia ⁠ had initially planned a protest of the facility for Saturday afternoon, but postponed the event by a day after reporting road closures around the center.

So it’s been over 24 hours since the shooting, and so far it’s been mentioned by the Washington Post (half an hour ago), BBC (10 hours ago), NBC News (18 hours ago), the Hill (1 day ago), and the New York Times (1 day ago). Some of these mention his friend’s description of him as an anarchist and “anti-fascist,” some mention his assault of a police officer at a protest a year earlier, none of them mention that he was a member of Occupy Portage (the local affiliate of Occupy Wallstreet, of course). Only the Hill mentions the verbal assaults the Democrats have leveled against law enforcement, and that’s in the form of a quote of the spokesperson for the company that manages the facility:

    ”The outrageous and baseless accusations that have been leveled against our facilities have led to misplaced aggression and a dangerous environment for our employees, whose safety is our top priority.”

It’ll be interesting to see how many others in the MSM(D) report on this, whether they’ll make the same connection. Or whether, as seems more likely, they’ll just blow it off if they mention it at all, and avoid any hint that Democratic rhetoric might be responsible.
#15018066
Pants-of-dog wrote:So ICE has started killing white people too now?

Wow, have you been drinking the kool-aid. Did you even bother to read the article? The man was killed by the four Tacoma police officers that responded.
#15018070
Pants-of-dog wrote:And the Tacoma police force has been killing white people for a while?

They killed a man armed with a rifle and carrying incendiary devices, trying to light cars on fire and make a propane tank explode. His race was and is irrelevant.
#15018076
Well, I've written it before and I'll write it again. Having a border means detaining people who try to make unauthorised crossings. Detaining them means you need a place to put them into. It's not wise to incercerate adults and children together, so these "family separations" are a necessary and normal consequence of having a border.

Getting mentally ill people worked up over these supposed atrocities is shameful.
#15018079
Hong Wu wrote:Well, I've written it before and I'll write it again. Having a border means detaining people who try to make unauthorised crossings. Detaining them means you need a place to put them into. It's not wise to incercerate adults and children together, so these "family separations" are a necessary and normal consequence of having a border.

Getting mentally ill people worked up over these supposed atrocities is shameful.


Why? Why is it necessary to have family seperations?

Why do we need a border at all?
#15018081
Hong Wu wrote:Well, I've written it before and I'll write it again. Having a border means detaining people who try to make unauthorised crossings. Detaining them means you need a place to put them into. It's not wise to incercerate adults and children together, so these "family separations" are a necessary and normal consequence of having a border.


I see how you made this unexplained and illogical leap from “housing asylum seekers” to “putting people in prison”.

This is how you get around the moral quandary of forcibly separating families and the having the children die in the custody of US police.

Getting mentally ill people worked up over these supposed atrocities is shameful.


I am not sure he was mentally ill. His actions were consistent with the rational idea that we should not kill children and we should stop others from doing so.
#15018087
Pants-of-dog wrote:Anyway, what is it about this particular shooting that is interesting?

The shooting itself, not much outside of the fact that the inevitable has happened. When you have national leaders and opinion-shapers repeatedly equating our law enforcement with mass-murdering racists, someone is eventually going to respond accordingly. What is more interesting is how the MSM(D) responds (or doesn’t) to the shooting. After all, their knee-jerk reaction when something similar happens targeting Leftists or minorities is to blame it on Conservative rhetoric, loudly and often.

Hong Wu wrote:Well, I've written it before and I'll write it again. Having a border means detaining people who try to make unauthorised crossings. Detaining them means you need a place to put them into. It's not wise to incercerate adults and children together, so these "family separations" are a necessary and normal consequence of having a border.

Actually, keeping the families together is wise. Unfortunately, some judges in their infinite wisdom have made that impossible (except those sent back to Mexico, of course). God knows if they did so to deliberately sabotage our immigration enforcement, we certainly don’t.

Getting mentally ill people worked up over these supposed atrocities is shameful.

I haven’t heard any reports that this shooter is mentally ill, just a true believer. If you actually believe our law enforcement officers are mass-murdering racists and so a threat to those they incarcerate, physically attacking them is perfectly reasonable. And that’s what the Left has been at least insinuating if not outright saying plainly for ages.
#15018089
Doug64 wrote:The shooting itself, not much outside of the fact that the inevitable has happened. When you have national leaders and opinion-shapers repeatedly equating our law enforcement with mass-murdering racists, someone is eventually going to respond accordingly.


Well, your government does go around killing lots of brown people (i.e. Iraq, Syria) and does either kill children or let them die when the government should be taking care of them.

It is not a completely irrational judgement to make about your police forces.

What is more interesting is how the MSM(D) responds (or doesn’t) to the shooting. After all, their knee-jerk reaction when something similar happens targeting Leftists or minorities is to blame it on Conservative rhetoric, loudly and often.


No, conservative misconceptions about media are not interesting.

Actually, keeping the families together is wise. Unfortunately, some judges in their infinite wisdom have made that impossible (except those sent back to Mexico, of course). God knows if they did so to deliberately sabotage our immigration enforcement, we certainly don’t.


So, why did your government decide to forcibly separate families?

I haven’t heard any reports that this shooter is mentally ill, just a true believer. If you actually believe our law enforcement officers are mass-murdering racists and so a threat to those they incarcerate, physically attacking them is perfectly reasonable.


...and since we actually have deaths of children at the hands of US immigration officers, this is also factually valid.

And that’s what the Left has been at least insinuating if not outright saying plainly for ages.


And the rest of the citizenry should also be holding the government accountable for the deaths of children.
#15018090
Pants-of-dog wrote:...and since we actually have deaths of children at the hands of US immigration officers, this is also factually valid.

Putting aside the rest of the nonsense in your post, let’s focus on one example: please provide a link for the deaths of ... what, six children? Out of the tens if not hundreds of thousands that the Border Patrol have processed? ... that have died at the hands of US immigration officers.
#15018096
Pants-of-dog wrote:I am not sure what you are asking for.

Do you want a link to the six deaths so far?

https://www.theroot.com/u-s-government- ... 1834976658

So, looking at your link, there’s one child with congenital heart defects that died in a nursing facility of complications following a surgical procedure, a teenager that died of a heart attack that might or might not have survived if the nurse there had responded properly (or possibly at all), and four that your link doesn’t detail reasons for their deaths. Not one of them is reported to have died at the hands of US immigration officers, though it certainly sounds like the nurse could be charged with negligent homicide. Want to try again?
#15018099
Oh, I see.

You are trying to say that we should ignore the deaths of these children because we cannot immediately show it was cold blooded murder.

No. I think government should be held accountable for the deaths of children even if the kids merely died while in government custody as a result of neglect or other causes.

You are basically arguing that since we do not have enough evidence to charge people with first degree murder, we should ignore forcible separation of families, deaths due to neglect, and a host of other issues.

That seems less rational than, for example, attacking the vehicles in an immigration detention center as way of hopefully rescuing some families.
#15018119
The guy was a Left-Anarchist terrorist piece of shit. If this had been a Right Winger or Libertarian that committed this act of Terrorism, the world wouldn't have heard the end of it from the Corporate Liberal Media. But since his heroes were Howard Zinn, Emma Goldman, and John Brown, instead of some Fascist, down the memory hole this whole tale will go...
#15018120
A friend of Van Spronsen said that she thinks he wanted to provoke a fatal conflict, the Seattle Times reported.

Deb Bartley, who told the Times she has been a friend of Willem Van Spronsen's for about 20 years, described him as an anarchist and anti-fascist, and believes his attack on the detention center intending to provoke a fatal conflict.

"He was ready to end it," Bartley said. "I think this was a suicide. But then he was able to kind of do it in a way that spoke to his political beliefs . I know he went down there knowing he was going to die."


This elderly man was suicidal and ready to end his life by provoking a fatal conflict, while making a political statement at the same time. There was another thread about a former soldier who was shot to death by police officers in a similar circumstance.
#15018122
annatar1914 wrote:The guy was a Left-Anarchist terrorist piece of shit. If this had been a Right Winger or Libertarian that committed this act of Terrorism, the world wouldn't have heard the end of it from the Corporate Liberal Media. But since his heroes were Howard Zinn, Emma Goldman, and John Brown, instead of some Fascist, down the memory hole this whole tale will go...


He died trying to save children from concentration camps. I'm sure that's commendable.

Also this is the first time I've heard of this so I guess "corporate Liberal media" doesn't care.

But let's be honest here. We all know right wing and liberal media are the same. They're both capitalists.
#15018128
Just a friendly reminder that both black and red bloc anarchists are trash. It is kinda shameful that Europe exported black bloc in mass to many countries. Those fuckers are really annoying because they literally try to start riots all the fucking time be it climate change summits, global conferences, IMF/WTO meetings, yellow west protests etc etc. There is no real policy that they provide to fix the situation. They are only interested in the riot itself.
Last edited by JohnRawls on 14 Jul 2019 22:24, edited 2 times in total.
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