The arrest of a US army veteran who protested against the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown has raised alarms among legal experts and fellow veterans familiar with his service in Afghanistan.
Bajun Mavalwalla II – a former army sergeant who survived a roadside bomb blast on a special operations mission in Afghanistan – was charged in July with “conspiracy to impede or injure officers” after joining a demonstration against federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) in Spokane, Washington.
Legal experts say the case marks an escalation in the administration’s attacks on first amendment rights. Afghanistan war veterans who know him say the case against Mavalwalla appears unjust.
“Here’s a guy who held a top secret clearance and was privy to some of the most sensitive information we have, who served in a combat zone,” said Kenneth Koop, a retired colonel who trained the Afghan military and police during Mavalwalla’s deployment. “To see him treated like this really sticks in my craw.”
The 11 June protest against Ice that led to Mavalwalla’s arrest was confrontational, leaving a government van’s windshield smashed and tires slashed, but Mavalwalla was not among the more than two dozen people arrested at the scene. More than a month passed before the FBI arrived at his door on 15 July.
The 35-year-old, who used his GI Bill to earn a degree in sustainable communities from Sonoma State University, was set to move into a 3,000-sq-ft house that day, which he had bought with his girlfriend, a nurse and fellow Afghanistan war veteran, with the help of a loan backed by the Department of Veterans Affairs.
Mavalwalla’s father, a retired US army intelligence officer with three Bronze Stars earned during tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, brought his truck for the occasion. He planned to move his son into a dream home in a bucolic, southern section of Spokane that was large enough to accommodate their blended family (Mavalwalla has one child; his girlfriend, Katelyn Gaston, has three) and solidify the couple’s life together.
But at 6am the FBI knocked on Mavalwalla’s door and they arrested him. Cell phone video shot by Mavalwalla’s father shows the veteran – tall, fit, with wire-rimmed glasses, tight ponytail and trim goatee – smiling in apparent disbelief, his hands shackled behind his back.
“This is not how I planned to spend my moving day,” Mavalwalla says, as agents search his pockets and force him into a black pickup truck. “I’m a military veteran. I’m an American citizen.”
At 3pm, Mavalwalla, who receives disability compensation for post traumatic stress disorder connected to his service in Afghanistan, appeared in federal court along with eight other people indicted in connection with a protest against an Ice transport that occurred a month earlier.
While the indictment alleges other protesters struck federal officers and let the air out of the tires of an Ice transport, Mavalwalla was not charged with obstruction or assault. Instead, he was charged with “conspiracy to impede or injure officers”.
According to the indictment, Mavalwalla and his co-defendants “physically blocked the drive-way of the federal facility and/or physically pushed against officers despite orders to disperse and efforts to remove them from the property”.
Mavalwalla, who has no criminal record, pleaded not guilty.
His family says Mavalwalla’s actions were motivated by a commitment to non-violent protest, which traces back to the family’s deep connection to the Indian independence leader, Mahatma Gandhi.
A one-minute video posted on Instagram shows the army veteran briefly jostle with an officer whose face is covered by a ski mask and sunglasses. Mavalwalla then locks arms with other demonstrators to block the gate.
The conspiracy count carries a maximum penalty of six years in prison, a $250,000 fine and three years of supervised release. He was released on his own recognizance while awaiting trial, with a judge even giving him permission to travel to Disneyland for a previously planned family vacation.
‘He’s a test case to see how far they can go’
The US attorney’s office in Spokane, which brought the charges, declined to comment, citing an ongoing investigation.
The indictment was handed down two days after career prosecutor Richard Barker, the acting US attorney for eastern Washington state, resigned. In a social post, Barker called his exit “a very difficult decision”.
“I am grateful that I never had to sign an indictment or file a brief that I didn’t believe in,” he wrote.
The current acting US attorney, nominated for the permanent post by Donald Trump, is Pete Serrano, a former litigator for the Silent Majority Foundation, a conservative advocacy group. In February, Serrano filed an amicus brief in support of Trump’s executive order to end birthright citizenship, a position at odds with the 14th amendment. He has no prosecutorial experience and has described the January 6 US Capitol rioters as “political prisoners”.
Patty Murray, a Democratic senator from Washington state, has pledged to block his confirmation.
Legal experts say the conspiracy charges against Mavalwalla underscore the lengths the Trump administration will go to quash protests against Ice, giving the immigration agency a free hand as it steps up raids, adds agents and seeks to achieve the president’s goal of 3,000 deportations per day.
So far, the Trump administration has primarily charged demonstrators for assault and obstruction, acts that typically involve a victim and an assailant. But a federal conspiracy charge is a crime of intent. In this case, prosecutors would just have to prove that defendants agreed in concert to impede or injure an officer.
“He’s a test case to see how far they can go,” said Luis Miranda, a former chief spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security under Joe Biden.
‘Honest, direct, polite and very trustworthy’
The charges against Mavalwalla sent shockwaves through a tight community of veterans with connections forged in Afghanistan that intensified after the bungled August 2021 US withdrawal. The fall of Kabul to the Taliban brought them together again to evacuate Afghans who worked alongside the US military.
After his arrest, Mavalwalla’s commanding officer, Col Charles Hancock, who is retired, wrote on Facebook that he knew the trained crypto-linguist to be “honest, direct, polite and very trustworthy” and was “deeply concerned about the current state of affairs in our country”.
Koop, the retired colonel, said Mavalwalla put the diplomatic connections he gained due to his security clearance at the disposal of Koop’s translator, who escaped and otherwise might have been murdered by the Taliban. “It was no surprise to me that concern for the individual, human rights and safety would be right up Bajun’s portfolio and mindset,” Koop said.
As word spread that Mavalwalla knew how to rescue people in the frenetic days after the fall of Kabul, more people reached out.
When Erin Piper, the community director at a church in Livonia, Michigan, learned that a relative of one of her son’s friends had worked as a custodian on a US military base in Afghanistan, she called Mavalwalla to see if he could help bring over an extended family of aunts, uncles and siblings who had been left behind.
Mavalwalla sprung into action, locating safe houses for 20 members of the former custodian’s extended family and at least a dozen other Afghan civilians whose family members collaborated with the US military, she said. He helped them acquire travel documents, arranged for safe transport over land to Pakistan and raised $130,000 to pay expenses, including visa applications and flights there to Brazil and eventually to the United States.
“It was hard,” Piper said, but Mavalwalla was patient.
In text messages, he urged Piper to be sure to take care of herself and her family. “It does no good for us to neglect those right in front of us,” he wrote on 25 September 2021, a month after the Taliban takeover.
“You cannot save the world,” he added. “It’s good to try though.”
‘An issue of selective prosecution’
Mavalwalla was one of hundreds of people to respond to a 11 June social media post from the former president of the Spokane city council that encouraged protesters to block an Ice transport they believed would carry two Venezuelan immigrants who were in the country legally, petitioning for asylum when they were detained.
“I am going to sit in front of the bus,” Ben Stuckart, the former city council president, wrote. “Feel free to join me.”
In interviews, former prosecutors said the conspiracy statute was broad and afforded the Trump administration potentially sweeping powers.
“Federal conspiracy charges are a wondrous thing,” said Bruce Antkowiak, a former federal prosecutor who teaches at Saint Vincent College in Pennsylvania. “It is a vast net which you can use to catch a bunch of people.”
Under this law, prosecutors won’t have to prove that Mavalwalla blocked the bus or attacked agents, Antkowiak said. “The major issue in a conspiracy case is intent,” he said. “You have to prove an agreement. You don’t have to prove that people sat down together and made a pledge. You don’t even have to write up an agreement they have verbally, but you have to prove that these people agreed to act in concert,” he said.
Because of the law’s sweeping power, prosecutors typically use discretion, experts said.
“It seems like what we have here is an issue of selective prosecution,” Robert Chang, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine, said that will lead to a “chilling effect on free speech under the first amendment”.
Antkowiak said he expected the justice department to bring conspiracy charges more frequently in the months ahead, given the Trump administration’s desire for Ice agents to pursue an agenda of rapid deportations unhindered.
Jennifer Chacón, a Stanford University law professor who studies the intersection of immigration and criminal law, said she would not be surprised if Ice increased monitoring social media to bring more cases like the one against Mavalwalla.
“You could view this as an attempt to send a message to everyone who feels a sense of justice and moral outrage over Ice raids – you could face prosecution, too,” she said.
Mavalwalla’s mother, US army veteran Ellyn Mavalwalla, said her son did not know Stuckart, the former city councilman whose social media post sparked the demonstration, and only met him in jail on 15 July, after both were arrested on federal charges by the FBI.
His father, retired intelligence officer Bajun Ray Mavalwalla, said he believed his son had been racially profiled – that in reviewing footage from the demonstration, federal authorities had fixated on the demonstrator “with a funny name”.
He said he worried the United States was being “taken over by fascists”, but also that the promise of America that drew his family here generations ago would endure.
“My father left India on the deck of a boat, at 19 years old,” the elder Mavalwalla said. “He floated for six days across the Arabian Sea to Kuwait. He nearly died when he arrived. Then an American family sponsored him to come to the US.”
Gandhi’s legacy
In addition to military service, a commitment to peaceful protest has been at the heart of the Mavalwalla family for generations.
Mavalwalla II’s great-great, grand-uncle, Parsee Rustomjee worked with Gandhi in South Africa and supported the Indian independence leader when he launched his legendary, non-violent revolution against British imperialism.
The two families were close – according to the family, Gandhi was godfather to Mavalwalla’s great-grandmother – “and Bajun grew up with stories,” his mother said, with social justice at the center.
After Gandhi was assassinated in 1948, his burial shroud was distributed among his family’s closest confidants, including members of Mavalwalla’s family, and is now held by Mavalwalla’s mother.
Three days after the protest, his mother texted him: “Channel your inner Gandhi.”
“I know, mom,” Mavalwalla replied. “Always non-violence.”
