Tackled and Pepper-Sprayed 80-Year-Old Santa Barbara Attorney Sounds Off

Nobody knows how unreliable eyewitness testimony can be better than criminal defense attorneys. Even if it’s their own testimony. Just ask Doug Hayes, now 80 years old, who spent the past 50 years defending people facing criminal charges in Santa Barbara. Last Friday, Hayes got blasted in the face with pepper spray by ICE agents during a protest by the county’s Probation Department offices; he also got grabbed by the legs and tackled to the ground. When pressed for details the following morning in his law offices overlooking Santa Barbara’s fabled courthouse, Hayes frequently replied, “I don’t remember,” then adding, “I said what I said. I did what I did. I don’t remember. Anybody who says they can is just making stuff up.”

Actually, Hayes remembers a whole lot.

He remembers sitting in his office hearing all the protesters’ honking cars and whistles that first alerted him something was happening. When he got outside, he was confronted by the sight of two ICE agents dog-piling on top of a young man — believed to have punctured the tire of an ICE car — grinding him face-first, it appeared, into the concrete. “The kid wasn’t moving. He wasn’t doing anything. They were just piling on.” Hayes readily concedes that he walked up and got in their faces. “Take your masks off,” he yelled at them, “Cowards.” Did he think of Renee Good or Alex Pretti, the two Minneapolis protestors shot and killed by ICE agents? “No. No. No,” Hayes said. “I just reacted. This was just wrong.” 

Hayes got close. Too close. One of the agents warned Hayes that he’d pepper-spray him. Hayes kept telling him to take his mask off. “I wanted to be able to identify him later,” he said. Hayes knows cops. There were no city cops around, he said, even if these agents had the word “Police” stenciled on their backs. “I didn’t know who they were, but I knew they were thugs,” he said. “We don’t think this can happen in our little town. We don’t believe that what happened in Minneapolis can happen here in Santa Barbara. But these creeps are everywhere, running wild.”

[Click to zoom] Doug Hayes, 80, confronted ICE agents outside of the Santa Barbara Probation Office before being pepper-sprayed and tackled to the ground by an ICE agent on February 20, 2026. | Credit: Courtesy

Hayes knows Santa Barbara. He was born in Cottage Hospital in 1946. Hayes said his father was a dean at what later would become UCSB and once ran for Congress. His family lived in Hope Ranch where he attended Laguna Blanca as, at best, an indifferent student. When he asked a school administrator how he could get better grades to get into Princeton, Hayes recalled being told, “Hayes, you’re a C student and you’ll always be a C student.”

So, he attended UCSB instead. 

Although Hayes had never played high school football, he played right guard for UCSB’s 1965 football team. “I wasn’t very big, but I got good. I didn’t know anything about contact and I hadn’t been in fights, but I could get angry and I knew when I got angry, I could be efficient.” 

Even now, at age 80, with two replaced knees, one replaced hip, contact lenses, and a hearing aid, Hayes said he might have been able muster some of that old efficiency with the agents. He didn’t think they were that big. But even in the heat of reaction, he knew better. “I remember telling myself, ‘Don’t touch those guys. Don’t touch those guys.’” At the very least, Hayes figured, he might get charged with assault on a federal agent.

In the video taken of the incident, Hayes can be seen wearing a blue T-shirt celebrating UCSB’s 1969 football team, the last year the school fielded a team. The 1965 team — the one Hayes played on — went 8-1, winning a spot in a playoff bowl game, which they lost. 

After UCSB, Hayes attended law school up in Oregon, where he jokes he graduated in the top 95 percent of his class and passed the bar in 1972. After college, Hayes got a job working for the Merced County DA’s office, where the training and supervision was strictly of the sink-or-swim variety. The first day on the job, he was given a trial to try. That day. He lost. But he learned. 

After a brief stint in Merced, Hayes came back home, where he landed a job with the Santa Barbara District Attorney’s office. When a new DA got elected, Hayes was put on notice that his days were numbered. That’s when he began defending people charged with crimes rather than prosecuting them. 

During his five decades in practice, Hayes has become enmeshed — almost geologically — into the county’s criminal justice eco-system. Today, he shares a practice with his daughter Annie Hayes. Back when he started, an old-school spirit of collegiality was more prevalent. Hayes knew most everybody, and vice versa. 

He also knows all the old stories — such as how one of the Shalhoob brothers rode his horse up State Street during one Fiesta nearly naked — and all the whispered rumors, some of which might actually be true. Handling a bread-and-butter caseload, Hayes was rarely one to seek out the limelight. Media attention, he said, rarely worked out well for his clients. 

He made an exception in 2006 when he ran for District Attorney against then-incumbent Christie Stanley. “I came in second,” he said. During Hayes’s career, six District Attorneys have come, and five have gone. The way law is practiced and criminal justice dispensed has changed radically but incrementally. In that time, Hayes said he’s encountered only 10 people he’d consider truly evil. By that, he said, he means people who’d slit his throat for the entertainment of watching him bleed to death. Stephen Miller, Donald Trump’s chief advisor on immigration enforcement, Hayes said, might well qualify as the 11th.

Outside of Hayes second-story offices, two flags fly in the breeze. One is the Mexican flag. The other is an American flag, which Hayes hung upside down. “That’s a sign of distress,” he said.

Everything came to a boil last Friday, he said, when he reached for the backpack belonging to the suspect ICE agents were then dog-piling. All of a sudden, Hayes said, his eyes were stinging. And he was getting tackled. His main concern with both was losing a contact lens. He kept his eyes closed tight so it wouldn’t pop out. All of a sudden he found his body was being lifted up. And water was running down his face. As for the pepper spray, he shrugged that off. He experienced worse, he said, such as accidentally rubbing some of the oils of a Carolina Reaper — until two years ago, the hottest chili pepper in the world — he grew himself into his eye. 

He was not traumatized by the experience; he suffered no post-traumatic stress syndrome. What bothered him the most was the assault on civil rights that’s now taking place at the hands of ICE. “I don’t sue people; that’s not me,” he said. “But I’m thinking of filing a civil action. As an attorney, I often advise my clients to get on with their lives and just drop it if I don’t think they have a case I can win in front of a jury. But I’m not my client. I’m me. I don’t want to drop it.” 

For the time being, Hayes is fielding of phone calls from people wondering how he’s doing. “I’m sad and angry combined,” he said. “I’m just really disgusted. This can’t be happening. But it is.”