>This wasn’t the first time ICE agents stopped and held Garcia Venegas. In fact, Saturday’s encounter marked the third such incident, according to court filings. Garcia Venegas, whose parents are originally from Mexico, had twice before been detained after ICE raided construction sites where he was working, and twice before he was let go after proving his American citizenship. This third detention, Garcia Venegas wrote in his statement, had caused him emotional distress and anxiety. “I live in constant fear that I will be subjected to further baseless detentions just for going about my daily life,” he said, adding, “I only wish to live my life in peace.”

>In the Trump era, the privilege of American citizenship hasn’t been enough to protect people from getting caught in the crosshairs of immigration enforcement. Although the frequency of Garcia Venegas’ wrongful detentions sets him apart, he’s far from an outlier. In fact, Garcia Venegas is one of at least 170 US citizens who have been held by immigration agents in the first nine months of the second Trump presidency, according to a review of cases by ProPublica from last year. And last September, he sued the federal government over his arbitrary detentions.

>“Leo is just a normal everyday guy who is trying to go about his life quietly and peacefully,” said Jared McClain, an attorney with the Institute for Justice representing Garcia Venegas. “He just wants to go to work and earn an honest living, and the way that the administration is handling immigration enforcement means that he can no longer do that freely.”

>The first incident took place in May 2025, when Homeland Security Investigations officers stormed a private site in Foley where Garcia Venegas was working with a crew laying concrete foundations for new homes. The complaint filed in the US District Court for the Southern District of Alabama claims the agents targeted the Latino workers, including Garcia Venegas’ brother, who was pushed to the ground. Garcia Venegas started recording the interaction on his phone.

>The video he shot shows an immigration agent warning him, “You’re making this more complicated than you want to.” The man then appears to grab Garcia Venegas, who says, “Don’t touch me!” and offers to show his papers. He is then forced to the ground, where he repeatedly states that he’s a citizen. Garcia Venegas said the officers dismissed his ID as fake and held him for over an hour. “I felt dreadful after my detention—not only because it happened once but because I knew it could happen again,” he wrote. “I was afraid to return to work.”

>Leo Garcia Venegas was even accused of obstructing agents – after the video of his first detainment at an Alabama construction site went viralA DHS spokesperson later said he “physically got in between agents” and his brother, whose arrest he was filming.Watch for yourself:
— Nicole Foy (@nicolefoy.bsky.social) 2025-10-18T14:35:29.580Z
https://bsky.app/profile/nicolefoy.bsky.social/post/3m3hz3klszs2y

>In a declaration, an acting assistant special agent in charge of HSI’s Mobile, Alabama office, said Garcia Venegas was handcuffed for about 18 minutes. On social media, the Department of Homeland Security accused Garcia Venegas of attempting to “obstruct and prevent the lawful arrest of an illegal alien” and refusing to “comply with numerous verbal commands.” DHS also called the raid a “targeted worksite operation.”

>Garcia Venegas took two weeks off from work following the May arrest. Not long after he returned, he was working at a partially built residential development when immigration officers approached him to check his immigration status. Again, Garcia Venegas showed them his REAL ID, but was told the document could be fake. The agents held him for about 30 minutes before releasing him alongside other workers with lawful status who had also been detained, according to the September complaint.

>Garcia Venegas’s lawsuit charges DHS with carrying out policies that allow immigration officers to raid private construction sites without a warrant, detain workers without “reasonable suspicion” that they lack status, and hold them despite evidence of their citizenship or lawful presence. “Immigration officers, wielding an overly broad grant of authority but no warrant, raided the private construction sites where Leo was working and rounded up all the workers who looked Latino—even citizens, like Leo, who had done nothing wrong,” the complaint, which seeks compensatory damages, states.

>In October, Garcia Venega’s legal team filed motions for a preliminary injunction and class certification, claiming the federal government is violating American citizens’ Fourth Amendment rights. Without the intervention of the court, the motion argues, “countless innocent people risk being seized in lawless construction site raids.” The government has moved to dismiss the claims. At a hearing on Wednesday, a federal judge didn’t issue a final decision on the motions, saying he needed to consider whether the court had jurisdiction over the matter.

>“It’s got to be difficult to live in a place where you can’t go about your everyday life,” McClain said, “you can’t go to work, you can’t go to the store and come home without being put in leg shackles and forced to prove, once again, that you have a right to be here.”

>>1512807
Has he considered simply not looking like a lazy Mexican?

Well if his brother is an illegal alien, he should stop driving his brother's truck.

I knew a guy that bought a used fishing boat that got detained for hours every time he took it to Canada. Turns out the previous owner of the boat was flagged because the previous owner was caught smuggling cigarettes into Canada with it. He traded in the boat for another one and his problems stopped.

>>1512807
What the fuck is the point of carrying an ID if the feds just go “lol nuh uh?”

>>1512826
>Well if his brother is an illegal alien, he should stop driving his brother's truck.
He only had the truck the first time, and the claim it was registered to his brother is entirely from ICE.

>>1512821
>lazy Mexican
>literally both times he was arrested was whiled doing his job in construction

>>1512837
Schrodinger's Immigrant.

>>1512827
IDs mean nothing when people have quotas to fill

>>1512850
>quotas
Fucking soviet shit. No wonder the reds like it.

>>1512850
Literally this; several ICE agents have admitted outright they have near-impossible to fulfill quotas so they just jump on whoever and if they have the slightest bit of uncertainty about immigration status they just book them so they can count it.

>>1512857
Why not just lie?

>>1512867
well, when it's all over i'm sure the republicans will claim that all the evil shit ice did was a lie like the holocaust

>>1512867
>>1512871
i think he's asking why the ice agents dont just lie and say they detained more than they actually did so it looks like they are meeting the quota.

>>1513014
that old adage: "just doing my job"

>>1513014
Optics boosting operations only work if the people watching you think you're capable of redemption.

>>1512867
>>1513014
Because then they can get caught (those prisons they store everyone caught by ICE in also love having prisoners to charge per room, so they'll notice pretty damn fast) and get fired. If they just arrest people who later get let go, they have the instant excuse of "oh well those evil lib judges and lawyers let them go, can't do anything about that" and don't get in anywhere near as much trouble, if any.

>>1512807
>cops can pull you over for whatever BS reason
>Hey we gotta ID you
>Nope this ID looks fake we gotta take you in
>Gotta tow your car too, cant leave it here
Nope turns out your ID was all good after 4 hours in a holding cell and questioning, have a nice day sir!
>no recourse because the cops technically didnt do anything illegal
If republicans were on the receiving end of this for even 5 seconds they would be protesting outside every police station in the country.

>>1513268
Maybe if there weren't millions of illegal aliens this wouldn't be an issue.

>>1513280
You people werent complaining when it was your ancestors flooding through ellis island and just being handed citizenship without as much as checking you gave your real name.

>>1513283
Indeed. I wasn't even alive then. And had The New Deal not happened, I'd bet immigration would be way more lax.

>>1513280
>Maybe if there weren't a totally reasonable number of immigrants in the country the police wouldn't keep ignoring this guy's ID because he's brown and they'd stop arresting him on racist vibes. I'm a fucking dumbass!

>>1513289
>unreasonable number of illegal immingrants

>>1513283
Americans were complaining, you absolute troglodyte. They complained about the blacks, the Irish, the Italians, the Chinese and every single other minority group, correctly identifying that allowing any religion that wasn't Protestant, any skin color that wasn't White, and any group that wasn't American would inevitably culminate in the divided loyalties we see in America today. All of them deserve the rope.

>>1513311
>All of them deserve the rope.
Ok let's start with Trump. His grandparents immigrated under false pretenses; his grandfather didn't qualify for immigration under Bavarian law and he ran a whorehouse well before he was a US citizen.

>>1513289
>flood the immigration system with criminals
>get upset because the system can't handle them all
>return to step one

>>1513369
Who did that? And how?

>>1513370
Dems.
The reason why it takes numerous days, sometimes weeks to verify someone's info is because the system is backed up. Same reason ICE's processing centers all along the southern border were set up using old prisons under Obongo.
IIRC there were several thousand people approaching the southern border *per day* under Biden. Imagine trying to verify someone's identity when they have no phone number, no home address, no driver's license, no medical records, no dental records, a valid SSN and can't speak english.

>>1513377
Amazing how all of this backup and alleged border crossers and ICE still regularly fails completely and utterly at meeting their own quotas based on those reports, even after they've been given more budget than some military branches.

Almost like those numbers aren't quite right.

>>1513369
If the system was flooded with criminals they'd have no need to go after anyone working a job with a valid ID. Hell, they wouldn't need to go after people with pending status at all, yet that's most of their fucking arrests.

>>1513379
Shut the fuck up asshole.

>>1513383
mad I'm pointing out that either ICE is intentionally being lazy and not going after the endless stream of criminals you claim exist, or they don't exist at all and you've been conned?

>>1513383
A concession if I've ever heard one.

>>1513378
Yeah because dems keep trying to fight the federal government, sometimes literally, to protect the brown heckin migranterinos

>>1513383
Yup, he mad. This is an abject failure right here. Also, lets be entirely fair here OP, his name is Leonardo Garcia Venegas. That is not Anglo, nor Dutch, not even any of the white diaspora like Germans or Italians or Irish who got here after the fact. That dude is Mexican, this isn't his country and he doesn't belong here.

As usual, OP is a faggot.

>>1513452
>Yeah because dems keep trying to fight the federal government, sometimes literally, to protect the brown heckin migranterinos
They're failing their quotas in red states too. For fucks sake, this guy in this article is from Alabama.

>>1513452
And how are they doing that?

>>1513483
>e. Also, lets be entirely fair here OP, his name is Leonardo Garcia Venegas. That is not Anglo, nor Dutch, not even any of the white diaspora like Germans or Italians or Irish who got here after the fact. That dude is Mexican, this isn't his country and he doesn't belong here.
America is a country founded by immigrants.