When immigration agents pulled U.S. citizen Leonardo Garcia Venegas from his car this month and chained him up, he wasn’t surprised. He wasn’t afraid.
He was tired.
Like ProPublica detailed last fallhe had already been arrested twice before.
A year ago, Garcia Venegas was filming his brother’s arrest during a raid on their construction site on the Alabama coast when he was approached by agents, who ignored his arguments that he was a citizen. A few weeks later, a police officer entered the house Garcia Venegas was building and refused to trust the now 26-year-old Alabama REAL ID, which only citizens and legal residents can obtain.
Videos of the incidents went viral. He appeared before Congress. He also has a lawsuit against the Trump administration.
But all the attention hasn’t changed much. On May 2, officers followed him to his home. Once again, they did not believe his citizenship claims or the REAL ID he once again tried to show them.
Today, after this latest detention, Garcia Venegas seems demoralized.
“Honestly, it’s terrible,” Garcia Venegas told ProPublica. The mental burden of wondering when it will happen again weighs on him, causing stress and depression. “I drive to work every morning and I know that at any moment they could arrest me again.”
While immigration campaigns no longer make headlines, the most recent Garcia Venegas incident highlights how the erroneous detention of Americans has continued despite congressional investigations and denials from top immigration officials.
A few days after the last arrest of Garcia Venegas, masked agents attacked an American teenager in the Bronx. When they finally realized he was a citizen, they left him in an unfamiliar neighborhood, bloodied and bruised.
The same week that the two citizens were arrested, administration officials spoke on a panel at a border security conference in Phoenix and downplayed and denied that the citizens had been detained in error. Recordings of the conference were shared with ProPublica.
“Since the beginning of this administration, we have not had a single arrest of U.S. citizens for false identification where we believed they were illegal aliens when they were actually U.S. citizens,” said Matthew Elliston, a senior Immigration and Customs Enforcement official. “This hasn’t happened any time.”
In another panel, outgoing ICE chief Todd Lyons acknowledged that immigration agents sometimes detain U.S. citizens in cases where those citizens allegedly put “their hands on law enforcement.” He also said the arrests had a “deterrent” effect.
As ProPublica and others have reported, citizens… including Garcia Venegas — Police officers accused of assault have not always been accused of assault. Video footage has often contradicted the Department of Homeland Security’s claims that its agents were attacked.
In response to questions from ProPublica, a DHS spokesperson said in a statement that despite the shackles, Garcia Venegas was “NOT detained.” The statement continued: “ICE conducted a routine check on a car registered to an illegal alien. After Venegas’ identity was established, he was released.” DHS also said the Bronx teen was “NOT arrested” but rather “temporarily detained.”
The agency said it “does NOT arrest U.S. citizens in error. DHS enforcement operations are highly targeted.”
But it’s unclear what, if anything, intelligence agents used in Garcia Venegas’ repeated detention.
Garcia Venegas said officers and local law enforcement at the scene blamed him for his latest arrest because he was driving a car registered to his brother.
“The officers told me I risked being arrested again until I registered the license plates in my own name,” Garcia Venegas said in a recent lawsuit filing. “But the police could have known immediately that I wasn’t my brother just by checking the REAL ID I had in my hand when they took me out of the truck and tackled me to the ground.”
The Garcia Venegas incidents bear the hallmark of what are now known as the “Kavanaugh arrests.” These are judgments in which, Supreme Court Justice Kavanaugh wrote in a case last fall, officers are allowed to arrest people based in part on their “apparent ethnicity” (Garcia Venegas is Latino), their employment (he works in construction) and their language (he speaks primarily Spanish).
Americans, Kavanaugh said, have no reason to worry. Officers will establish citizenship and “promptly let the individual go.” (In a later case on another issue, Kavanaugh included a footnote that “agents should not make domestic immigration stops or arrests on the basis of race or ethnicity. “)
At his final stop, Garcia Venegas was released after about 15 minutes. But the consequences are far from over.
Even though he was born in Florida and graduated from high school in the same county where he is still detained, Garcia Venegas sometimes wonders if he should move to his family’s home in Mexico.
“I just want to live in peace,” he said.
Last fall, when Garcia Venegas filed his federal lawsuit against the government, he demanded more than just compensation. He insisted that officers stop “unconstitutional” raids in his area. The government said in court that the immigration sweeps were “based on reasonable suspicion, probable cause and the Constitution.”
After the third detention of Garcia Venegas, his lawyers rushed to update his trial with details of his last detention. But government lawyers argued that Garcia Venegas’ case still lacked merit.
Garcia Venegas also filed a separate request for damages from the government last fall. He received a denial from ICE in mid-April that contained no explanation. His third detention took place approximately two weeks later.
At the Border Security Conference this month, Customs and Border Protection Chief Rodney Scott was asked about ProPublica’s reporting on citizen detentions and how the agency is responding to them.
“I will do nothing to avoid arresting American citizens,” he said. “Because we stop criminals, period.”
