On July 2, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and its sub-agency, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE):  

The Trump administration claims this is a crackdown on “the worst of the worst.” But according to the ACLU lawsuit the majority of those “stopped and arrested in the raids have not been targeted in any meaningful sense of the word at all, except on the basis of their skin color and occupation.

“Those who have borne the brunt of Defendants’ heavy-handed pattern of unlawful conduct include day laborers, car wash workers, farm workers, street vendors, service workers, caregivers and others who form the lifeblood of communities across Southern California.

“Over a thousand residents in [Los Angeles] have already been impacted, including a shocking (though hardly surprising) number of U.S. citizens and individuals lawfully present in the country.”

On May 2, Florida Highway Patrol officers and Border Patrol agents stopped 18-year-old landscaper Kenny Laynez and three coworkers—one of them his mother—as they drove past luxury buildings to a job in Palm Beach County.

An officer rolled down a tinted window and signaled to his mother—who was driving—to pull over. The officer asked where they were headed. Laynez said they were going to work and the officer took his mother’s license and the truck’s registration and insurance.

The officer returned and said his mother’s license was suspended.

The officer asked if they were “illegal.”

Laynez said they were not, although two of his co-workers—Esdras and Marroquin—were, and asked what that had to do with the license.

A van pulled up and more armed agents swarmed the truck. A female officer approached his window and ordered them in Spanish to shut off their phones.

Instead, Laynez—assuming that something ominous was going to happen—started recording with his phone: 

OFFICER (in Spanish): Who in here is illegal? Whoever takes longer to answer will get more charges and spend more time in jail.

One of the co-workers—Esdras—raised his hand.  

A male officer ordered them to open the door.

LAYNEZ: Wait, hold up. You don’t have the right to do that.

OFFICER (laughing): I don’t have a right?

He reached inside the car and opened the door. An agent grabbed Esdras by the hair and placed his neck in the crook of his arm.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents

Another agent pulled Marroquin out by the leg and tightened his hands around his neck.

Laynez stepped out of the car, but an officer who had ordered him to get on the ground pushed him from behind, twisted his arms and forced him to kneel on the pavement.

Esdras stood rigidly as three officers tried to force him to the ground. They told him in English to lie down, while Laynez urged him in Spanish not to resist.

An officer pulled out a yellow Taser and fired twice into Esdras’ stomach, slamming him to the pavement.

An agent forced Laynez to lie on the pavement. An officer later ordered Laynez to stand up

LAYNEZ: I am not going to get up because you are going to do to me whatever you were doing to Esdras. That is not how you arrest people.

OFFICER:  Be quiet.

LAYNEZ:  I’ve got the right to talk. I was born and raised here.

OFFICER: You have no rights here. You are a “Migo,” brother.

An officer said that Laynez’s coworker was resisting arrest, so he should be charged: “He was being a dick right now. That is why we tased.”

The agents confirmed Laynez’s mother had legal status and issued her a ticket for driving with a suspended license. Before leaving, an officer held her driver’s license to her face and tore it in half.

Although the officers were shown a picture of Laynez’ Social Security card, they arrested him. 

He was taken to the Riviera Beach facility. About four hours later, he was taken to another room. A female officer asked for his birthdate three times, although he had written it down to another officer. Then she produced a ziplocked bag with his phone, wallet and headphones.

She asked him to unlock it, adding that she needed to see if he had filmed videos of the arrest.

Laynez refused to open it and set it down on the table. The officer said they would wait until he opened it, and threatened to press charges if he didn’t unlock his phone.

But then a supervisor appeared and said that Laynez wasn’t supposed to be in that room because he is a U.S. citizen. The supervisor took Laynez’s fingerprints and said it was only to leave a record that he had been in the facility. 

Then he told Laynez he must sign some paperwork and appear in court. 

The arrest report stated that Laynez was being charged with nonviolent police obstruction. But the police report doesn’t mention that Laynez resisted. 

Laynez pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of obstruction without violence simply to get the incident over with. He entered a pretrial diversion program on June 4. The state will drop the charges on July 30 if he completes the program by then.

On July 2, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and its sub-agency, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE):

“Since early June, this District [Los Angeles] has been under siege.

“Masked federal agents, sometimes dressed in military-style clothing, have conducted indiscriminate immigration operations, flooding street corners, bus stops, parking lots, agricultural sites, day laborer corners, and other places, setting up checkpoints, and entering businesses, interrogating residents as they are working, looking for work, or otherwise trying to go about their daily lives, and taking people away. 

“The raids in this District follow a common, systematic pattern. Individuals with brown skin are approached or pulled aside by unidentified federal agents, suddenly and with a show of force, and made to answer questions about who they are and where they are from.

“If they hesitate, attempt to leave, or do not answer the questions to the satisfaction of the agents, they are detained, sometimes tackled, handcuffed, and/or taken into custody. In these interactions, agents typically have no prior information about the individual and no warrant of any kind.

“If agents make an arrest, contrary to federal law, they do not make any determination of whether a person poses a risk of flight before a warrant can be obtained. Also contrary to federal law, the agents do not identify themselves or explain why the individual is being arrested.  

“Further, apparently to accommodate the sharp rise in arrests, the government has resorted to keeping individuals at what is supposed to be a short term processing center and ICE basement holding area in downtown Los Angeles, known as “B-18,” often for days.

“In these dungeon-like facilities, conditions are deplorable and unconstitutional. The government has also unlawfully deprived those arrested of access to counsel. Under such conditions, some of those arrested are pressured into accepting voluntary departure.”

Contrast this behavior with the way Mafia “Boss of all Bosses” John Gotti was arrested on December 11, 1990, when FBI agents and NYPD detectives raided the Ravenite Social Club in Manhattan.

They had arrest warrants for Gotti, boss of the Gambino Mafia Family, and his two lieutenants: Sammy “The Bull” Gravano, his underboss, or second-in-command, and Frankie Locascio, his Consigliere, or adviser.

Moreover, there was no mistaking that these were legitimate law enforcement agents: They wore jackets emblazoned with “FBI” or “NYPD,” showed their credentials, and didn’t hide their faces behind masks.

John Gotti

And when the three Mafiosi were taken to the Metropolitan Correctional Center, in Manhattan, New York City, they were allowed to call their attorneys.

Every nation has the right to control its borders and decide who has the right to enter—and under what conditions. But nations that pride themselves on adhering to the law should be held accountable with their law enforcement agencies flagrantly and routinely violate it. 

On July 11, Thomas Homan, the designated “Border Czar” for Donald Trump’s second presidency, said during an interview on Fox News: “People need to understand ICE officers and Border Patrol don’t need probable cause to walk up to somebody, briefly detain them, and question them.

“They just need the totality of the circumstances. They just got through our observation, you know, get articulable facts based on their location, their occupation, their physical appearance, their actions.” 

Thomas Homan

This contradicted a statement made in court that week by Thomas Giles, the assistant director of ICE, that the standard for making arrests “is we need to determine probable cause and determine alienage.” 

“And there you have it,” wrote Senator Alex Padilla (D-Calif.), who on June 12 was roughed up by security forces while trying to ask Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem questions at a press event.

“Under the Trump Administration, ICE and Border Patrol are being empowered to stop and question you based solely on how you look. No probable cause. No real reason. Just your ‘physical appearance.’ That’s not justice—it’s profiling.” 

Even natural-born American citizens—such as Kenny Laynez—now risk arrest and detention by overzealous ICE agents.

According to the lawsuit filed by the ACLU, the reason for this is: “The government is aware that its actions are unconstitutional and contrary to officers’ training, but deliberately persists because this system allows it to coerce removals, avoid public accountability, and ultimately—given the limited bed space at longer-term detention facilities in the area—keep arrest numbers high.

“Federal immigration enforcement is constrained by law. But since the federal government began its mass immigration enforcement operations in [Los Angeles] on June 6, 2025, all of these legal requirements have given way to one overriding consideration: numbers, pure numbers. Quantity over quality.

”In late May, the White House and the Department of Homeland Security imposed a quota of 3,000 immigration-related arrests per day—with ‘consequences for not hitting arrest targets.’ In order to reach this target, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller directed high-level officials to change their approach to stops and arrests in the field.

“Agents and officers, according to him, should no longer conduct targeted operations based on investigations. Instead, they should ‘just go out there and arrest [unauthorized noncitizens] by rounding up people in public spaces like ‘Home Depot’ and ‘7-Eleven’ convenience stores.”