Andrea Vélez, a 32-year-old marketing designer, was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) on June 24 as she was going to work in downtown Los Angeles. On June 12, Brian Gavidia, 29, was working at a trailer yard in Montebello, California, when he was assaulted and restrained by ICE officers. Just over a week earlier, Elzon Lemus, a 23-year-old electrician, was stopped, pulled from his car, and handcuffed on his way to work in Nassau, New York.

In addition to sharing the experience of being detained by immigration agents, the three have something in common that has raised the controversy over immigration raids to a new level: they are all U.S. citizens of Latino origin. ICE has no authority to detain them. “Now that ICE is having to meet higher quotas for arbitrary arrests than ever before, we’ll see more and more cases like these,” Nareen Shah, director of Government Affairs for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), told EL PAÍS.

“The problem is that even when people claim to be U.S. citizens and can prove they are, we’ve still seen cases where they’re detained,” Shah said. Under the Fourth Amendment, Americans are protected from random searches unless law enforcement has probable cause to believe they are involved in criminal activity. In the case of ICE, they cannot legally detain a citizen because their powers are regulated by immigration law, according to federal legislation.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which oversees ICE, has rejected the accusation that it is discriminating based on race or ethnicity in its operations. “Any claim that law enforcement has targeted individuals based on their skin color is disgusting and categorically FALSE. These types of disgusting smears are designed to demonize and villainize our brave ICE law enforcement.

This kind of garbage has led to a more than 400 percent increase in the assaults on ICE officers,” it said in a statement. Just minutes after Andrea Vélez’s mother dropped her daughter off at her workplace in Los Angeles, an ICE agent picked her up and forced her into a car. The scene was captured on video footage that has spread like wildfire on social media.

Vélez and her family believed it was a kidnapping. Three days later, when she was released, Vélez explained her traumatic experience at a press conference. “I was going to work and everything happened so fast.

It’s hard to process it in my mind. The agents didn’t identify themselves, and I was scared,” she said. While detained, “I wondered why I was one of them.

I didn’t know what was going to happen to me, where I was going to end up,” she said. Bond of $5,000 Vélez was released on $5,000 bond and faces charges of “obstructing an ICE officer.” According to her attorney, Dominique Boubion, who spoke on the Democracy Now website, Vélez only tried to protect herself when she saw agents who were about to arrest some street vendors running toward her. Boubion highlighted one detail: they spoke to her in Spanish, although she demonstrated that her English was good.

DHS spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement that DHS Secretary Kristi Noem “has been clear: if you lay a hand on a law enforcement officer, you will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.” “I’m not sure they’ll respect my rights. It’s very unfair that we have to go through this because we’re Hispanic,” complained Vélez’s sister, Estrella Rosas. The family is considering filing a lawsuit against the officers.

The fact that those detained were Latinos explains why this community is the one most concerned about deportations. Approximately half (47%) now express some or a lot of concern, compared to only 15% of whites, according to Pew Research data. The law does not allow a person’s race, ethnicity, or occupation to be used as the sole basis for believing they have violated federal immigration law.

Objective evidence, such as a criminal record, must be provided, but in none of the recent cases did the detainees have a criminal history. “Because of the color of their skin, their accent, or their ethnicity, they become targets in what is reminiscent of what happened in the Third Reich,” denounced Fred Brewington, Elzon Lemus’s attorney, at a press conference in which his client denounced the treatment he received by ICE agents, despite having assured them he was a U.S. citizen. “I am a victim because of my race and ethnicity.

Just because of my skin color and because I am Hispanic, they made me feel like I was a criminal,” Lemus said. On June 3, at 7:00 a.m., he was riding in the passenger seat of his coworker’s car on the way to work when ICE stopped them in Nassau County, New York. A video captured the agent’s hostile attitude as he demanded to see his identification.

They pulled him out of the car, handcuffed him, and held him in a van for more than 20 minutes while they checked his identity. “People have constitutional rights. Just because ICE is trying to increase the number of arrests, they can’t go after anyone who doesn’t speak English, who appears to be a non-citizen, or who was born abroad,” Shah explains.

The ACLU just won a court victory in a 2018 case against a Florida sheriff who detained a U.S. citizen named Peter Sean Brown, a Black man, at the request of ICE. Brown’s repeated pleas that he was a U.S. citizen and could not be detained by immigration agents were ignored. Brown escaped deportation to Jamaica, a country to which he had no ties, because a friend produced a copy of his birth certificate.

“At a time when we are witnessing a surge in arrests of citizens for illegal immigration by federal and local authorities, this decision is a key reminder that the Fourth Amendment protects us all,” said Cody Wofsy, deputy director of the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project. Which hospital were you born in? ICE agents also didn’t believe Brian Gavidia when he repeatedly assured them he was a U.S. citizen.

On June 12, while working at a trailer yard in Montebello, California, he saw ICE agents arriving. “I’m an American, man,” he insisted to the agent who was pinning him against a fence. Incredulous, the agent asked him the name of the hospital where he was born, whose name Gavidia couldn’t remember.

The incident was also captured on video. “We’re not safe, guys, we’re not safe in America today,” Gavidia later stated. Just this week, President Donald Trump made some controversial statements.

“We also have a lot of bad people that have been here for a long time […] They’re not new to our country. They’re old to our country. Many of them were born in our country.

I think we ought to get them the hell out of here, too,” the tycoon said in Florida. “It’s truly heartbreaking that this person, the president of the United States who swore to protect the Constitution, would speak so brazenly about violating it,” Shah laments. Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition