In the federal government’s widespread immigration crackdown over the past year, some U.S. citizens have also been rounded up and detained. A ProPublica report says more than 170 citizens have been taken into DHS custody — some of whom have been kicked, dragged and denied water. Those numbers don’t reflect the government’s activities in Chicago, where ProPublica is currently tracking cases.
Nicole Foy is the investigative reporter at ProPublica who broke the story. She talked with WUWM’s Jimmy Gutierrez about what she learned.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Jimmy Gutierrez: Over 170 U.S. citizens have been held and detained by immigration officials, and a lot of these interactions have some pretty violent videos that come with them, like with Leonardo Garcia Vanegas. What can you tell us about his story?
Nicole Foy: Leo was filming the arrest, the pretty violent arrest of his brother who is undocumented, when officers, you can see in the video, start coming towards him and trying to detain him. In a follow up video that his coworkers filmed, you hear them yelling that he's a citizen. He has his paperwork.
And yet, not only did officers continue to detain him, even when they saw his real ID that he had in his pocket, they dismissed it as probably fake. And so he spent, they believe, like another hour or two before they were able to determine his citizenship to their satisfaction.
And then two weeks later, it happened again.
Once again, someone came into the worksite where he was and he had to leave with them. It wasn't as violent and dramatic as last time and wasn't caught on video, but he still had to leave again and they again dismissed his real ID as fake. And so he has filed a federal lawsuit because he has no reason to believe that he won't just keep getting stopped like this.
This behavior has basically lead in to a violation of constitutional rights of both citizens and non-citizens as well, correct?
Several groups, several U.S. citizens, several legal permanent residents and other people who are undocumented but do feel that they were detained in a way that used racial profiling instead of intelligence or other, like, reasonable-suspicion factors that normally are what immigration agents say they’re using to detain people and instead claim that it was just part of these roving patrols. People allege that officers really just stopped them because they happened to be working in a manual-labor job and were Latino.
The government has denied this pretty emphatically, but we found in our investigation that, as of Oct. 5, around 50 U.S. citizens around the country have experienced being held or detained by immigration agents who are questioning their citizenship. The majority of them were Latino.
But then there was this other category which, because of this rapid expansion of enforcement around the country, we’re also seeing many more U.S. citizens get detained — not just because officers are doubting their citizenship, but on allegations of assaulting officers or interfering or obstructing arrests, whether at protests or because they’re trying to intervene in the arrests of family members or neighbors that they see playing out in front of them.
With this report now out, has the federal government responded to this reporting or any of these cases? What have they had to say about this?
Immediately after our story was published, the Department of Homeland Security put out a tweet with screenshots of our story that was FAKE NEWS on it. But honestly, what they said in their tweet is largely what they told me, saying that we absolutely do not racially profile. However, citizens who attack law enforcement or obstruct law enforcement will be prosecuted.
One example of that, even though he very clearly falls into the category of citizens, the government accused Leo of obstructing officers and getting in the way of the arrest. Now, they did this after his video went viral and after there were questions about why he had been detained. But the government has made these claims about many of the citizens who have been arrested in the cases that we reviewed, but they don't always end up bearing out in court or in the video where you can see what happens.
