Leo Garcia Venegas is a natural-born American citizen who just wants to work in peace. But the federal government won’t let him. He has been swept up in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids at work — not once, but twice — where he was assaulted, handcuffed and treated like a criminal by agents of the U.S. government.
Garcia is a construction worker in Baldwin County, Alabama. Every day, he goes to work and helps build the homes needed to support the region’s fast-growing population. And every day, he works in fear. Earlier this month, he partnered with my nonprofit law firm, the Institute for Justice, to file a lawsuit against ICE and several other federal agencies, senior officials and officers responsible for enforcing immigration laws.
It all goes back to early 2025. On his first day in office, President Donald Trump rallied federal agencies, including ICE, to start conducting mass deportations of undocumented immigrants. That effort has involved, in Border Czar Tom Homan’s words, “massively expand[ed]” “worksite enforcement operations.”
Officers storm into the non-public areas of businesses, armed with guns, and often detain anybody who they think looks undocumented. Many of the people swept up in these raids are American citizens. These raids have hit the Alabama construction industry particularly hard. Officers have been raiding private worksites for months. Construction workers, including citizens, are afraid to go to work. Garcia’s experience shows why.
In May, he was working on a posted and fenced site, preparing to lay the foundation for a new home, when masked agents burst in and started detaining everybody who looked Latino (they left a group of non-Latino workers alone). When Garcia told them he was a citizen, the agents tackled and handcuffed him anyway. Even after inspecting his REAL ID — a credential issued only to citizens and lawful residents — the agents kept Garcia restrained for about an hour.
Then, in June, it happened again. Federal agents entered a nearly completed house in which Garcia was working, cornered him and ordered him to exit so they could check his status. Once again, Garcia produced his REAL ID. And once again, the agents refused to accept it. They marched him several blocks to a lineup with other workers they had detained — including another citizen and a lawfully present worker — only releasing him 20 minutes later.
Garcia was not charged with a crime after either raid. After the first raid, the federal government claimed that Garcia “physically got in between agents and the subject they were attempting to arrest and refused to comply with numerous verbal commands.” But Garcia was merely taking out his phone to record the altercation — when an ICE agent grabbed him. And the government has never attempted to justify Garcia’s second arrest.
The fact is, Garcia did nothing wrong. All he ever did was show up to work. And for that, he was deprived of his rights as a U.S. citizen. The government’s difficult relationship with the truth cannot change the reality of what it did to Garcia.
These terrifying raids show no sign of slowing down. Indeed, a recent post by Stephen Miller, Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy and Homeland Security Advisor, suggests the floodgates are now open. According to Miller, the federal government holds the power to “ensur[e] the full and unrestricted enforcement of immigration law in all fifty states.”
That is embarrassingly wrong. The Constitution does not tolerate “unrestricted” power. Indeed, the whole point of the Constitution is to restrict government power. Look at the Fourth Amendment: It protects “[t]he right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures.”
Moreover, the Constitution does not tolerate an ends-justify-the-means approach. Regardless of how one might feel about current federal immigration enforcement, hopefully all Americans can agree that any policy issued by any administration must comply with the Constitution. Under Supreme Court precedent, here is what a constitutional policy looks like: If federal agents want to raid posted, fenced or enclosed property, they need a warrant. If they want to detain people, they need reasonable suspicion that those people are violating immigration or other laws. And if they want to arrest people, they need probable cause.
The federal agents who raided Garcia’s worksites and detained him — even after he showed his REAL ID — had none of that. So, Garcia is suing.
The lawsuit, which will seek class-action status, asks the U.S. district court in southern Alabama to enjoin ICE and its fellow immigration enforcement agencies from conducting any further warrantless construction site raids or suspicionless seizures of citizens and other lawfully present workers — all of which violate the Fourth Amendment and federal regulations that were adopted to limit immigration officers’ power.
The bottom line is simple: There is no ICE exception to the Fourth Amendment. Garcia has every right, as an American citizen, to work on private property without having to fear that armed, masked agents will storm the site without a warrant and detain him just for doing his job. As much as Mr. Miller might like to wish that right away, wishes are not law — the Constitution is.
This article was originally published on MSNBC.com
