A U.S. citizen who was tackled and arrested by border agents after filming and yelling at them said his 'blood was boiling' when agents high
Brittny Mejia and Rachel Uranga at Los Angeles Times:
A 37-year-old U.S. citizen who was tackled to the ground and arrested after filming federal agents at Home Depot on Thursday said he was held for more than an hour near Dodger Stadium, where agents boasted about how many immigrants they arrested. “How many bodies did you guys grab today?” he said one agent asked. “Oh, we grabbed 31,“ the other replied. “That was a good day today,” the first agent responded. The two high-fived, as he sat on the asphalt under the sun, Job Garcia said. Garcia was released on Friday from a downtown federal detention center. No apparent criminal charges have yet to be filed. He is one of several U.S citizens arrested during enforcement operations in recent days. Department of Homeland Security officials say some have illegally interfered with agents’ jobs. In response to questions about why Garcia was arrested and if he’d been charged, a spokesperson for the U.S. attorney’s office in L.A. recommended a reporter contact the Department of Homeland Security.
[...] Garcia, a photographer and doctoral student Claremont Graduate University, had been picking up a delivery at Home Depot when someone approached the customer desk and said something was unfolding outside.
[...] The agent brought him to the ground and three other agents jumped in, Garcia said “Get the f— down sir” and “give me your f— hand. You want it, you got it, sir, you f— got it. You want to go to jail, fine. You got it,” an agent can be heard saying in the video. “You wanted it, you got it,” the man yelled.
An agent handcuffed him so hard “that there was no circulation running to my fingers,” Garcia said.
Pinned down, Garcia had difficulty breathing. “That moment, I thought I could probably die here,” he said. The agent put Garcia’s phone back in his pocket. The recording kept running.
As Garcia was put into a vehicle, his video captured an agent twice saying: “I’ve got one back here.” “You got one what?” Garcia shot back. “You got one what?” He said an agent told him in broken Spanish to “wait here,’ though it could not be heard on the video. “I f— speak English, you f— dumbass,” he clearly shouts back. No agent asked if he was an American citizen, he said. Nobody asked for identification. “They assumed that I was undocumented,” he said later in an interview. The video ends after about four minutes, while he is waiting in the van.
More ICE insanity: Job Garcia was detained after filming ICE agents near Dodger Stadium. Garcia has since been released.
