I posted a photo of Border Patrol agents pinning a man to the ground in a headlock – and the internet made up every excuse in the book to de
Scott Hechinger for Zeteo (12.12.2025):
The first time I saw the photo, I stopped breathing. A man, who appeared to be a restaurant worker in Charlotte, North Carolina, pinned to the floor of a commercial kitchen, his face twisted in pain. One federal agent’s arm locked around his neck. Another officer forcefully driving the man’s arm behind him. The scene was captured by an image taken by a Getty photographer. After serving for nearly a decade as a public defender in Brooklyn, I know the names prosecutors give to what I was looking at: Assault. Strangulation. Felony. Every state has different ways to describe it and different punishments associated with it. I looked up the law in North Carolina, where this took place: “Assault inflicting physical injury by strangulation,” I learned, is a Class H violent felony, punishable by up to three and a half years in prison. I posted the photo on X and shared the language of the statute above it. My point – though unstated – was simple: If any of my clients had done what those agents did, they would already be in handcuffs facing years behind bars. But when the state does it, it’s rebranded as “enforcement” or even “safety.” Millions of people saw the tweet. And then the replies came. Some were straightforward and, though upsetting, expected: “He’s illegal. He deserves it.”
Others proclaimed the force was somehow justified because the man was “resisting arrest.” I saw that same allegation play out countless times as a public defender. So often, when I met a client at first appearance, read the charges, and saw “disorderly conduct,” “obstruction of governmental administration,” “resisting arrest,” or “assault” of an officer, I would then meet a bloodied and bruised person, disproportionately Black or brown. The logic was always the same: if the police action was excessive, officers just invented a lawful reason to justify their violence. But the most revealing replies weren’t the openly racist ones or the predictable “resisting” chorus. It was the people who insisted that the man had a knife in his hand.
He didn’t. The photo clearly shows a cell phone in one hand and nothing at all in the other. But the replies were frantic: circling shadows, zooming in on pixels, drawing in arrows, and calling me all versions of “dummy” for not seeing what so clearly they saw. And then I started zooming in too. Enlarging the photo, comparing angles, Googling other Getty images from the same sequence to show that the man’s hands were empty. I even double-checked with AI to make sure I wasn’t missing anything. I responded impatiently with my own photographic evidence and comparisons that they were seeing a shadow, not a blade; that they were hallucinating a blade. And then I stopped. I had been dragged into disproving a lie instead of naming the truth. The imaginary knife wasn’t the point. The need for the lie was. Why do so many people tolerate, even cheer, violence when it’s carried out by someone in a uniform? Why is it so easy for two armed men choking a restaurant worker on the floor to be rebranded as just “law enforcement”? People hallucinated a weapon because the reality demanded too much of them. The reality was that a man, who apparently had just gone into work earlier that day, was needlessly and violently headlocked by government agents on the floor of his workplace. [...] State violence that is occasionally captured in spectacularized images—such as the videos of police attacking King, Castile, and George Floyd; and the Charlotte image I reposted—is in fact very routine when people come into contact with law enforcement. But most of the time, unless someone films it, we never know it happened. And when we do see it — clearly, unmistakably — it collides with everything we’ve been taught about people with badges. The American public needs to see more images of law enforcement aggression to confront the violence being waged in our name and unlock a lifetime of hardened perceptions and beliefs. This is exactly why I’ve spent years urging people to record ICE and police; why I helped create videos teaching immigrants and bystanders how to safely document arrests; why I’ve said, over and over, that filming ICE is not just protected by the First Amendment, but “the most American thing you can do.”
Scott Hechinger wrote a solid piece in Zeteo on how disturbing many Americans applaud state violence against immigrants by ICE and Border Patrol goons.
