On the morning of May 2, Leonardo Garcia Venegas was driving home from a convenience store run in Silverhill, Alabama, when he noticed an unmarked vehicle following him. As he parked the truck outside his home, immigration officers approached him and tried to open the driver’s door. In a declaration submitted as part of a civil lawsuit, Garcia Venegas said the agents pulled him out of the car and onto the ground, and shackled his arms and legs. Garcia Venegas estimates seven or eight law enforcement personnel, including US Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers and local police—most of whom wore plain clothes and tactical vests—surrounded him. They asked him no questions.
Garcia Venegas, a 26-year-old Florida-born US citizen, said he tried to show his Alabama STAR ID as proof of status, but the agents ignored him. They put him in the back seat of one of their vehicles, questioned him about his place of birth, and searched his wallet. He offered to provide his American passport, which was inside the house, but the agents refused. Several minutes later, they released him, but not before having dogs sniff the truck for drugs, according to the declaration. Garcia Venegas said the officers told him he had been stopped because the car he was driving was registered in the name of his brother, who is undocumented. (ICE didn’t respond to a request for comment before publication.)
This wasn’t the first time ICE agents stopped and held Garcia Venegas. In fact, Saturday’s encounter marked the third such incident, according to court filings. Garcia Venegas, whose parents are originally from Mexico, had twice before been detained after ICE raided construction sites where he was working, and twice before he was let go after proving his American citizenship. This third detention, Garcia Venegas wrote in his statement, had caused him emotional distress and anxiety. “I live in constant fear that I will be subjected to further baseless detentions just for going about my daily life,” he said, adding, “I only wish to live my life in peace.”
In the Trump era, the privilege of American citizenship hasn’t been enough to protect people from getting caught in the crosshairs of immigration enforcement. Although the frequency of Garcia Venegas’ wrongful detentions sets him apart, he’s far from an outlier. In fact, Garcia Venegas is one of at least 170 US citizens who have been held by immigration agents in the first nine months of the second Trump presidency, according to a review of cases by ProPublica from last year. And last September, he sued the federal government over his arbitrary detentions.
“Leo is just a normal everyday guy who is trying to go about his life quietly and peacefully,” said Jared McClain, an attorney with the Institute for Justice representing Garcia Venegas. “He just wants to go to work and earn an honest living, and the way that the administration is handling immigration enforcement means that he can no longer do that freely.”
The first incident took place in May 2025, when Homeland Security Investigations officers stormed a private site in Foley where Garcia Venegas was working with a crew laying concrete foundations for new homes. The complaint filed in the US District Court for the Southern District of Alabama claims the agents targeted the Latino workers, including Garcia Venegas’ brother, who was pushed to the ground. Garcia Venegas started recording the interaction on his phone.
The video he shot shows an immigration agent warning him, “You’re making this more complicated than you want to.” The man then appears to grab Garcia Venegas, who says, “Don’t touch me!” and offers to show his papers. He is then forced to the ground, where he repeatedly states that he’s a citizen. Garcia Venegas said the officers dismissed his ID as fake and held him for over an hour. “I felt dreadful after my detention—not only because it happened once but because I knew it could happen again,” he wrote. “I was afraid to return to work.”
In a declaration, an acting assistant special agent in charge of HSI’s Mobile, Alabama office, said Garcia Venegas was handcuffed for about 18 minutes. On social media, the Department of Homeland Security accused Garcia Venegas of attempting to “obstruct and prevent the lawful arrest of an illegal alien” and refusing to “comply with numerous verbal commands.” DHS also called the raid a “targeted worksite operation.”
Garcia Venegas took two weeks off from work following the May arrest. Not long after he returned, he was working at a partially built residential development when immigration officers approached him to check his immigration status. Again, Garcia Venegas showed them his REAL ID, but was told the document could be fake. The agents held him for about 30 minutes before releasing him alongside other workers with lawful status who had also been detained, according to the September complaint.
Garcia Venegas’s lawsuit charges DHS with carrying out policies that allow immigration officers to raid private construction sites without a warrant, detain workers without “reasonable suspicion” that they lack status, and hold them despite evidence of their citizenship or lawful presence. “Immigration officers, wielding an overly broad grant of authority but no warrant, raided the private construction sites where Leo was working and rounded up all the workers who looked Latino—even citizens, like Leo, who had done nothing wrong,” the complaint, which seeks compensatory damages, states.
In October, Garcia Venega’s legal team filed motions for a preliminary injunction and class certification, claiming the federal government is violating American citizens’ Fourth Amendment rights. Without the intervention of the court, the motion argues, “countless innocent people risk being seized in lawless
construction site raids.” The government has moved to dismiss the claims. At a hearing on Wednesday, a federal judge didn’t issue a final decision on the motions, saying he needed to consider whether the court had jurisdiction over the matter.
“It’s got to be difficult to live in a place where you can’t go about your everyday life,” McClain said, “you can’t go to work, you can’t go to the store and come home without being put in leg shackles and forced to prove, once again, that you have a right to be here.”