Leonardo Garcias Venegas, a 26-year-old natural-born American citizen, is a construction worker in Baldwin County, Alabama. On May 21, Leo was working as part of a concrete crew on private property when he saw armed men wearing camouflage and masks jump the fence, run past the No Trespassing sign, run past another crew on site, and make a beeline for members of his team. The difference between the two groups? All the workers on the concrete crew were Latino.
One of those workers was Leo’s brother, who asked two of the armed men why they were there, and if they had a warrant. The armed men didn’t say anything—they just grabbed Leo’s brother and pulled him to the ground. At this point, Leo took out his phone and began to record while slowly walking towards his brother, but another masked gunman stepped into his path. Leo asked this man if he was “immigration.” The man confirmed that he was, and said, “You’re making this more complicated than you want to.”
Then the agent grabbed Leo, and began forcing him to the ground as Leo repeatedly yelled that he was a citizen and called for help. Non-Latino workers at the site, who were never approached by the immigration agents, also yelled out that Leo was a citizen, and exclaimed things like “That’s illegal!” and “He’s not even doing nothing wrong, what the fuck?” Two more agents rushed over to help keep Leo pinned on the ground, while Leo continued to repeat that he was a citizen and could show them his papers.
Finally, one of the agents reached into Leo’s pocket and found his Alabama driver’s license, but said it was fake and put him in handcuffs. Agents kept Leo in those cuffs for over an hour before letting him go, with no charges.
In an interview with Telemundo shortly after the incident, Leo said that he was “very sad” and “a little nervous.” Leo’s cousin added that she was afraid agents would harass her family again, since all that mattered was “the color of their skin.”
They were right to worry. Three weeks later, during another raid at another construction site, immigration agents arrested and detained Leo, and continued to detain him after he showed proof of citizenship. “I just want to work in peace,” said Leo on Tuesday, in a press release from his attorneys at the Institute for Justice.
Clip via YouTube
Leo is now the lead plaintiff in a federal class action lawsuit challenging the Trump administration’s policy of randomly raiding construction sites, rounding up Latino people and demanding they prove their citizenship, and continuing to hold them even after they do. In a complaint filed on Tuesday, Leo asked the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Alabama to let him sue on behalf of all citizens and lawful residents in the district who’ve been (or who will be) subjected to these warrantless raids.
Put differently, Leo is trying to sue on behalf of people who are experiencing exactly what Justice Brett Kavanaugh recently claimed people don’t experience. On September 8, in Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo, the Supreme Court lifted a lower court order which had blocked federal immigration agents in Los Angeles from stopping people just because they look Latino. The three Democratic appointees dissented, and five of the Republicans did not even try to defend the indefensible. But in a solo concurrence, Justice Brett Kavanaugh gave it his best shot, asserting that the government’s interest in enforcing immigration laws outweighs undocumented residents’ interest in evading immigration laws, and for legal residents, immigration stops are harmless.
For many reasons, Kavanaugh’s opinion is not good. Most relevant here, though, is that his argument relies on demonstrably false assumptions about ICE agents’ conduct. Juxtaposed with Leo’s lawsuit, and the unending horrors perpetrated by Trump’s goons in Alabama and elsewhere, Kavanaugh’s concurrence in Vasquez Perdomo becomes more preposterous with each passing day.
According to Kavanaugh, the government “sometimes makes brief investigative stops to check the immigration status” of people who work or appear to work in construction jobs. According to Leo, armed men in camouflage charged at Latino workers and tackled them to the ground without even asking about their immigration status.
According to Kavanaugh, if the officers learn the person they stopped is a lawful resident, they “promptly let the individual go.” According to Leo, officers ignored the shouts of alarmed workers who offered proof of their citizenship, opting instead to chase and restrain every Latino worker on sight. They cuffed Leo and led him near the back of an unmarked car, where he stood for over an hour in the Alabama heat, insisting he was a citizen and asking the agents to check his Social Security number. Eventually, the agents placed a call, verified the number, and let Leo go.
According to Kavanaugh, Latino residents have “no good basis” to think they’ll be racially profiled, and “certainly no good basis” to think an unlawful stop is “imminent.” According to Leo, he was subjected to another immigration stop three weeks after the first one.
Leo’s story is not unique. On the same day he filed his lawsuit, armed federal immigration agents conducted a midnight raid of a South Shore apartment building in Chicago, breaking down the doors, pulling people from their homes, and detaining everyone in the five-story building. Adults and children alike were zip-tied for hours, regardless of their citizenship status. One witness, who lived across the street, described crying upon seeing naked children separated from their mothers, and asking the agents about their humanity. “One of them literally laughed,” she said. Then the agent replied, “Fuck them kids.”
This is only the latest of many news stories that Kavanaugh prefers to ignore. Instead, he justified racial profiling by imagining that all immigration agents are polite professionals who comply with the law, and pose no threat to lawful residents beyond minor inconvenience. But as a wealthy white man on the Supreme Court, Kavanaugh has never had to fear immigration stops or racial profiling. His opinion turns to fiction because the reality of the policies he supports is too disturbing to imagine.
