After filming federal officials at Home Depot on Thursday, a 37-year-old American citizen was beaten to the ground and taken into custody. He claimed that he was detained for almost an hour close to Dodger Stadium, where authorities brag about the number of immigrants they had taken into custody.
Did you guys catch a lot of bodies today? “One agent asked,” he stated.
The other said, “Oh, we grabbed 31.”
The first agent said, “Today was a good day.”
As he sat in the sun on the tarmac, Job Garcia claimed, the two gave each other a high five.
Garcia was freed Friday from a federal prison facility in the downtown area. There aren’t any pending criminal charges. He is one of numerous Americans who have been taken into custody in recent days as a result of enforcement actions. Officials from the Department of Homeland Security claim that some have unlawfully interfered with agents’ duties.
When asked if Garcia had been charged or why he had been arrested, a representative for the L.A. U.S. attorney’s office suggested that a reporter get in touch with the Department of Homeland Security.
A request for response from DHS and the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol was not answered.
Garcia claimed that the things he heard while in custody left him feeling uneasy.
“They reduce them to bodies and call them bodies,” he remarked. My blood was boiling.
Garcia was at Home Depot picking up a delivery when someone came up to the customer counter and told that something was happening outside. Garcia is a photojournalist and PhD student at Claremont Graduate University.
As he left, he heard, “La migra, La migra.” Telling the agents they were useless, he snatched up his phone and followed them around the parking lot until he saw them making a half-circle around a box truck.
According to his footage, a Border Patrol agent radioed someone before slamming his baton on the passenger window. The glass broke. People yelled when he unlocked the door.
A startled man is seen texting while driving in the footage. It seemed like he had refused to unlock his door.
Garcia claimed an agent lunged at him and shoved him, but it’s unclear from the video what transpired next.
He recalled that my initial response was to push his hand away. The agent then seized his left arm, twisted it behind his back, and tossed his phone, he claimed.
Garcia claimed that when the agent knocked him to the ground, three more agents dove in.
Give me your f hand, sir, and get the f down. You f got it, sir, you want it, and you got it. Okay, so you want to go to jail. In the footage, an agent can be heard saying, “You got it.”
The man shouted, “You got it, you wanted it.”
Garcia claimed that an agent tied him so firmly that his blood flowed on my fingertips.
Garcia was pinned down, breathing hard.
He said, “At that moment, I thought I could probably die here.”
Garcia’s phone was returned to his pocket by the agent. The recording continued.
Garcia’s video showed one agent saying, “I’ve got one back here,” twice as he was being loaded into a car.
What do you have? Garcia fired back. What do you have?
He claimed that although it was not audible on the video, an agent instructed him to wait here in bad Spanish.
He cries back, “I f speak English, you f dumbass.”
He claimed that no agent inquired about his citizenship in the United States. No one requested identification.
Later in an interview, he stated, “They thought I was undocumented.”
After four minutes or so, the video cuts to him waiting in the van.
California
The lives of the sellers and their families who established a makeshift village at Home Depot in Hollywood are upended when immigration officers arrest dozens of people there.
In order to demonstrate his U.S. citizenship, Garcia requested that an agent get his wallet from his vehicle. His ID was retrieved by another agent, but he was still in handcuffs.
His hands started to swell because they were so tight.
He was placed in shoelace-like shackles by the agents. They sped off down the 101 Freeway after turning a curve and pausing to transfer him into another van.
He said that I had spilled blood on their seat. They’re going to remember me, he thought.
He was accompanied in the van by a dejected Mexican man who revealed that his wife was six months pregnant.
The man said, “My wife told me not to go to work today.” She told him that something didn’t feel right.
“It was heartbreaking,” Garcia added. I wish he had escaped while they were attempting to seize me.
Garcia was removed from the vehicle and instructed to sit on the asphalt as agents moved prisoners into various vans and processed them for approximately an hour on what he described as an aramp into Dodger Stadium close to Lot K. His criminal history was checked by a female.
It was angry and strange.
Garcia stated that they were attempting to construct a case of some kind. He told The Times that he was arrested for driving without a license when he was just 17 years old.
After they transported him, agents later fingerprinted him and tried to interrogate him.
According to the agent, they would like to hear your side of the story.
Garcia said no.
He claimed to have heard a source say, “Trump is really working us.”
He met Adrian Martinez while incarcerated in a detention center in the downtown area.
Martinez, a 20-year-old Walmart worker and also a U.S. citizen,had been arrested on Tuesdaywhile he tried to stop the arrest of a man who cleaned a shopping center in Pico Rivera. The two spoke for about 10 minutes, as Martinez waited to go to court.
You re the Walmart kid, right? he asked him.
Garcia told him what had unfolded outside the Home Depot.
That s exactly what happened to me, he said Martinez told him. They were bullying this older guy. I didn t like that so I went and confronted them and they put their hands on me and I pushed their hands off.
U.S. Atty. Bill Essayli posted a photo of Martinez on X and said he was arrested for an allegation of punching a border patrol agent in the face after he attempted to impede their immigration enforcement operation. Martinez was charged in a criminal complaint with conspiracy to impede a federal officer.
The complaint makes no reference to a punch, but alleges that Martinez blocked agents vehicles with his car and then later a trash can.
A complaint generally contains one charge and does not include the full scope of a defendant s conduct, or the evidence that will be presented at trial, said Ciaran McEvoy, a spokesperson for the U.S. attorney s office in L.A. Considering this is an active case, we will not be providing further comments outside of court proceedings.
Martinez was released Friday on a $5,000 bond.
U.S. Attorney Essayli and U.S. Border Patrol Sector Chief Gregory Bovino outrageously alleged that Adrian assaulted a federal agent, Martinez s attorneys said in a statement. However he has not been charged with an assault charge because he didn t assault anyone, and the evidence of that is clear.
Garcia said his cellmate was worried about these protests. He asked, Don t you think the protesters who are out there destroying property, rioters, is a bad look?
Rioting is the language of the unheard, he said, riffing on a quote from the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
