American immigration and customs agents carry out a raid as part of the Cross Check operation in Sherman, Texas, on June 20, 2019.
Charles Reed | US Immigration and application of courses | Reuters
A construction worker in Alabama and an American citizen who says that he was arrested twice by immigration agents in just a few weeks filed a complaint with the Federal Court to demand the end of the Raids of the Trump administration targeting industries with large immigrant staff.
The collective appeal, filed Tuesday by the concrete worker Leo Garcia Venegas to the law firm of Public Interest Institute for Justice, requests that the firm call “tactics of application of unconstitutional and illegal immigration”.
Venegas, born in the United States, lives and works in the county of Baldwin, Alabama, an area of the Gulf coast between the cities of Mobile and Pensacola, Florida, which has experienced immense growth of the population in the last 15 years, and which offers numerous construction works.
The trial comes only a few weeks after the Supreme Court has raised the ban on a judge who had prohibited immigration agents in Los Angeles from preventing people only according to their race, language, work or location.
The court has repeatedly granted some of the most severe Trump administrations of immigration policies, while also leaving open that legal results could change as the cases take place.
The new trial describes repeated raids in workplace despite the agents without a mandate or suspicion that specific workers were in the United States illegally, and a series of American citizens – many with Latin American names – which were detained.
The Ministry of Internal Security “authorizes these armed raids according to the general hypothesis that certain groups of people in the industry, including Latinos, are probably illegal immigrants,” said the trial.
In a raid in May which swept Venegas, a video shot by a colleague shows him forced on the ground by immigration agents when he has repeatedly insisted that he was an American citizen. The trial indicates that the agents targeted the workers on the site who looked Latino, while leaving the other workers alone. Venegas was released after more than an hour, according to the law firm.
Venegas was again held on another construction site less than a month later.
“I feel like I can’t do anything to prevent immigration agents from stopping when they wish,” Leo said in a statement published by the law firm. “I just want to work in peace. The Constitution protects my ability to do so.”
Venegas, who specializes in the installation of concrete foundations, says that he was stopped twice despite showing his real identity driving license issued in Alabama – a high security identity card available only for American citizens and legal residents.
Immigration agents told him that the identity card was false, before finally freeing it. He was released after about 20-30 minutes.
“Immigration agents are not above the law,” said lawyer for the Institute for Justice Jaba Tsitsuashvili in a statement. “Leo is an American citizen who works hard to defend everyone’s law without being held simply for their appearance or for the work they do.”
The DHS did not immediately respond to a request for comments.
