This is an adapted excerpt from the Nov. 15 episode of “Velshi.”
Earlier this year, the Supreme Court issued a ruling that allowed U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in the Los Angeles area to question and detain people based on how they look, what language they speak, what work they do or even where they happen to be.
The conservative-majority court issued that ruling even though the Constitution actually has a specific amendment that prohibits that sort of thing. Nobody in America, whether they were born here, are here visiting, here seeking asylum or even here undocumented, should be racially profiled or detained without due process.
But even beyond that, a ruling like this opens the door to U.S. citizens being swept up in Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown.
In his concurring opinion, Justice Brett Kavanaugh said citizens had nothing to worry about. “If the officers learn that the individual they stopped is a U.S. citizen or otherwise lawfully in the United States, they promptly let the individual go,” he wrote.
The court’s three dissenting liberal justices, though, could read the tea leaves. They noted that countless Americans had already been “grabbed, thrown to the ground, and handcuffed simply because of their looks, their accents, and the fact they make a living by doing manual labor.”
“Today, the Court needlessly subjects countless more to these exact same indignities,” the justices wrote.
Those dissenting justices were correct. As ProPublica reported last month:
Americans have been dragged, tackled, beaten, tased and shot by immigration agents. They’ve had their necks kneeled on. They’ve been held outside in the rain while in their underwear. At least three citizens were pregnant when agents detained them. One of those women had already had the door of her home blown off while Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem watched.
ProPublica found that more than 170 U.S. citizens have been held by immigration officers; of those, nearly 20 were children — and despite Kavanaugh’s assertion, these citizens are not always being promptly let go.
Take the story of natural-born American citizen Leonardo Garcia Venegas. In May, Garcia Venegas was working at a construction site in Alabama when masked agents swept through. He said they started detaining everyone who looked Latino and left the non-Latino workers alone.
Garcia Venegas began filming as officers grabbed him. Through a struggle, you can hear him tell the officers he is a citizen and was willing to show them his papers.
Even after the officers inspected Garcia Venegas’ REAL ID — which is issued only to U.S. citizens and legal, documented residents — he said the agents dismissed it as fake, and he was restrained for more than an hour. Just two weeks later, it happened again — to the very same American citizen. Federal agents entered another construction site where Garcia Venegas was working, cornered him and ordered him to leave the property so they could check his status. Once again, he produced his REAL ID and social security card, but the agents again refused to accept them. Ultimately, he was released 20 minutes later. In a statement to NBC News, Homeland Security alleged Garcia Venegas interfered with an arrest during a targeted worksite operation and said agents do not racially profile or target Americans. But Garcia Venegas’ story is not an isolated incident. There are countless stories of U.S. citizens being detained, arrested and assaulted. Remember, the U.S. doesn’t compel its citizens to walk around with their birth certificates, Social Security or green cards. But Trump’s immigration policy has created a situation where Black and brown people feel they just have to accept that they will be stopped by immigration officers, and that papers — which they are not legally required to carry on their person — may not be enough. Brianna Williams and Allison Detzel contributed.
Ali Velshi is the host of “Velshi,” which airs Saturdays and Sundays on MSNBC. He has been awarded the National Headliner Award for Business & Consumer Reporting for “How the Wheels Came Off,” a special on the near collapse of the American auto industry. His work on disabled workers and Chicago’s red-light camera scandal in 2016 earned him two News and Documentary Emmy Award nominations, adding to a nomination in 2010 for his terrorism coverage.
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