A U.S. citizen who was violently arrested in a California ICE raid and detained for 24 hours said it was all worth it if an undocumented person was able to use that moment to flee.
Job Garcia, a 37-year-old PhD student at Claremont Graduate University, was arrested during an ICE raid last Thursday at a Home Depot in Hollywood, ABC 7 reported.
Video captured an ICE agent telling Garcia, who is a U.S. citizen, “You want to go to jail? Fine, you got it.”
Garcia recalled the horrifying moment he was placed into custody by the officer: “The pressure of like, the knee on my back, and his hand on my neck, I thought like ‘Is this it for me?’”
Footage of the violent arrest, which came as ICE agents detained about 30 people at the store, quickly went viral.
Before he was detained, Garcia and several other shoppers were yelling at the officers as they targeted a man in a truck by smashing his window.
“A split second after that is when he lunged at me. I was still recording, so he pushes me, puts both hands on me, and I pushed his hand off. And then, he didn’t like that, so he grabbed my left hand,” Garcia said.
Garcia said the officers seemed surprised when he told them he was a U.S. citizen, but they still decided to arrest him. He was first taken to a holding area at Dodger Stadium, where he overheard agents discussing how many people they’d grabbed.
“Like, ‘How many bodies did you guys get today?’ And one of them said 31, and they started like, ‘Yay! It was a good day today.’ And they were like, high-fiving each other,” Garcia said.
Garcia said he also overheard officers talking about potential charges they could slap him with.
“At first it was assault of a federal agent, but only later, the narrative started switching because the video was out,” Garcia said.
This underscores the importance of citizen videos — Record! Record! Record!
https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/ice-arrest-usa-citizen-b2774799.html