A U.S. Citizen Detained by ICE for Three Days Tells His Story
George Retes is a 25-year-old U.S. Army veteran who served a tour in Iraq. On July 10, while on his way to work as a security guard at a Southern California cannabis farm, he was detained by federal immigration agents, despite telling them that he is an American citizen and that his wallet and identification were in his nearby car, Retes told me. While arresting him, the agents knelt on his back and his neck, he said, making it difficult for him to breathe. Held in a jail cell for three days and nights, he was not allowed to make a phone call, see an attorney, appear before a judge, or take a shower to wash off pepper spray and tear gas that the agents had used, according to the Institute for Justice, a public-interest law firm that is representing Retes. He worried about his two young children and missed his daughter’s birthday. Mistreatment of American citizens by immigration authorities is not new. According to a 2021 Government Accountability Office report, the best available data indicate that Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested 674 “potential” U.S. citizens, detained 121, and removed 70 during a five-year, six-month period that ended in 2020. We don’t yet know if detentions of U.S. citizens are becoming more common in President Donald Trump’s second term, but news outlets have documented more than a dozen such cases. And the Trump administration has ramped up immigration raids, rolled back due-process protections, and secured funding to quickly hire 10,000 additional ICE officers, all of which creates the conditions for more erroneous detentions—and raises the question of whether ICE can violate the rights of citizens with impunity. “There must be some avenue to hold the federal government or its officers liable for violating George’s constitutional rights,” Marie Miller, one of Retes’s attorneys, told me. Her strategy is to seek relief for Retes under the Federal Tort Claims Act, a law that allows private parties to sue for negligent or wrongful acts committed by federal employees acting within their job. The government has six months to resolve a claim, after which the claimant can sue. The hope is that the case “will chart a path to holding federal officers or their employer accountable,” Miller explained, “and that blazing the path to accountability will discourage this kind of treatment.” She said that ICE has acknowledged receiving Retes’s claim but has not yet responded. [Listen: How ICE became Trump’s secret army] ICE did not respond to my request for comment about the claim. But a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security put out a statement after the raid in which Retes was swept up, saying that the “US Attorney’s Office is reviewing his case, along with dozens of others, for potential federal charges related to the execution of the federal search warrant in Camarillo.” Retes was one of more than 360 people who were detained in the operation—“a mix of workers, family members of workers, protesters and passersby,” according to the Los Angeles Times. Late last month, I spoke with Retes, who detailed his story, starting with the day that his employer, Glass House Farms, one of California’s largest legal-cannabis companies, was raided. What follows has been edited for length and clarity. You were driving to your job as a security guard when you encountered a bunch of men, some with ICE vests on, blocking the road. You’ve described the scene as chaotic. Can you tell me what you saw? Cars bumper to bumper, people getting out walking down the street to try to see what’s happening, really a logjam. Making my way through was a task, and eventually I drove up to where a line of agents was just in the middle of the street keeping everyone away and blocking the road. They were raiding your workplace. Were there signs or instructions on what to do? Nothing. So I pull up a good distance away. I put my car in park. I get out. I say, I’m a U.S. citizen. I’m just trying to get to work. I have a job just like you guys. I have a family to feed. I got bills to pay. I’m not here to fight you guys. I’m not part of the protest. I’m literally just trying to get to work. They didn’t care and immediately got hostile. No one seemed to be in charge. Just all of them yelling at once. Yelling what? They were all yelling different things: Work is closed. You’re not going to work today. Get the fuck out of here. Leave, get back in your car. Pull over to the side. And then they started walking toward me in a line. I didn’t want to escalate. I wasn’t there to argue or to fight them. So I decided to get back in my car. I didn’t want any conflict. They surrounded my car. I’m telling them, “I’m leaving.” I’m trying to leave. And agents are banging on my driver’s- and passenger’s-side windows. Agents in front are telling me to reverse, pull over to the side, while other agents are trying to open my door and telling me to do something completely different, contradicting each other. I reversed out of the lane I was in to get out of the way. Then they let a bunch of their vehicles pass by. How did the arrest happen? They re-approached my car. I don’t know why they decided to re-approach, but they end up throwing tear gas behind my car. Now I’m kinda just trapped there, with tear gas filling up my car, choking. They’re banging on my window, telling me to reverse again, and I’m trying to tell them, How do you expect me to reverse when I can’t see? You hear me coughing. They just weren’t listening; they were still telling me to reverse, still trying to pull my car door open, still contradicting each other. Then one of the agents shatters my driver’s-side window, and another agent sticks his