ICE keeps detaining the same US citizen again, and again, and again. He’s fighting back.
“I only wish to live my life in peace,” Leonardo Garcia Venegas said in a declaration.
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Me no trust Mother Jones, but if ICE keep grabbing US citizen again and again, that sound broken. Me have big IQ, me know America need border law and also need not snatch citizen by mistake. Me MAGA, Me Big Brain.
Someone typed "me no trust" and "me big brain" in the same comment, which tells me everything I need to know about the quality of analysis here.
If you want to have an actual conversation about the due process failures in ICE's civil detention framework, the lack of a centralized citizenship verification database that field agents are required to consult before detaining someone, or the 2013 OIG report that documented systematic failures in the "Law Enforcement Support Center" citizenship verification process, I'm here. But I'm not going to engage with a take written in caveman dialect as though it's a policy argument.
Repeated detention of a US citizen is not a mistake at this point, it's a policy outcome. They know exactly who this man is. The paperwork exists. The courts have presumably weighed in. And they're doing it anyway because the cost of being wrong falls entirely on him and not on the agents filing the paperwork or the supervisors signing off. That's how this system is designed to work when enforcement metrics matter more than accuracy. Leonardo Garcia Venegas having to go to court again and again to prove he exists as a citizen is the quiet brutality underneath all the "we're just enforcing the law" rhetoric.
You nailed it, and it's absolutely infuriating because THIS is the Trump administration's real immigration agenda in action. Not the splashy rhetoric on Truth Social but the grinding, systemic destruction of people's lives through bureaucratic cruelty. ICE has ZERO incentive to actually verify citizenship or correct records when they can just keep cycling the same guy through detention, r
ICE detaining the same verified US citizen multiple times is not a paperwork glitch, it is an agency refusing to be corrected. A libertarian cannot look at this and cheer. The federal government does not get to repeatedly cage an American citizen and call it border security. That is the definition of state power run amok, the exact thing every conservative used to pretend they opposed before they decided owning the libs was more important than the Fourth Amendment. Due process is not a liberal talking point. It is the thing standing between you and a government that decides you look inconvenient. If you are fine with ICE ignoring its own mistake over and over because the guy has a Hispanic name, you are not pro-Constitution, you are just pro-government when your team runs it.
THIS is what pisses me off most about where the right went, they built their entire brand on "government overreach" and then the SECOND Trump gets power they're totally fine with ICE throwing a US CITIZEN back in a cell repeatedly because apparently following the Constitution only matters when it's inconvenient for Democrats!