'A good day': Detained U.S. citizen said agents bragged after arresting dozens at Home Depot
A 37-year-old U.S. citizen who was tackled to the ground and arrested after filming federal agents at Home Depot on Thursday said he was held for more than an hour near Dodger Stadium, where agents boasted about how many immigrants they arrested.
'How many bodies did you guys grab today?' he said one agent asked.
'Oh, we grabbed 31,' the other replied.
"That was a good day today," the first agent responded.
The two high-fived, as he sat on the asphalt under the sun, Job Garcia said.
Garcia was released on Friday from a downtown federal detention center. No apparent criminal charges have yet to be filed. He is one of several U.S citizens arrested during enforcement operations in recent days. Department of Homeland Security officials say some have illegally interfered with agents' jobs.
In response to questions about why Garcia was arrested and if he'd been charged, a spokesperson for the U.S. attorney's office in L.A. recommended a reporter contact the Department of Homeland Security.
DHS and U.S. Customs and Border Protection did not respond to a request for comment.
Garcia said he was shaken by what he heard while he was detained.
'They call them 'bodies,' they reduce them to bodies,' he said. "My blood was boiling."
Garcia, a photographer and doctoral student Claremont Graduate University, had been picking up a delivery at Home Depot when someone approached the customer desk and said something was unfolding outside.
"La migra, La migra," he heard as he walked out. He quickly grabbed his phone and followed agents around the parking lot, telling them they were "f— useless" until he came to a group of them forming a half-circle around a box truck.
A Border Patrol agent radioed someone and then slammed his baton against the passenger window, his video shows. Glass shattered. He unlocked the door as people shouted.
In the video, a stunned man can be seen texting behind the wheel. He had apparently refused to open his door.
It's unclear from the footage what happened next, but Garcia said an agent lunged toward him and pushed him.
"My first reaction was to like push his hand off," he recalled. Then, he said, the agent grabbed his left arm, twisted it behind his back and threw his phone.
The agent brought him to the ground and three other agents jumped in, Garcia said
"Get the f— down sir" and "give me your f— hand. You want it, you got it, sir, you f— got it. You want to go to jail, fine. You got it," an agent can be heard saying in the video.
"You wanted it, you got it," the man yelled.
An agent handcuffed him so hard "that there was no circulation running to my fingers," Garcia said.
Pinned down, Garcia had difficulty breathing.
"That moment, I thought I could probably die here," he said.
The agent put Garcia's phone back in his pocket. The recording kept running.
As Garcia was put into a vehicle, his video captured an agent twice saying: "I've got one back here."
"You got one what?" Garcia shot back. "You got one what?"
He said an agent told him in broken Spanish to "wait here,' though it could not be heard on the video.
"I f— speak English, you f— dumbass," he clearly shouts back.
No agent asked if he was an American citizen, he said. Nobody asked for identification.
'They assumed that I was undocumented," he said later in an interview.
The video ends after about four minutes, while he is waiting in the van.
Read more: Raid at a Home Depot in Hollywood shatters an immigrant refuge
Garcia asked an agent to get his wallet from his car, so he could prove he was a U.S. citizen. Another agent retrieved his ID, but he remained handcuffed.
They were so tight, his hands began to swell.
The agents switched him to handcuffs that looked like shoelaces. They took off around a corner, stopped to shuffle him into another van and sped off down the 101 Freeway.
"I smeared my blood in their seat," he said. And he thought, "They're going to remember me."
With him in the van was a Mexican man, face downcast, who said his wife was six months pregnant.
"My wife told me not to go to work today," the man said. "Something doesn't feel right," he said she told him.
"It broke my heart," Garcia said. "I wish he was the one who got away when they were trying to grab me."
On what he described as a ramp going into Dodger stadium near Lot K, Garcia was taken out of the car and told to sit on the asphalt as agents shuffled detainees into different vans and processed them for about an hour. A woman ran his background for criminal offenses.
It felt surreal and enraging.
'They were trying to build some sort of case," Garcia said. He told The Times he was arrested at 17 for driving without a license.
After they transported him, agents later fingerprinted him and tried to interrogate him.
The agent said they wanted to "take your side of the story."
Garcia declined.
He said he overheard an agent tell someone, 'Trump is really working us."
While held at a downtown detention facility, he met Adrian Martinez.
Martinez, a 20-year-old Walmart worker and also a U.S. citizen, had been arrested on Tuesday while he tried to stop the arrest of a man who cleaned a shopping center in Pico Rivera. The two spoke for about 10 minutes, as Martinez waited to go to court.
"You're the Walmart kid, right?" he asked him.
Garcia told him what had unfolded outside the Home Depot.
"That's exactly what happened to me," he said Martinez told him. "They were bullying this older guy. I didn't like that so I went and confronted them and they put their hands on me and I pushed their hands off.'
U.S. Atty. Bill Essayli posted a photo of Martinez on X and said he "was arrested for an allegation of punching a border patrol agent in the face after he attempted to impede their immigration enforcement operation." Martinez was charged in a criminal complaint with conspiracy to impede a federal officer.
The complaint makes no reference to a punch, but alleges that Martinez blocked agents' vehicles with his car and then later a trash can.
'A complaint generally contains one charge and does not include the full scope of a defendant's conduct, or the evidence that will be presented at trial," said Ciaran McEvoy, a spokesperson for the U.S. attorney's office in L.A. "Considering this is an active case, we will not be providing further comments outside of court proceedings.'
Martinez was released Friday on a $5,000 bond.
'U.S. Attorney Essayli and U.S. Border Patrol Sector Chief Gregory Bovino outrageously alleged that Adrian assaulted a federal agent," Martinez's attorneys said in a statement. "However he has not been charged with an assault charge because he didn't assault anyone, and the evidence of that is clear."
Garcia said his cellmate was worried about these protests. He asked, "Don't you think the protesters who are out there destroying property, rioters, is a bad look?"
'Rioting is the language of the unheard," he said, riffing on a quote from the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
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This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
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