SACRAMENTO—Years ago, I drove through a Border Patrol station along a Southern California freeway in my little sports car. As a white guy in a Navy blazer, I wasn’t surprised that the agents immediately waved me along—even as they questioned the Latino drivers around me, searched their trunks and thoroughly inspected their vehicles. I clearly didn’t the fit the profile of an illegal immigrant or Mexican drug smuggler.
By contrast, one time that I flew with my mom, whose 90-year-old body has its share of metal implants, TSA agents examined her as if she might be the member of a sleeper cell. It’s just how it goes in TSA’s Security Theater—although once I was diverted to a “random” line for extra vetting and noticed that I appeared to be the only person in line who didn’t look Middle Eastern. What a coincidence.
My Border Patrol story reinforces an obvious point I’ve made to some of my Trump-supporting friends: The government almost certainly will use profiling to target criminal aliens, gang-bangers and even garden-variety illegal immigrants. Sometimes, liberal activists act as if racial/ethnic disparities in any given area necessarily prove racial discrimination. That’s not always the case, but ethnic profiling always goes hand-in-hand with immigration enforcement.
As such, I’ve been appalled, but not surprised, by some of the stories emanating from the administration’s high-profile immigration raids throughout the country. In one recent raid in Montebello, Border Patrol agents—masked and driving an unmarked SUV—descended on a parking lot and detained a local man.
“One agent soon twisted Jason Brian Gavidia’s arm and pressed him against a black metal fence outside the lot where he runs an auto body shop,” according to The New York Times. “Another officer then asked him an unusual question … . ‘What hospital were you born at?’ … He did not know the hospital’s name. ‘I was born here,’ he shouted at the agent, adding, ‘I’m an American, bro!’” I don’t know about you, but I couldn’t instantly tell you the name of the hospital where I was born.
The agents ultimately released him, but confiscated his driver’s license. There’s a lot wrong with this picture. In a constitutional republic, armed officers should not be wearing face masks as if they are members of some third-world paramilitary organization. There’s no reason for that unless they are behaving in a manner that skirts the boundaries of the law.
Civilian policing is the norm in free countries for obvious reasons. If you’re walking down the street and a gang of masked, armed men jumps out of an unmarked vehicle and abducts you, how do you know they’re legitimate officers and not bandits or kidnappers?
The facemask issue is an argument is for another day. It’s a debate we’ll soon have in the California Legislature, as two lawmakers recently proposed a bill that would ban law-enforcement officials from concealing their faces while on duty. Today, the focus is on the profiling aspect of the ongoing immigration raids. If the feds are sending swarms of officers into the field to round up illegal immigrants, they almost certainly will end up questioning, detaining and harassing people who look like they might be here illegally—but aren’t.
As The Guardian reported, “A co-founder of a group for Latinas who supported Donald Trump has excoriated the president on some of theimmigration-related arrests being carried out by his administration, which she called ‘unacceptable and inhumane.’” In an X post, “Ileana Garcia wrote: ‘This is not what we voted for.’” She’s right about the nature of many of the arrests, but what exactly did she think she voted for given that candidate Trump promised to do exactly what his administration is doing?
A number of Trump-voting business owners and farmers who have had ICE agents whisk away part of their work force have made similar points. Same with people who have had family members deported—sometimes after they were “disappeared” in broad daylight, with no notification to loved ones. They didn’t expect their workers and loved ones to get nabbed. Frankly, they are among the least sympathetic opponents of the raids. They voted for these policies—and only seem upset now that it’s affecting them and not just other people.
The end result of these sweeps: All Americans—and especially those with darker skin—need to always carry our papers. The Fourth Amendment is clear: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated.” Then again, the administration isn’t keen on the due-process concept either, which simply requires the government to prove its case before it sends you to a gulag in El Salvador.
If you’re not upset by these developments, then I suppose you just don’t fit the profile of an American who cares much about the Constitution.
Steven Greenhut is Western region director for the R Street Institute and a member of the Southern California News Group editorial board. Write to him at sgreenhut@rstreet.org.
