A US -born citizen who is fighting in a dirty handcuff and detained in a vehicle as part of the immigration raid has had a real ID that was rejected as a fake, said a man’s cousin on Friday.
A video of the arrest broadcast by Noticias Telemundo showed authorities grabbing Leonardo Garcia Venegas, 25 years old, while in a workplace in Foley, Alabama, on Wednesday and bent his hands behind him. Someone outside the camera can be heard screaming, “He is a citizen.”
Garcia told Noticias Telemundo that the authorities had taken his personality from his wallet and told him he was fake before he handcuffed him. Real ID is the identification that US citizens are required by law to travel through airports and enter federal buildings. It is considered a higher form of security.
“Obviously, the real ID is no longer valid. He has a real ID card,” said his cousin Shelah Venegas. “We all made sure that we have the real identifier and went through the protocols that the administration wants. … He has his true identifier and then they see him and I guess because his English is not owned and/or because he is brown, he is fake, he is not real.”
Garcia had told Noticias Telemundo that they “grabbed my really bad” and the handcuffs were put “very hard” on it.
Garcia said he was released from the vehicle where he was detained after giving his arrests with his social security employees, which showed he was a US citizen.
The arrest has left Garcia, who was born in Florida, has shaken, especially because officers also arrest and detain his brother, who is not legally in the country, Venegas said. She added that Garcia lives with her brother. Their parents are from Mexico.
Leonardo Garcia Venegas. (Telemundo)
“He was actually quite sick when he came back,” Venegas told Garcia. “He said his hands hurt his hands as well. His wrists, you can see where there are all the handcuffs. … The way they put him on the ground, his knees also hurt.”
She said they were trying to find a lawyer, but the locals told them it was almost impossible to judge a federal agent. It is not clear from the video whether the authorities were federal immigration agents or local law enforcement agencies performing duties for implementation.
The Ministry of Interior Security said in a statement to the NBC News that Garcia was interfering in arrest during a purposeful work operation.
“He physically included between the agents and the topic they were trying to arrest and refused to comply with numerous verbal commands,” says Trisha McLaughlin, Assistant Secretary of DHS. “Anyone who actively impedes the law enforcement in the performance of their sworn obligations, including US citizens,” of course, will face consequences that include arrest. “
The answer did not deal with the rejection of the identification of a garcia.
Garcia denied that he had interrupted arrest. He told the NBC News that he was trying to get his phone out when the immigration and customs agent for execution took it and threw it to the ground and then the agent began to grab him.
Venegas said Garcia’s brother had signed deportment documents because the family did not want him to hold “forever” as they saw another family member who had been held at the Louisiana Retention Center for months.
“This is inhuman, what they do to our people. They treat them as if they were killers,” she said.
Venegas said that the arrests of immigration were creating consequences among the Spaniards, even among US citizens.
“It’s about a race now. It’s not a matter of whether you are legal or not here,” she said.
Her family owns a pretty big negotiation company, she said: “And many of the people who work with us do not work. … They refuse to go to work. They said they would not go until these things were moved.”
Venegas added that most of her family is self-employed and “do the same thing that every other citizen does.”
“It’s just crazy that we can’t be different, the color we are. We contribute to this country in the same way that every other citizen does with his taxes,” she said. “But we must be the ones who we go to work, we will be scared that we will be discriminated against.”
“I think of my family,” she said. “Although many of them are citizens, I think how we all work in the same area in construction and they cannot sit there because they can literally harass or attack the way my cousin did.”
This article was originally published on nbcnews.com