The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), joined by the United Farm Workers (UFW), claims the Border Patrol agents operating a raid in a South Sacramento Home Depot parking lot violated a court order. This injunction, issued in April by the Eastern District of California, instructed the agents to refrain from detaining individuals without reasonable suspicion and to desist from warrantless arrests absent an assessment of flight risk, as reported by ABC10.
The federal lawsuit, steered by the ACLU and UFW, alleges three prime infractions: inadequate guidance to agents facilitating profiling based on traits such as skin color or occupation, improper tactics used to conduct mass raids, and failure to maintain adequate records, which an earlier court ruling mandated. In the midst of the defendants, reports from KCRA 3 indicate an 18-year-old high school student, Selvin Osbeli Mejia Diaz, found himself ensnared by the controversial operation—arrested while on his way to shop at a nearby Ross.
The legal filings accuse Border Patrol agents of targeting individuals for "their apparent ethnicity, apparent occupation, and presence at or near a Home Depot with no reason to believe the specific individuals they stopped were in the country unlawfully, and arrested them without assessing flight risk," according to the ACLU and UFW obtained by KCRA 3. Mejia Diaz's account paints a jarring picture: a masked man "dressed like a soldier" emerging from a vehicle, initiating a pursuit, and forcefully detaining him without prior identification. His ordeal purportedly continued with denied contact with his family for days while being moved through ICE facilities.
U.S. Border Patrol's El Centro Sector Chief Gregory Bovino defended the controversial operation, saying to KCRA 3, "We go where the threat takes us." He justified the raids on "predefined targets" that lead to the apprehension of "several individuals that were aggravated felons" and warned of similar future interventions. Meanwhile, the ACLU continues to make their case against perceived violations of the court order, challenging the legitimacy of a arrests that, in part, includes a high school student seeking asylum, who claims innocence of any crime.
