As immigrant rights leader Frank Sharry has repeatedly said, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has become “unshackled and unhinged,” a claim backed up by a new report that a driver, identified by the California Highway Patrol as a plainclothes ICE agent, tailgated a motorist in an incident that culminated in the federal immigration agent pointing his gun at her and telling her to “pull the (expletive) over or I’m going to shoot you.”
According to the San Diego Union Tribune, Felicia Ocampo and her young son were on their way home when a silver Ford Focus pulled up close behind her car. When she tried to speed away, the car continued following, with the two eventually weaving in and out of traffic, she trying to get away, and he trying to catch up. “I was going to do anything to get away from him,” Ocampo said. “He was driving erratically. It was like he was trying to harm my car or run me off the road.” When she again tried to maneuver away, he pulled up alongside her, demanded she pulled over, and “pointed the gun at” her:
She immediately thought of her son who was sleeping in the back seat. When she looked again at the man, she said he was putting on a black Kevlar vest.
She said there was nothing about the Ford Focus that suggested he was a member of law enforcement, but the vest gave her pause and she decided to pull over near Ted Williams Parkway — about 5 miles from where the incident started.
He quickly pulled up behind her, and when he appeared in her window, she said she let him have it.
“I start to yell, ‘What are you doing? You’re scaring me!’” she said. “My anxiety was really going off. Then he said ‘If you don’t shut your mouth, I’m going to put my gun in it and shut it for you.’”
According to immigration attorney Matt Holt, “California law limits the ability of federal agents in the state to arrest people for violations of California and local laws. And they do not have the capability to write traffic tickets.”
But that’s exactly what the officer threatened to do, demanding Ocampo’s driver’s license and proof of insurance and “at no point did he identify himself or say what agency he was with”:
When the man returned, his demeanor had changed. He told her “it was her lucky day,” she said, and that the emergency lights in his car weren’t working and he didn’t have a citation book in his car. Then he smiled and apologized.
She said she apologized too and quickly drove off as he walked back to his car. She realized later that he never returned her driver’s license. Her mom called 911 soon after — about 3:30 p.m.
“I’ve been a mess for days,” she said Thursday. “What he did — it’s not right. He should haven’t pulled a gun on me. I didn’t do anything to deserve that.”
“The stop appears to be a Fourth Amendment violation which protects us from these types of investigatory stops,” Holt said. He notes that “case law has established that immigration agents need to have a reasonable suspicion that a violation of an immigration law occurred in order to pull someone over,” and in some cases that can include drivers who are endangering other motorists. In this case, it appears to be the plainclothes ICE agent who was endangering motorists by pulling his gun on a woman and threatening to put it in her mouth while her child sat in the backseat of the car.
This report comes as Donald Trump seeks to hire an additional 15,000 federal immigration enforcement agents in order to ramp up his mass deportation force, a $3 billion dollar plan that even the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general has expressed doubts over. Because in part federal immigration agencies attract so many bad apples, the administration would need to vet 1.2 million candidates in order to find enough qualified agents:
[ICE] said in a Thursday statement that they are “cooperating fully” with the investigation.
“ICE holds its personnel to the highest professional standards and has zero tolerance for employees who violate the public’s trust,” spokeswoman Lauren Mack said.
Except for the fact that an “unshackled and unhinged” ICE has even been arresting the victims of domestic abuse at courthouses where they were attempting to obtain protective orders, with ICE most likely tipped off by their abusers. “Highest professional standards” indeed.