A 37-year-old U.S. citizen was arrested and arrested after filming federal agents at Home Depot on Thursday, saying he was detained near Dodger Stadium for more than an hour, with agents boasting about how many immigrants they arrested.
“How many bodies did you catch today?” he said to an agent.
“Oh, we caught 31,” another answered.
“It was a wonderful day today,” the first agent replied.
Job said the two high momentums sat on the asphalt in the sun, Garcia said.
Garcia was released from the federal detention center on Friday. No obvious criminal charges have been filed. He is one of several U.S. citizens arrested in law enforcement operations in recent days. DHS officials said some people illegally interfered in the work of agents.
To answer questions about why Garcia was arrested, a spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Los Angeles advises reporters to contact the Department of Homeland Security if charged.
Department of Homeland Security and U.S. Customs and Border Patrol did not respond to requests for comment
Garcia on Friday, June 20, 2025 at Silver Lake Apartment in Los Angeles, California. U.S. citizen Garcia was arrested and detained in a raid in Los Angeles Thursday, June 19, 2025. He was released Friday at 8:30 a.m.
(Luke Johnson/Los Angeles Times)
Garcia said the sound he heard when he was detained was shaken.
“They call them ‘corpses’ and they reduce them to their bodies,” he said. “My blood is boiling.”
Photographer and PhD student, Claremont University Graduate University, has been picking up and delivering at Home Depot when someone approached the client’s desk and said something was happening outside.
“La Migra, La MigraHe heard as he walked out. He quickly grabbed the phone and followed the agents around the parking lot, telling them they were “f-useless” until he came to one of the groups forming a semicircle on the box truck.
His video shows a Border Patrol agent broadcasting someone and then ramming his baton into the passenger window. The glass was broken. He unlocked the door as people shouted.
In the video, a shocked man can be seen texting behind the steering wheel. He obviously refused to open the door.
It’s not clear from the camera what happened next, but Garcia said an agent rushed towards him and pushed him.
“My first reaction was to push the hand away,” he recalled, and then, he said, the agent grabbed his left arm, twisted it behind him, and threw the phone.
Garcia said the agent brought him to the ground and the other three agents jumped in
“Get f-Mr.” and “Give me your f.
“You want, you know,” the man shouted.
Garcia said an agent put his finger on, “My fingers are not in circulation,” Garcia said.
Fixed, Garcia had difficulty breathing.
“At that moment, I thought I might die here.”
The agent put Garcia’s phone back in his pocket. The recording continues to run.
When Garcia was put into the vehicle, his video captured a broker saying twice, “I’m back here.”
“Do you have anything?” Garcia shot back. “Do you have anything?”
He said an agent told him to “wait here,” although it could not be heard in the video.
“I speak English, you F-Silly,” he yelled obviously.
He said no agent asked if he was a U.S. citizen. No one asked for identification.
“They thought I didn’t prove it,” he later said in an interview.
The video ended about four minutes later while he waited in the van.
Garcia asked an agent to get his wallet from the car so he could prove he was a U.S. citizen. Another agent retrieved his ID card, but he was still handcuffed.
They were too tight and his hands began to swell.
The agent replaced him with handcuffs that looked like shoelaces. They took off around the corner, stopped to wash him into another van, and drove down Highway 101.
“I painted blood on their seats,” he said. “They want to remember me.”
He was on a van with him, a Mexican man who said his wife was six months pregnant.
The man said, “My wife told me not to go to work today.” He said, “Something is not right.”
“It hurt my heart,” Garcia said. “I hope he is the one who tries to catch me.”
Regarding the ramp he described entering Dodge Stadium near K, Garcia was taken out of the vehicle and told to sit on asphalt as agents reorganized the detainees into different vans and processed them for about an hour. A woman commits a criminal offense.
Feeling surreal and intense.
“They are trying to establish a case of some kind,” Garcia said, telling the Times that he was arrested at the age of 17 without permission.
After they transported him, the agent later fingerprinted him and tried to interrogate him.
The agent said they wanted to “master your story.”
Garcia refused.
He said he heard an agent tell someone: “Trump is really working hard.”
He met Adrian Martinez while he was in a downtown detention center.
Martinez, a 20-year-old Walmart worker and U.S. citizen, was arrested Tuesday when he tried to stop arresting a man who cleans the shopping mall in Pico Rivera. The two talked about it for about 10 minutes as Martinez waited to go to court.
“You’re a Walmart kid, are you?” he asked him.
Garcia tells him what happened outside of Home Depot.
“That’s exactly what happened to me,” Martinez said. “They were bullying this older guy. I didn’t like that, so I went to face them and they put their hands on me and I pushed them away.”
We atty. Bill Essayli posted a photo of Martinez on X and said he was “arrested on charges of assaulting the Border Patrol after trying to hinder his immigration enforcement action.” Martinez was charged with criminal lawsuits conspiring to obstruct federal officials.
The complaint didn’t mention a punch, but claimed that Martinez used his car to block the agent’s vehicle, and then the trash can.
“The complaint usually contains a charge that does not include the full scope of the defendant’s conduct or evidence that will be provided at trial,” said Ciaran McEvoy, spokesman for the Law Firm’s Los Angeles-based lawyer’s office. “Because this is an active case, we will not provide further comments outside of court proceedings.”
Martinez was released on Friday with a margin of $5,000.
“U.S. Attorney Assayli and U.S. Border Patrol chief Gregory Bovino have outrageously claimed Adrian had assaulted a federal agent,” Martinez’s attorney said in a statement. “However, he was not charged with assault because he did not attack anyone and the evidence was clear.”
Garcia said his roommate was concerned about the protests. He asked: “Don’t you think the protesters there are destroying property, rioting, and looking bad?”
“Rumor is unheard of language,” he said.
