Opinion | What Body Cam Footage Reveals About ICE’s Tactics

I was literally at work. All of a sudden, I see the lights behind me. I see them with guns and everything drawn, and I’m like, all of a sudden they just — somebody just grabs me, from my shirt. The first question they asked me was, where was I born? One of them tells him: Just get him, he’s Mexican. He points me out. It was a matter of seconds. My daughter was passing by. She got her phone and she started recording. And they pulled me out of the car. And —— [SCREAM] I started screaming because I — because I panicked. They never asked my name or ID anything. I’m a U.S. citizen, and I was detained —— for five days. Immigration agents appear to have had no clear reason to approach Juanita Avila and Javier Ramirez other than, it seems, the color of their skin. That’s because Chief Justice John Roberts’s Supreme Court has given ICE the rubber stamp to racially profile. This is the opinion of the New York Times editorial board. It’s happening across the country. This is body camera footage from just one night of traffic stops in Nashville, Tenn. In May 2025, state troopers and federal immigration agents teamed up. We rarely get to watch ICE in action like this. A nonprofit had to sue to get this footage, which was first made public by Lighthouse Reports. What it shows is troubling. Take these two stops. In the first, a driver is pulled over for a broken brake light. Before the officer even runs her license, he tells the ICE agent waiting nearby —— She’s let go without any further questions. Now, compare that to these stops. In most cases, when a driver looks Latino or speaks with an accent —— officers ask everyone in the car for identification. But when the driver looks white — The footage also shows officers stopping Black and brown drivers for minor issues — like a tinted window, a license plate without a light, even a bent plate that’s still clearly readable. Then come the questions. This is what racial profiling looks like. What’s even more troubling, the Supreme Court has effectively signed off on all of this. In a recent ruling, the court said immigration agents can weigh factors like race, language and accent when deciding who to stop and question. Juanita and Javier carried documents with them proving their citizenship or legal status. But when stopped, they say they weren’t even given the opportunity to show those documents. My passport was in my wallet that day. I pulled out my green card from my pocket. And I said, “I have my ID. You guys didn’t even ask for it.” I was moving a lot because they put their knee, put it on my neck. So I remember the video of George Floyd. I’m like, I don’t want to die. So I was trying to move from it. I just didn’t want them to take me for no reason. I actually called 911. I just hear the officers just laughing. They took the picture of me with the face recognition. You hear them laughing, high-fiving themselves, like, hey, how many did you get, how many did you get? You know, oh, I got 18, I got five, I got six. Yeah! You know, high-fiving. And all of a sudden, it got alerted again, who I was, and they seen that I was a U.S. citizen. So that’s when, you know, it was like awkward silence. So why is this happening? It’s long been the case that law enforcement can use physical factors like race, gender and height to identify an individual suspect. But for years, the Supreme Court has been very clear that you can’t use race in broad, blanket ways in many parts of American life. Take education. In 2023, the Supreme Court ruled against Harvard, saying colleges could no longer consider race in admissions decisions. Also in 2007, Chief Justice John Roberts argued that if you sort people by race, it’s discrimination. He put it simply: “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” But when it comes to immigration, the court has taken the opposite approach. It has allowed ICE to consider race during immigration stops. This is a double standard, and communities of color are left living with the consequences. I was traumatized. I couldn’t even — I didn’t even want to get up. Just by seeing cars pass by, you know, with tinted windows, you know, or plates from a different state, you don’t know if they’re ICE or not. I thought they were coming for criminals. To me, that was fine, but not this. They had no reason for them to pull me over, or to stop me and to do all the things that they did. I told my daughter: If anybody asks you where are you from, tell them, “I am a U.S. citizen,” and you were born in L.A. So remember those words. And she said, ”OK, Daddy.” The Supreme Court and the Trump administration must uphold the promise of the Constitution. All persons, regardless of race, must be treated equally under the law. The Supreme Court needs to address its contradictory rulings. Otherwise, millions of people will continue to live in fear of their own government.