Detained U.S. citizen said agents bragged and high-fived after arresting dozens at Home Depot

Garcia was released on Friday from a downtown federal detention center. No apparent criminal charges have yet to be filed. He is one of several U.S citizens arrested during enforcement operations in recent days. Department of Homeland Security officials say some have illegally interfered with agents' jobs.

Garcia said he was shaken by what he heard while he was detained.

“They call them 'bodies,' they reduce them to bodies,” he said. "My blood was boiling."

Garcia, a photographer and doctoral student Claremont Graduate University, had been picking up a delivery at Home Depot when someone approached the customer desk and said something was unfolding outside.

"La migra, La migra," he heard as he walked out. He quickly grabbed his phone and followed agents around the parking lot, telling them they were "f— useless" until he came to a group of them forming a half-circle around a box truck.

A Border Patrol agent radioed someone and then slammed his baton against the passenger window, his video shows. Glass shattered. He unlocked the door as people shouted.

In the video, a stunned man can be seen texting behind the wheel. He had apparently refused to open his door.

It's unclear from the footage what happened next, but Garcia said an agent lunged toward him and pushed him.

"My first reaction was to like push his hand off," he recalled. Then, he said, the agent grabbed his left arm, twisted it behind his back and threw his phone.

The agent brought him to the ground and three other agents jumped in, Garcia said

"Get the f— down sir" and "give me your f— hand. You want it, you got it, sir, you f— got it. You want to go to jail, fine. You got it," an agent can be heard saying in the video.

"You wanted it, you got it," the man yelled.

An agent handcuffed him so hard "that there was no circulation running to my fingers," Garcia said.

Pinned down, Garcia had difficulty breathing.

"That moment, I thought I could probably die here," he said.

The agent put Garcia's phone back in his pocket. The recording kept running.

As Garcia was put into a vehicle, his video captured an agent twice saying: "I've got one back here."

"You got one what?" Garcia shot back. "You got one what?"

He said an agent told him in broken Spanish to "wait here,' though it could not be heard on the video.

"I f— speak English, you f— dumbass," he clearly shouts back.

No agent asked if he was an American citizen, he said. Nobody asked for identification.

“They assumed that I was undocumented," he said later in an interview.

The video ends after about four minutes, while he is waiting in the van.

Garcia asked an agent to get his wallet from his car, so he could prove he was a U.S. citizen. Another agent retrieved his ID, but he remained handcuffed.

They were so tight, his hands began to swell.

The agents switched him to handcuffs that looked like shoelaces. They took off around a corner, stopped to shuffle him into another van and sped off down the 101 Freeway.

"I smeared my blood in their seat," he said. And he thought, "They're going to remember me."

With him in the van was a Mexican man, face downcast, who said his wife was six months pregnant.

"My wife told me not to go to work today," the man said. "Something doesn't feel right," he said she told him.

"It broke my heart," Garcia said. "I wish he was the one who got away when they were trying to grab me."

On what he described as a ramp going into Dodger stadium near Lot K, Garcia was taken out of the car and told to sit on the asphalt as agents shuffled detainees into different vans and processed them for about an hour. A woman ran his background for criminal offenses.

It felt surreal and enraging.

That fucking Nazi Gestapo lover Steven Miller is the defacto president setting these policies for the lazy cognitively compromised Orange Dotard. Start calling him President Miller if you want to get rid of him. Dump could only stand calls for President Musk for about a month before he booted him.

What few people are mentioning is that many of these agents - ICE, Homeland Security, etc. - are Latinos/Hispanics themselves, many of them children of immigrants. How did they lose their humanity, their empathy, their compassion? How did they become about "collecting bodies"?

R3 This happens with every race/culture to a degree. My explanation for the ones who are doing it knowingly and deliberately, (not just, say, for the money to feed their families): they came here legally and resent those who snuck in and didn't have to study American history and put in the work they put in for citizenship, and are now trying to take the jobs from their own kind, Perhaps, they're projecting.