Mural, East Los Angeles. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

Are you an American citizen if you were born here or merely if it looks like you were born here in the eyes of police and immigration officers? Do all American citizens enjoy the same constitutional rights or are the rights of some citizens circumscribed by the color of their skin? Does a birth certificate carry more weight than the language you speak or the way you speak English? Has the Trump purge of immigrants really been about immigrants (it clearly isn’t about criminal immigrants) or about particular kinds of ethnic descent?

Consider the case of Brian José Morales García, a 25- year-old American citizen living in Austin, Texas, who was stopped by Texas cops, turned over to federal immigration officials and quickly deported to Mexico.

In April, Morales García was on his way to work installing air conditioning units when his entire construction crew, including his boss, was pulled over by state police outside of the central Texas town of Fredericksburg.

Morales García told the cops he was a US citizen. They didn’t believe him. They’re paid not to believe people. They’re paid by the Feds to turn over as many suspected undocumented people as possible. The exact amount Texas law enforcement is being paid to arrest suspected undocumented people for the Feds is kept secret. But some departments are being paid as much as $1000 per officer and 25% of their salaries. Other incentives include the Feds buying local sheriff’s departments cop cars and other equipment.

The Supreme Court doesn’t care, either. Racial profiling stops in the name of immigration enforcement operations are just fine by them, even when the arresting officer isn’t quite sure what your ethnicity is. Your “apparent ethnicity” is reason enough for the cops to pull you over, interrogate you and haul you into jail until you prove you are in the state legally. In fact, your “apparent ethnicity” may be reason enough to deport you. The burden of proof has been flipped on its head. It’s on you to prove your American citizen, not on the cops to prove you’re not. Brett Kavanaugh called these stops a minor inconvenience and assured his fellow justices that when the detained person proves they’re a US citizen, “they’ll be free to go after a brief encounter.”

Morales García’s “brief encounter” lasted more than 120 days.

After his arrest, Morales García was booked in the Gillespie County jail. Then he was turned over to Border Patrol.

Morales García told Border Patrol the same story: He is a US citizen. He was born in Denver, Colorado. He lives in Austin. His parents are from Mexico. He has repeatedly crossed the border and back to see them legally, showing border guards his papers. He said he has his birth certificate and Social Security card in his apartment in Austin to prove his citizenship.

Border Patrol didn’t believe him. They, too, are paid not to believe people. The entire immigration purge has become a bounty-hunting operation, where immigration officers have quotas to meet and are paid per arrest, no matter if the arrest holds up.

What kind of documents do Americans need to prove they are Americans? Morales not only had his birth certificate and Social Security card at home, where most Americans keep such documents, but he also had his hospital records, which show that he’d been admitted to a Denver Hospital on the same day he was born.

It didn’t matter. Neither the Texas cops nor the federal immigration agents cared enough to look. They had no incentive to allow Morales García to prove his citizenship. That isn’t what they’re paid to do.

Does every American need to carry their birth certificates with them at all times or just people who “appear” to be members of an undesirable ethnic group in the eyes of cops and immigration agents? What is an undesirable ethnic group in the US, anyway?

Why did Texas police pull over the pickup truck Morales García was riding in to begin with? The police report said the truck was lit up for a “window tint” violation. Really? In sun-blasted central Texas? This was a pretext stop. I think it’s safe to assume the truck was pulled over for the very reason Kavanaugh wrote they could pull it over: the people inside fit the profile of what the cop considered to be a suspect ethnic group. It was a case of textbook racial profiling, but racial profiling for profit. Easy money. No probable cause to worry about. You didn’t even have to fret if you’d detained the right people. In immigration arrests these days, anything goes.

Brian Morales García certainly isn’t alone. A ProPublica report found that in the first nine months of Trump’s second term, federal immigration agents had arrested 170 US citizens on the Kafkaesque charges of being in the US illegally. DHS was picking up right where it left off when Trump was evicted from the White House in 2021. According to a GAO investigation in July of that year, from January 2016 through December 2020, federal immigration agents wrongly arrested 674 and deported at least 70 American citizens. By wrongly, I mean illegally. But not “wrong” for Trump and his gang of xenophobes, who have vowed to end “birthright citizenship” one way or another. And by “birthright citizenship” I really mean “citizenship” altogether, because at that point the government is handpicking the “citizens” it likes and denying basic constitutional rights to those it doesn’t.

Morales García was lucky he had documents to prove his citizenship, even if the government didn’t want to see them. He was lucky his brother and mother lived in Denver and could get his records and vouch for his identity. He was lucky he was able to retain a good immigration lawyer by the name of Kate Lincoln-Goldfinch.

But all of these strokes of luck didn’t stop Brian Morales García from being deported to Mexico.

Border Patrol didn’t make any effort to prove that they had detained someone who was in the US illegally. They acted as if they didn’t want to know the truth. They didn’t make any effort to contact Morales García’s family, even to let them know he’d been detained. Instead, they tried to keep his family and anyone else from finding him by moving him to five different prisons before finally putting him on a plane to Mexico.

Morales García’s family didn’t learn about his arrest until his brother Miguel got a call from a reporter at Univision. Miguel is a US citizen. He was also born in Denver. But what does that mean? What did it mean for Brian?

Miguel works in a local McDonald’s. He resembles his brother. He doesn’t speak great English. He was rightly worried that if he contacted Border Patrol about his brother, they might come after him as well. What’s to stop them?

“I got scared,” Miguel told the Texas Tribune. “I’m worried about being questioned.”

You see how this works, right? You see how the arrest and deportation of someone like Brian Morales García can cause fear to cascade through a community of people who have a fundamental right to be here and left in peace.

That’s why ICE and Border Patrol don’t care if they arrest, rough up or deport American citizens. They don’t even care if these arrests become public. They want people to live in fear of them, to be terrorized.

Brian Morales García is married. At the time of his arrest, his wife was three months pregnant. He wasn’t on welfare or SNAP. He wasn’t in a gang. He didn’t fit any of the slanderous stereotypes slapped on his “apparent ethnic group.” He was an American citizen with a job in the blistering Texas sun. He was living the work ethic conservative politicians and media blowhards continually lionize as symbolic of the American character.

It didn’t matter. None of it mattered. What mattered was the shade of his skin, the language he spoke, the sound of his name. His own government, the government funded by the income taxes he dutifully paid, didn’t believe anything he honestly told them. And then they lied about him to justify his wrongful arrest and deportation from the country he was born in.

When Brian Morales García finally won the right to reenter the US last week, he was met at the Laredo crossing by his lawyer, Kate Lincoln-Goldfinch, who had all of the documents that proved Brian is who he said he was. But how long will that matter? He looks the same as he always has, a little older maybe, more stressed out certainly. And those looks make him a target, regardless of where he was born or what he does for a living.

Morales García told the Texas Tribune: “Am I supposed to just accept that if I get pulled over again, it’ll be the same thing?  Will it be the same treatment?”

What does it mean to be an American? You tell me. I really don’t know anymore. I do know this: Brian Morales García shouldn’t just “have to accept” this wretched situation. The real question is: how much longer will we tolerate it?