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The 37-year-old US citizen, who was arrested after working on the ground after filming federal agents at Home Depot on Thursday, had him in custody near Dodger Stadium for more than an hour, and the agents boasted the number of migrants they had arrested.
“How many bodies did you guys grab today?” he said one agent asked.
“Oh, we grabbed 31,” replied the other.
“Today was a good day,” replied the first agent.
He said the two high fives, Garcia sat on the asphalt in the sun.
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Job Garcia was released from Downtown Federal Detention Center on Friday. No obvious criminal charges have been filed yet. He is one of several US citizens who were arrested during his recent enforcement campaign. Officials with the Department of Homeland Security say some have illegally blocked the work of agents.
A spokesman for the LA U.S. Lawyer’s Office recommended that Garcia be contacted by the Department of Homeland Security, as well as the reason for his arrest, if he is indicted.
DHS and US Customs Border Patrol did not respond to requests for comment
Job Garcia at her Silver Lake apartment in Los Angeles, California on Friday, June 20, 2025. Garcia, an American citizen, was arrested and detained during an attack at Home Depot in Los Angeles on Thursday, June 19, 2025. He was released at 8:30am on Friday.
(Luke Johnson/Los Angeles Times)
Garcia said he was shaken by what he heard while he was in custody.
“They call them ‘body’ and reduce them to their bodies,” he said. “My blood was boiling.”
Garcia, a graduate college in Claremont, a photographer and doctoral student, was picking up a delivery at Home Depot when someone approached the customer desk and said something was unfolding outside.
“Ramigra, Ramigra,” he asked as he left. He immediately grabbed his phone and chased the agents around the car park, saying they “F-no-useful” until they came to their group forming a semicircle around the box truck.
A border patrol agent radioed someone and then slammed his baton into the passenger window, his video shows. Smashed glass. People yelled, and he unlocked the door.
In the video, you can see a surprised man texting behind the wheel. He had clearly refused to open his door.
What happened next is unknown from the footage, but Garcia says the agent rushed towards him and pushed him.
“My first reaction was to like to push my hands away,” he recalled. He then said, the agent grabbed his left arm, twisted it behind his back and threw his phone.
The agent took him to the ground, and three other agents jumped in, Garcia said.
“Get f-down sir” and “Give your f-hand. You want it, you got it, you got it.
“You wanted it, you got it,” the man cried.
The agent handcuffed him vigorously, saying, “There was no circulation running over my fingers,” Garcia said.
Garcia was fixed and had difficulty breathing.
“At that moment I thought I could probably die here,” he said.
The agent put Garcia’s phone back in his pocket. The recording continued to run.
When Garcia was put in the vehicle, his video captured the agent twice: “I’m back here.”
“What did you get?” Garcia fired back. “What did you get?”
He said the agent told him in broken Spanish to “wait here,” but he couldn’t hear it on the video.
“I speak English, you’re dumbass,” he exclaims clearly.
No agents asked if he was an American citizen, he said. No one asked for identification.
“They assumed I was not documented,” he said in an interview.
The video ends in about 4 minutes while he waits in the van.
Garcia asks his agent to get a wallet from his car, so he can prove he is a US citizen. Another agent obtained his ID, but he remained handcuffed.
They were so tight, his hands began to swell.
The agent switched him to handcuffs that looked like shoelaces. They took off around the corner, stopped to shuffle him into another van, then ran down the 101 highway.
“I smeared blood on their seats,” he said. And he thought, “They’ll remember me.”
With him, Ban was a Mexican man and his wife said she was pregnant for six months.
“My wife told me not to go to work today,” the man said. “I don’t feel like something’s right,” he said.
“It broke my heart,” Garcia said. “I wish he was the one who ran away while he was trying to grab me.”
After he described it as a ramp in Dodger Stadium near Lott K, Garcia was taken from the car and told to sit on the asphalt as agents shuffled the detainees into various vans and processed them for about an hour. A woman ran the background for a criminal offence.
It was surreal and enraged.
“They were trying to build some kind of case,” Garcia said. He told The Times, who was arrested at 5pm for driving without a license.
After they carried him, the agent later tried to fingerprint him and interrogate him.
The agent said, “I want to take your side of the story.”
Garcia declined.
He told his agent he heard someone tell him, “Trump is really working for us.”
He met Adrian Martinez while he was held at a downtown detention facility.
Martinez, a 20-year-old Walmart worker and US citizen, tried to stop the arrest of a man who cleaned a shopping centre in Pico Rivera on Tuesday. They spoke for about ten minutes as they waited for Martinez to go to court.
“You’re a Walmart kid, right?” he asked him.
Garcia told him what had unfolded outside Home Depot.
“That’s exactly what happened to me,” he said Martinez told him. “They were bullying this older man. I didn’t like it, so I went, confronted them, they put their hands on me and I pushed them away.”
Our atty. Bill Essayli posted a photo of Martinez on X, saying that he was arrested on allegations of punching a Border Patrol Agent in his face after attempting to interfere with immigration enforcement activities. Martinez was charged with criminal charges involving conspiracy to obstruct a federal officer.
The complaint doesn’t mention the punch, but Martinez claims he blocked the agent’s vehicle with his car and then blocked the trash can.
“The complaints generally include one claim and do not include the full scope of the defendant’s actions or the evidence presented at trial,” said Ciaran McEvoy, a spokesman for the U.S. Attorneys’ Office in LA.
Martinez was released on Friday with a $5,000 bond.
“U.S. Lawyer Essay and Chief Gregory Bovino of the U.S. Border Patrol sector claimed Adrian had attacked federal agents,” Martinez’s lawyer said in a statement. “However, he hasn’t been charged with assault because he didn’t assault anyone. The evidence is clear.”
Garcia said his cellmates are worried about these protests. He asked, “Don’t you think the protesters, rioters are destroying their property, have a bad look?”
“Riolence is an unprecedented language,” he said.
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