George Retes Jr., an American citizen and Army veteran who says he was brutally mistreated by federal agents when he was detained in a California immigration raid in July, wants to sue the federal government.
To start the process, he had to file what is known as a Standard Form 95 saying what happened to him and asking for compensation. It is the same document that lawyers for President Trump have twice filed to claim that he was mistreated by federal law enforcement during F.B.I. investigations into his conduct.
Like most claimants seeking money from the federal government for law enforcement misconduct, Mr. Retes is unlikely to get paid — or even to get a response.
Mr. Trump, on the other hand, may well obtain a settlement without even going to court, given that the Justice Department officials assessing the president’s claims work for him. One of those officials, Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general, previously worked as his lead criminal defense lawyer on one of the very cases over which Mr. Trump has filed a claim.
The difference between the experience of one ordinary citizen who says he was wrongly caught up in Mr. Trump’s immigration dragnet, and that of the government’s most powerful official, underscores the ethical conflicts and unfairness inherent in Mr. Trump’s situation, legal experts said.
Mr. Trump would be “one of the very few lucky people” to win compensation for law enforcement misconduct under the statute that lays out the process for settling claims without litigation, said Anya Bidwell, a lawyer with the Institute for Justice, a libertarian group that represents Mr. Retes.
“I doubt he deserves it more than countless of my clients,” she added.
Mr. Trump is seeking about $230 million in compensatory and punitive damages from the federal government, according to people familiar with the two claims who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe legal filings that are not public documents. On Tuesday, he told reporters he expected to be paid, though he added that he would donate the money to charity.
If, like most claimants, Mr. Retes hears nothing after six months, he can sue under the Federal Tort Claims Act, which theoretically waived the government’s immunity in some circumstances. In practice, the statute created a legal labyrinth that few of the many people who file tort claims each year claiming law enforcement misconduct successfully get through.
Legal scholars said the contrast was troubling.
“The prospect of the United States agreeing to spend taxpayer dollars to settle President Trump’s questionable legal claims is all the more galling given how hard it is for ordinary people to obtain compensation when they are actually abused by federal officials,” said Alexander A. Reinert, a professor at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law.
“American citizens wrongfully detained by ICE officers, or law-abiding individuals subjected to excessive force by federal law enforcement agents,” Professor Reinert added, “face significant hurdles even getting their claims heard in court.”
Justice Neil M. Gorsuch pondered the point in June in a Supreme Court decision as he delivered an incremental interim victory to a traumatized family whose home was wrongly raided.
Could such people sue the federal government for damages? Justice Gorsuch asked. “The answer is not as obvious as it might be,” he wrote.
Indeed, said Joanna C. Schwartz, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. She called the Federal Tort Claims Act a “hyper-technical statute riddled with exclusions” that made it difficult to win even when federal law enforcement engaged in clear wrongdoing.
The law protects law enforcement officials who have exercised discretion, a high bar that suits rarely clear. (That provision was at issue in the June case, when the court unanimously ruled that the family should have another chance to make the difficult showing required by the law.)
As a result, Professor Schwartz said, even U.S. citizens who have been wrongly arrested and detained by ICE agents in recent months may struggle to win relief.
In an interview on Tuesday in a Washington coffee shop, Mr. Retes grew emotional as he described his background and what he had endured. He was in town to meet with lawmakers to lobby for legislation that would make it easier to sue government officials who engage in misconduct.
Of Mexican and Cuban heritage, he was born in Ventura, Calif., to an American mother. After serving in the Army, including a tour in Iraq, he found work as a security guard at Glass House Farms, a cannabis facility in Camarillo, Calif.
In July, on his first day on a new shift, he was driving to work when he encountered a protest prompted by an immigration sweep, he said. The license plates of his white Hyundai Elantra indicated he was a disabled veteran, and its windshield featured a sticker noting that he was an Iraq combat veteran.
A row of federal agents in gas masks blocked his path, he said, and he got out. “I was just standing by my car yelling to them, like, ‘I’m a U.S. citizen,’” Mr. Retes said. “‘I’m just trying to get to work.’”
When that failed, he tried to leave.
Hostile agents surrounded the car, he said, yelling contradictory orders. A canister of tear gas landed near his car. An agent shattered the driver’s side window with his gun and pepper sprayed Mr. Retes in the face. Other agents dragged him from his car and knelt on his neck and back.
He was eventually taken to a Navy base, then to a federal detention center in Los Angeles, where he was strip-searched, he said. His requests for a phone call and a lawyer were ignored, and he said he was not allowed to shower despite having been doused with tear gas and pepper spray.
After three nights, he said, he was released without explanation. He had missed his daughter’s third birthday. He has received no compensation since, including for the damage to his car.
The Department of Homeland Security disputed aspects of Mr. Retes’s account this month after an earlier report in The New York Times.
“As U.S. Customs and Border Protection and ICE agents were executing criminal search warrants on July 10 at the marijuana sites in Camarillo, Calif.,” the agency said in a statement, “George Retes — a U.S. citizen — became violent and refused to comply with law enforcement. He challenged agents and blocked their route by refusing to move his vehicle out of the road. C.B.P. arrested Retes for assault.”
Mr. Retes has not been charged with a crime, said his lawyer, Ms. Bidwell.
Mr. Retes filed his SF-95 form in August with the F.B.I., D.H.S., ICE, the Bureau of Prisons and the Navy. He has not received a response from any of them, Ms. Bidwell said.
When his six-month waiting period lapses in February, Mr. Retes intends to sue the government in federal court in Los Angeles. But Ms. Bidwell acknowledged that he faced an uphill fight, given the carve-out in the law allowing wide latitude for law enforcement to use discretion.
“They invariably invoke the discretionary function exception, which is de facto immunity,” she said.
In both of Mr. Trump’s claims, enough time has passed since their filing that Mr. Trump could file a federal lawsuit. He has not. Now a decision about whether to pay the president rests solely with his administration.
The New York Times has reviewed one of Mr. Trump’s SF-95 forms, which demands payment to him for the F.B.I. search of his Mar-a-Lago home in 2022 and his subsequent criminal prosecution.
That seven-page document, signed by Mr. Trump on Aug. 7, 2024, claimed that the “targeting, indictment and harassment of President Trump has always been a malicious political prosecution aimed at affecting an electoral outcome to prevent President Trump from being re-elected,” and that the investigation led Mr. Trump “to spend tens of millions of dollars defending the case and his reputation.”
Mr. Trump’s earlier form was filed in late 2023, according to people familiar with the matter. “I’m the one that makes the decision, and that decision would have to go across my desk, and it’s awfully strange to make a decision where I’m paying myself,” he told reporters on Tuesday.
Mr. Retes’s form, on the other hand, explained: “I was detained for three days and three nights without reason and without explanation. During that time, I was violently and unjustifiably assaulted, pepper sprayed, handcuffed, shackled, transported twice, strip-searched, booked in jail, treated like a violent criminal, deprived of a shower and denied basic civil rights.”
Unlike the president, he will not help decide whether or how much he will be paid.
Adam Liptak covers the Supreme Court and writes Sidebar, a column on legal developments. A graduate of Yale Law School, he practiced law for 14 years before joining The Times in 2002.
Devlin Barrett covers the Justice Department and the F.B.I. for The Times.
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