Police have arrested a man believed to be working as an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent after he allegedly brandished a gun at a 17-year-old boy.
Footage of the Nov. 10 incident, obtained by local outlet KTLA 5, shows the man approaching an SUV on a dark street with his sidearm drawn and pointed toward the window.
“Freeze, police,” the man in the video says. “Put the car in f—ing park. Get out of the car. Turn it off, get out. You’re speeding in the f—ing neighborhood. Come over here, sit down, get your a– down. You have a driver’s license?”
Cops in Riverside, southern California, have since identified the suspect as 45-year-old Gerardo Rodriguez, a resident on the street who also displayed a badge toward the minor before getting him to step out of the car.
The teen is understood to have complied with demands from Rodriguez, who eventually released him to his parents. Authorities say Rodriguez has now been booked for assault with a deadly weapon, child endangerment, and assault by a public officer.
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The family is being represented in the case by local attorney Greg Kirakosian. “In the moment, I think [the boy] was just scared for his life,” the lawyer told the outlet. “By the time our client’s parents showed up, the neighbors had essentially come to the rescue and stopped him from doing what he was doing, calming him down, and forcing him to go back inside his house, and leaving the boy alone.”
Kirakosian added that upon hearing of the incident, the boy’s parents rushed down to the scene with a copy of his passport, out of fear that the hold-up might be part of a wider immigrant raid in the neighborhood.
“I think right now [there are] a lot of Mexican Americans, whether they are in a situation like this or not, who are angry and scared, and this just really came close to home for them,” he said.
The lawyer added he believes Rodriguez has likely been emboldened in his reported work as an ICE agent by a spate of alleged brutality in operations undertaken by immigration officers across the country—including one last week that saw a one-year-old baby pepper-sprayed from a moving car.
“It’s gotten so bad where he thinks he can now turn his own block into his personal ICE checkpoint,” Kirakosian said. “I don’t know how much worse the situation is going to get, honestly. This kid could’ve been shot.”
The Daily Beast has reached out to the Department of Homeland Security for comment on this story.
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