One Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent’s knee was on his neck, another’s was grinding his back. Drenched with tear gas and pepper spray, George Retes might have wished that his 137 pounds were back at Kirkuk, Iraq, one of his Army deployments. Herewith a glimpse of your tax dollars at work.

Born 26 years ago at Ventura, California, where his mother was born, he enlisted after high school and calls the Army “the best job ever,” adding, “I love the infantry.” He married a woman he deployed with, thereby acquiring a stepson, soon a daughter, and a reason to leave the Army: to avoid long absences from his children.

He loves Ventura (“The beach is my life”), where he landed a job with a security firm protecting an agriculture plant, which he approached by car mid-afternoon on July 10. ICE agents wearing gas masks — indicators of their dispositions — were blocking entry, he recounts, saying the plant was not operating. This was not the last ICE lie.

The ICEmen were presumably looking for undocumented immigrants. Mr. Retes’s driver’s license, which he says the ICEmen never asked to see, identifies him as “Veteran Army.” His license plate includes “DV”: disabled veteran. While ICE’s warriors were trying and ultimately succeeding in smashing his driver’s-side window (the better to pepper spray him), they apparently did not notice his rear window’s “Iraq Combat Veteran” sticker.

Amid a torrent of shouted and contradictory ICEmen commands, and after he asked for an agent’s badge number, he says, Mr. Retes was dragged from his car, his wrists were zip-tied behind his back, and he was seated on the roadside ground for four hours.

He was taken to a Navy base, where he was strip searched, then on to incarceration at Los Angeles, he says, handcuffs having replaced the zip ties. No charges had been made against him, but a mouth swab collected his DNA without his consent. 

He says his requests for a lawyer, and for a shower to ease the discomforts of tear gas and pepper spray residues, were ignored. After three days, during which he missed his daughter’s third birthday, an agent told him the charges against him had been dropped. “What charges?” he recalls asking. Silence.

When, two months later, Mr. Retes published a newspaper op-ed about his experience, ICE suddenly claimed Mr. Retes had been resisting its agents. Video from a Los Angeles television station’s helicopter monitoring ICE’s operation seems to refute the agency’s fabrication.

An anonymous spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security, which includes ICE, dismissed Mr. Retes’s account as “garbage.” Not much of an argument, but evidence of the milieu and mentality that produces ICEmen like those Mr. Retes met.

In today’s hiring binge, ICE recruiting ads ask: “Which way, American man?” Testosterone is the not-very-sub subtext. Recruits will “defend the homeland,” “recapture our national identity,” stymie an “invasion,” halt “cultural decline,” and even save “civilization.”

Something uncivilized is indeed happening. What jobs, if any, are recruits leaving for the glory of donning battle gear and masks (hiding what from whom?) and roaming American communities, throwing their weight around and throwing unarmed people to the ground?

Mr. Retes had never been east of Texas before coming to Washington last week. He and an Institute for Justice attorney (Anya Bidwell, born in Kyrgyzstan, reared in Ukraine, serious about liberty), visited congressional offices urging legislators to facilitate holding federal officials accountable. 

Mr. Retes wants to add the italicized five words to an existing statute: “Every person who, under color of any statute … of the United States or of any State … subjects, or causes to be subjected, any citizen … to the deprivation of any rights, privileges, or immunities secured by the Constitution and laws, shall be liable to the party injured…”

Trying to interest today’s legislators in legislating is, however, difficult. Furthermore, Republicans who control the supposed legislative branch are reluctant to risk seeming less ferocious than ICE’s make-believe warriors are regarding the supposedly uncivilized in our midst.

A 1971 Supreme Court ruling opened the door for holding abusive federal agents accountable for constitutional violations. Subsequent cases, however, have almost closed the door. This might explain ICE agents’ aura of impunity when abusing Mr. Retes for days.

How many appalling incidents are occurring during today’s tsunami of sometimes lawless “law enforcement”? ICE might not know and, if it does, might not speak truthfully.

Mr. Retes, who laughs easily and often, is ebullient, not angry. He is merely miffed about the difficulty of holding accountable those whose behaviors besmirch the reputation of the nation he served.

The Washington Post