Dittie@DittiePE
Border Patrol pulls over a 20-year-old in Slidell, LA for “white lights on the back of your vehicle… your reverse lights are on the whole time.”
Then, before writing a single ticket, the agent asks: “What’s your citizenship?”
The driver, Alan Laureano, was born in Slidell. His passenger — his 13-year-old stepbrother — was born in Pearl River, Louisiana. Both are U.S. citizens.
Didn’t matter. Twice, on camera, the agent tells Laureano he’s going to “check” the kid and “if he’s illegal, I will take him.”
He tries to open the 13-year-old’s car door himself. Laureano locks it and rolls the window down instead.
The agent then interrogates the child directly — full name, spelling, date of birth, birthplace — while Laureano stands his ground and refuses to hand over his own ID, telling the agent he doesn’t have the right to stop him over a taillight.
Immigration attorney Michael Gahagan reviewed the video and called it what it is: “an illegal detention.” Border Patrol isn’t authorized to detain someone over a traffic violation — they need independent reasonable suspicion of an immigration violation, and that has to come first, not get invented after the stop.
DHS’s after-the-fact statement claims the stop was based on “reasonable suspicion or probable cause of federal law violations” — but doesn’t say what that violation was. WWL Louisiana asked twice. No answer either time.
This is the pattern: pretext stop, pivot to citizenship, threaten a kid with removal before confirming anything. It only looks “routine” until you’re the one being asked to prove you belong in the country you were born in.
