{"id":233748,"date":"2026-03-24T06:19:21","date_gmt":"2026-03-24T06:19:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/233748\/"},"modified":"2026-03-24T06:19:21","modified_gmt":"2026-03-24T06:19:21","slug":"border-patrols-year-of-unchecked-force-sacramento-news-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/233748\/","title":{"rendered":"Border Patrol\u2019s year of unchecked force \u2022 Sacramento News & Review"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Sergio Olmos<\/a>, CalMatters<\/p>\n

This story was originally published by CalMatters<\/a>. Sign up<\/a> for their newsletters.<\/p>\n

Border Patrol agents have been roving from city to city over the last 15 months, far from their home bases in California and elsewhere along the U.S.-Mexico border, engaged in an unprecedented mass deportation campaign.\u00a0<\/p>\n

A collaboration between CalMatters, Evident Media<\/a> and Bellingcat<\/a> has tracked these agents, documenting their tactics on the ground and through mountains of video footage, since their first proof-of-concept raid in Bakersfield in January 2025.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Exactly one year later, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent shot and killed Ren\u00e9e Good in Minneapolis, followed weeks later by the killing of Alex Pretti by a Border Patrol agent.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Our investigation shows that, beyond those two shootings, immigration agents engaged in a pattern of force and questionable detention, aggressive tactics that courts have said likely violated the constitution, as they moved from Bakersfield to Los Angeles, and then Chicago and Minneapolis.<\/p>\n

In each city, federal courts stepped in to restrain them from violating civil liberties in that jurisdiction. Agents later deployed to another city. The video evidence suggests that agents\u2019 tactics became more brazen with each stop.<\/p>\n

Under President Donald Trump, immigration agents have operated without typical public accountability. Many agents wear masks. Incident reports are largely hidden from the public.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are in a completely uncharted world now with these masked agents,\u201d said John Roth, who served as inspector general of the Department of Homeland Security under Presidents Obama and Trump.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe first thing that you do when you give an agent a gun and a badge and the authority over American people is to make sure that they follow the Constitution, period,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

In this new film, we focus on the activity of five agents from the US-Mexico border whose identities we\u2019ve been able to confirm.<\/p>\n

We are not aware of any disciplinary action taken against these agents. DHS did not respond to requests for comment; the individual agents either declined to comment or didn\u2019t respond to calls or emails.\u00a0<\/p>\n

We showed the incidents to Roth and Steve Bunnell, former DHS general counsel. Both have testified before Congress raising the alarm about what they see as a dismantling of the department\u2019s accountability and credibility. Roth called the incidents \u201cdifficult to watch.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThere are sort of two essential components of DHS and law enforcement generally being effective, and that\u2019s trust and credibility,\u201d Bunnell said. \u201cAnd they have lost those things to the extent they had them.\u201d<\/p>\n

This article was originally published on CalMatters<\/a> and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives<\/a> license.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Sergio Olmos, CalMatters This story was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for their newsletters. Border Patrol…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":233749,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[2871,14,121,123,122],"class_list":["post-233748","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sacramento","tag-ice","tag-immigration","tag-sacramento","tag-sacramento-headlines","tag-sacramento-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/233748","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=233748"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/233748\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/233749"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=233748"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=233748"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=233748"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}