Record law enforcement officers whenever you can. Sure, they’ll hate it, but it helps all the people they seek to do harm to.
Last summer, recordings and other evidence undercut a lot of the administration’s attempts to convert First Amendment activity into criminal charges. Prosecutors who dropped cases after watching recordings or talking directly to the government’s witnesses noted a plethora of “untruthful statements” or “material misrepresentations.”
Six months later, the losing streak created by unforced (but deliberate) “errors” continued. Federal immigration officers just couldn’t stop lying, forcing DOJ prosecutors to voluntarily dismiss a bunch of felony assault cases that were completely reliant on statements made by officers who were later shown to be lying.
Here’s another case that’s hit a dead end because an ICE officer lied and an ICE supervisor decided to pass on these lies to a federal prosecutor. (h/t Aaron Reichlin-Melnick)
A Venezuelan man arrested by ICE was hit with a slew of escalating charges, most of which have vanished now that the truth is involved.
Gabriel Hurtado-Cariaco, 31, was referred to by DHS as a “criminal illegal alien” and a “known Tren de Aragua terrorist.” The agency said he “violently attacked an ICE agent” by slamming her head into the ground and attempting to choke her to death. At a preliminary hearing, a Homeland Security agent and a federal prosecutor said Hurtado-Cariaco received “special forces-type training” in the Venezuelan military and may have been involved in “killing people, hurting people, [and] committing human rights violations.”
The only thing true here is that Hurtado was once a member of the Venezuela military. But he deserted, fled to the US, and filed an asylum claim. He was paroled into the US in 2024 and, since then, had been steadily working as a delivery driver.
The arrest of Hurtado didn’t look great. Two ICE officers tried (and failed) to subdue him. He managed to escape custody, but was arrested successfully shortly after he fled the scene of the first attempted detention.
Perhaps the (attempted) arresting officer was too embarrassed to tell the truth. But the lies he told had serious consequences.
The initial narrative of what happened during Hurtado-Cariaco’s arrest was provided by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent Craig Allrich. Allrich, who was not at the scene of the arrest, penned the affidavit that would be used to secure a criminal complaint against Hurtado-Cariaco.
The first complaint actually told the truth. It simply said that Hurtado had resisted arrest. But that apparently wasn’t good enough for Allrich and/or the officer who failed to subdue Hurtado during his first encounter with him. Things got worse for Hurtado in a hurry.
It was in the amended complaint that Allrich laid out how Hurtado-Cariaco allegedly attempted to murder the female ICE officer, referred to as “Victim 1” throughout the document.
[…]
[A]s the two agents struggled to detain Hurtado-Cariaco, he was “able to get control of Victim 1 and place [her] in a chokehold.” Allrich said the male agent gave repeated commands to Hurtado-Cariaco to release the chokehold, but he “chose to continue choking Victim 1 rather than simply fleeing the scene.”
This assertion was a lie. Two recordings made by bystanders who witnessed the attempted arrest made it clear Hurtado had definitely resisted arrest, but at no point did he pin down the female ICE officer, nor did he ever place her in a chokehold.
At no point in either video is Hurtado-Cariaco seen choking the female agent. Instead, the videos show agents placing Hurtado-Cariaco into a chokehold on two separate occasions as he attempts to break free.
Hurtado’s federal public defender, Richard McWilliams, says federal prosecutors sat on these recordings and refused to remove the attempted murder charge despite having evidence proving otherwise. US Attorney Lesley Woods says this isn’t true, claiming the public defender refused to turn over the recordings he had obtained.
But Woods’ claims are difficult to believe, especially when prosecutors waited months to rewrite the indictment, excising the bogus attempted murder charge just so that they could replace it something nearly as damaging.
By November, prosecutors filed a superseding indictment, which abandoned the attempted murder charge and replaced it with another serious felony – providing material support to a terrorist organization.
According to prosecutors, the mere existence of a tattoo — one that doesn’t actually demonstrate a connection to Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua — was enough to hit Hurtado with terrorism charges.
(And that charge is only possible because the Trump administration unilaterally declared this gang to be foreign terrorist organization — something it only did in an attempt to legalize its unconstitutional detain-and-deport program.)
None of this bullshit impressed the judge handling Hurtado’s criminal case.
U.S. District Court Chief Judge Robert Rossiter said at the sentencing that the allegations made in the initial complaint were “at worst a misrepresentation and at best complete negligence.” Though Rossiter said there is “no doubt” that Hurtado-Cariaco committed the offense that he pleaded guilty to by fleeing the officers and struggling with them, he found the law enforcement reports “embellished” and “troubling.”
That’s a polite way of saying either the ICE officer at the scene lied or that the ICE supervisor who prepared the affidavit didn’t care whether or not he was being lied to.
And the judge isn’t happy with the government’s last ditch attempt to stick Hurtado with a lengthy sentence by belatedly adding some terrorism charges to the mix. As it stands now, Hurtado’s guilty plea to resisting arrest nets him a 14-month sentence, most of which he has already served because he’s been in jail since his arrest last June.
“To refer to him as a terrorist, attempted murderer, that he had put a chokehold on these victims… It’s just not borne out by the evidence,” Rossiter said. “And it’s troubling.”
If you can’t do your job without lying, you can’t be trusted to hold that position. If the administration can’t find enough people to arrest and deport without having to make up stories about murder or terrorism, then it needs to restrain itself to the promise that has always been empty: go after the worst of the worst. These lies were caught. Dozens or hundreds of others will go undetected.
Given what we know about the people “leading” this country and these agencies, I firmly believe they’d lie even if they didn’t have to. That’s just the kind of people they are. And the foot soldiers willingly serving this rolling atrocity of an administration need to be filmed whenever possible, because it’s the only way to keep them honest.