In a small Idaho town, a 10-year-old girl I’ll call A.S.P. was cozied up in her family’s pickup truck outside La Catedral racetrack, where she and her dad were looking forward to a day of festivities. It was a Sunday in October, and families in this predominantly Latino town, Wilder, were there to cheer on the horses, play games, snack on tacos, and sip horchata, as they often do on Sundays in the summer and early fall.
But today, a military-style helicopter was circling over the field. In the early afternoon, about 200 officers from a range of federal, state, and local agencies descended on the racetrack in full tactical gear, most carrying automatic rifles. They pointed their guns and screamed at terrified families, according to a lawsuit the ACLU filed on Tuesday; some officers shattered windows and dragged people out of their vehicles. Young A.S.P. emerged from the pickup in tears and tried to hug her dad, Ivan Popoca, a Latino lawful permanent resident who has lived in Idaho most of his life. But officers pushed him away and grabbed his daughter by the neck, scratching her, according to the suit.
Over the next four hours, the officers would temporarily detain hundreds of people who’d come to watch the races, in an immigration raid that made headlines but failed to appear on many people’s radar because it happened around the same time as other high-profile immigration operations in bigger cities like Chicago.
“My toddler was forced to witness an incredible amount of violence against people he loves and hear racial slurs about Latinos.”
The authorities at the racetrack had a search warrant and criminal warrants to arrest five people, including the track owner, whom they accused of facilitating illegal gambling. But the sweep was much broader. The officers rounded up the entire crowd, some 400 people, zip-tying most adults and many teenagers and forcing just about everyone onto the track, where, according to the suit, they sorted people by perceived immigration status, typically based on skin color. They arrested 105 people for immigration violations.
Witnesses cited in the legal filing accuse the officers of myriad abuses—shooting rubber bullets at teens, throwing flash-bang grenades into vehicles with people inside, pushing children and old people, and preventing people from using the bathroom until some children had to relieve themselves in public. But, as experts I’ve interviewed have noted, it is difficult to hold federal officers accountable for misconduct.
“All the problems you have with suing a regular law enforcement officer exist, and then you have additional barriers,” Lauren Bonds of the National Police Accountability Project, which works with civil rights attorneys to file lawsuits over police wrongdoing, told me recently. Notably, the Civil Rights Act of 1871, which allows people to sue government agents who violate their rights under the US Constitution—applies primarily to state and local officers, not federal ones.
The Idaho lawsuit, filed on behalf of three Latino families who went to La Catedral with their kids that day, aims to get around that issue. Section 1983 and Section 1985 of the Civil Rights Act stipulate that a person may be liable for violating constitutional rights, even if they’re not a state or local government employee, if they conspired with state or local employees. This provision was aimed, early on, at Ku Klux Klan members who were terrorizing Black people in cahoots with local police and sheriffs.
In this case, the ACLU’s attorneys argue that federal officers worked closely with the county sheriff and city police officers to terrorize families at the racetrack raid, and were therefore part of a conspiracy.
The conspiracy argument has succeeded before—most prominently, after federal officers conspired with state officers to murder Black Panther Party leader Fred Hampton in Chicago in 1969. It also was used to sue over an immigration raid in Tennessee during Trump’s first term. But ACLU attorney Jenn Rolnick Borchetta, who is working on the Idaho case, told me she hasn’t seen it tried during Trump’s second term, and that the outcome of the case could have implications far beyond this small Idaho town: All across the country, the Trump administration is collaborating closely with state and local police to carry out its mass-deportation agenda.
More than 1,000 police agencies have signed 287(g) agreements or joined task forces that help Immigration and Customs Enforcement locate and arrest immigrants. These collaborations have proved hugely effective for ICE, but could also make the administration more vulnerable to civil rights claims. “We have seen an increase under the Trump administration of abusive use of criminal warrants for immigration raids,” Rolnick Borchetta says, “and we do expect that this case might be the beginning of more cases right now to push back on this kind of conduct.”
Defendants in the Idaho case include officials from ICE and the FBI who helped coordinate the raid with the Canyon County sheriff and chiefs of the Caldwell, Nampa, and Idaho state police departments. Some of these agencies are part of what the administration calls the Treasure Valley Metro Violent Crime and Gang Task Force. The lawsuit accuses them of conspiring to violate the Fourth Amendment, which protects people against unreasonable searches and seizures, and the Fourteenth, which guarantees equal protection under the law. “In carrying out the Raid, the State and Federal Defendants conspired to abuse criminal warrants to conduct a large-scale immigration dragnet deliberately targeted at a large gathering of Latino individuals because of their ethnicity,” states the suit, which was co-filed by the ACLU’s Idaho chapter and attorney Wendy Olson.
The suit also slams the defendants for using excessive force, noting that law enforcement sent SWAT teams to a family friendly event; snipers stood atop a nearby barn and silo as parents and their kids waited below. Officers allegedly used racial epithets, including “spic” and “wetback,” and swore at minor children. Juana Rodriguez, a 30-year-old Idaho-born citizen, begged for officers to remove her zip-ties so she could console her sobbing 3-year-old son. “As a parent, nothing is more heartbreaking than hearing your child cry out in fear and being told you cannot hold or comfort them,” she said in a statement provided to me before the lawsuit was filed.
The officials who executed the raid “thought they could act abusively without anybody noticing,” says attorney Rolnick Borchetta. The ACLU’s aim, she told me, is “to get some measure of accountability and repair for the families and many children who were harmed” and to “show how federal officers can be held to account at a moment when they are acting lawlessly in a lot of the country.”
Among the teens who were zip-tied during the raid, the lawsuit says, was a 15-year-old with the initials Y.Z.—afterward, his grades slipped and he became anxious. Ten-year-old A.S.P. had recurring nightmares.
“I took my 3-year-old to a family-friendly event where we could eat, play, and enjoy horse races together,” Rodriguez said in her statement. “My toddler was forced to witness an incredible amount of violence against people he loves and hear racial slurs about Latinos, experiences that no child should ever be exposed to.”
“I am a proud US citizen,” she added. “I know what happened to me was wrong and…no family should be treated this way again.”
