US Citizen Deported After Traffic Stop Returns Home

Morales said he is still rattled: “Am I supposed to just accept that if I get pulled over again, it’ll be the same thing? Will it be the same treatment?”

His lawyer, Kate Lincoln-Goldfinch, said police across Texas are targeting people by race or ethnicity as they assist ICE, “and this is absolutely what happened in the case of Brian.” She called the arrest “an outcome of overzealous immigration enforcement” and added: “If we live in a country where law enforcement can racially profile someone because of the color of their skin, or their accent, or the language that they speak, and detain and deport them, then that is a country that I don’t recognize.”

Nayna Gupta, policy director at the American Immigration Council, said the case is “headline grabbing, given how egregious the injustice was — from our perspective, it was by no means an exception,” and predicted “more and more of these errors.”

Republicans who built the system have dismissed profiling warnings. State Sen. Charles Schwertner, the Georgetown Republican who carried the sheriff-partnership bill, told a Democratic colleague: “There are obviously inherent biases of individuals. That said, there are ways to properly train.”

Spokesmen for the Justice Department, Abbott and Texas DPS did not respond to Tribune requests for comment. DPS Director Freeman Martin has said his agency was “going after the migrants that pose the largest threat to the communities.”