Federal agents shot at Francisco Longoria for driving his truck down a California street.
It was a Saturday morning in San Bernardino. Longoria runs a party supply business. He was delivering a bounce house to a customer. His son and his son-in-law were in the truck with him. Three unmarked vehicles cut him off. Four masked men jumped out with their guns drawn. They did not identify themselves.
Longoria, born in Mexico, thought he was being kidnapped.
“I see what happens in Mexico,” he said. “I thought, are we going to be kidnapped by these masked men?”
They were Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection agents. They wore police gear but had no warrant. One agent smashed the truck window and struck Longoria in the face. Another broke the passenger window. With armed men on either side and the road ahead clear, Longoria drove away. An agent fired three rounds into the truck. Two bullets lodged in the passenger side. One barely missed the back window where his son-in-law sat.
“I was afraid for my life,” Longoria said. “I felt like death was imminent.”
The agents say Longoria tried to run them over. The video recorded inside the truck tells a different story. At his bond hearing, the U.S. attorney could not think of a lawful basis for the stop. He was not aware of any injuries to the officers.
Before Longoria could call for help, the federal officers had already called local police with their version. San Bernardino police misheard the report and believed Longoria had fired back at the agents. When Longoria called 911 from his own driveway — a man who had just been shot at, calling the police for help — the police arrived and handcuffed him.
Local police looked up his record. He didn’t have one. They let him go. Then ICE agents tried to arrest him at his front gate, still without a warrant. The family refused to open the door.
Neighbors poured into the street. They knew the Longoria family — the party business, the contributions to the local church, the graduation and quinceañera photos on the walls. The standoff lasted hours. Officers deployed pepper spray. Several neighbors were arrested. “I am forever indebted to them,” Longoria said.
On August 28, at 4:19 in the morning, a security camera recorded what came next. Federal officers in helmets, vests, and night-vision goggles surrounded the Longoria home. They pointed assault rifles at the door. The lasers from the guns touched the bodies of the family inside, including Joana Longoria, Daniel Rascon’s fiancée, who was five months pregnant.
“If you move, we will shoot you,” the agents told them.
“Don’t shoot, she’s pregnant!” Rascon shouted.
The agents handed them a piece of paper. It alleged Longoria had run over two officers — a felony charge of assault against federal officers with a dangerous weapon. The agents took Longoria in a muscle shirt and shorts. He carried his shoes in his hands.
At the Adelanto ICE facility, a two-thousand-bed detention center in the southern California desert, Longoria lost twenty pounds. The food was awful. The portions were too small. They were not given enough water. Guards watched them constantly, even in the bathroom. He met workers swept up in the southern California raids — car-wash workers, street vendors, day laborers. People injured by federal agents showed him broken hands and limbs. They had not received medical attention. Two people died at Adelanto while Longoria was detained there — Gabriel Garcia-Aviles, 56, and Ismael Ayala-Uribe, 39 — after ICE allegedly neglected their medical needs.
On September 17, the government dropped all charges.
He was not released. He stayed at Adelanto for three more months while his lawyers fought for his freedom. He came home in early December, in time for Christmas and the birth of his granddaughter in January.
The felony never existed. The three months are real.
Longoria’s story is part of a documented pattern playing out across the country. Since January 2025, ICE has opened fire on at least thirty people. The sequence follows a script: agents use force, then accuse the victim of weaponizing a vehicle. The charges are frequently dismissed. In some cases, the agents were not even looking for the people they harmed. The shooting of Longoria violated both: CBP’s own use-of-force policy directs officers not to shoot at a moving vehicle merely fleeing from agents, and the agents’ conduct flouted a California court’s temporary restraining order prohibiting officers from targeting people based on race, language, or type of work. This month, agents shot and killed two men in their vehicles in Texas and Maine. ICE briefly paused most vehicle stops. The president reversed the pause.
The Longoria family’s lawsuit names the pattern plainly: officers “shoot or otherwise attack innocent people and then manufacture charges … falsely alleging the innocent individual ‘weaponized’ their vehicle, only to later dismiss all charges.”
The Hebrew prophets had a word for men who do this.
“Woe to those who make unjust laws, to those who issue oppressive decrees, to deprive the poor of their rights and withhold justice from the oppressed of my people” — Isaiah 10:1–2.
The Torah commands, thirty-six times by rabbinic count, that the stranger must be welcomed and protected. Not once. Not as an afterthought. Thirty-six times. “You shall not oppress a resident alien; you know the heart of an alien, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt” — Exodus 23:9. The commandment does not say the stranger must have the right papers. It says you know the heart.
Jesus in Matthew 25 does not ask the nations what immigration policy they preferred. He asks what they did when they saw him hungry, thirsty, naked, sick, in prison — and a stranger. “Whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.” There is no exception in that passage for those who lacked authorization.
Abraham Joshua Heschel, who marched at Selma and said his legs were praying, wrote that prophecy is “the voice that God has lent to the silent agony, a voice to the plundered poor.” The Longoria family’s agony is no longer silent. They have filed a lawsuit. They have testified before Congress. The question is whether anyone in authority is listening.
The communities that support aggressive immigration enforcement are not strangers to many of us. The climate the current administration is exploiting — the fear, the suspicion, the willingness to look away when masked men shoot at a father on a Saturday morning — is a climate our own communities helped build. We who have been part of that do not get to pretend we are merely observers.
And the officers who fired those bullets are people. They carry out orders in a system that rewards volume over precision, that measures success in bodies detained rather than communities protected. The door of return is open for them. They can refuse the next unlawful stop. They can report the next false charge. They can choose the law they swore to uphold over the quota they are pressured to fill.
But the door does not close the wound. The commandment to love the stranger is not a suggestion. A country that fires bullets at a father delivering a bounce house, then jails him for three months on a charge it cannot sustain, has work to do — the work of building an immigration system that begins with the dignity of the person standing in front of it, not the papers in that person’s pocket.
Francisco Longoria has tomatoes, squash, watermelon, chilis, and peas growing in every inch of soil around his San Bernardino home. He cannot work. He wears an ankle monitor. The front door federal officers broke at four in the morning has been nailed back together. The truck with the bullet holes sits beside the house, unrepaired. He cares for his granddaughter Delilah, a baby with big curious eyes who does not yet know what was done to her family. “I want to stay in the country with my family,” he said. “But I’m not the one to decide that. Only God can decide what happens to my future.” There is a garden growing where the bullets landed. The man who planted it is waiting for the country that shot at him to decide whether he belongs.