Federal agents shot Francisco Longoria, then charged him with a felony invented to cover the shooting.
The morning of 16 August 2025, Francisco Longoria was driving his truck through a quiet San Bernardino neighborhood with his son Jonathan and his son-in-law Daniel Rascon. He was headed to deliver a jumper for a water slide — the kind of work that pays the rent on a party-rental business and nothing more. Three unmarked vehicles boxed him in. Four masked men in police gear jumped out. The agents did not identify themselves. They did not produce a warrant. When Longoria refused to roll down his window, one of them smashed the glass and struck him in the face.
Longoria hit the gas. An agent fired three rounds at the truck, leaving two bullet holes in the passenger’s side and one in the back. His passengers recorded the whole thing on their phones. They made it home, called 911, and reported what had happened.
That phone call was the beginning of a different nightmare.
The Department of Homeland Security built a felony case against the man its own agents had shot. It charged Longoria with assaulting federal officers with a dangerous weapon, alleging he had run two of them over with his truck. The U.S. attorney handling the case told the judge at Longoria’s bond hearing that he could not think of a lawful basis for the stop, and that he was not aware of any injuries to the officers. The videos inside the truck, the judge said, were “quite scary.” The government dropped the charges on 17 September, thirty-two days after the shooting. It held Longoria for three more months anyway, on an immigration detainer, at the Adelanto ICE Processing Center in the California high desert. He lost twenty pounds. He watched guards supervise him while he used the bathroom. He met men who showed him the broken hands and limbs the federal agents had given them and the medical care they had not been given. Two men died in Adelanto while Longoria was there — Gabriel Garcia-Aviles, fifty-six, and Ismael Ayala-Uribe, thirty-nine — after the lawsuit alleges the agency neglected their medical needs.
This is not an isolated incident. It is the playbook.
Since the current administration took office, ICE agents have opened fire on at least thirty people, according to Trace, a non-profit outlet that tracks such shootings. In case after case, the sequence repeats: federal agents fire on a person of color, the Department of Homeland Security announces the victim “weaponized” their vehicle against officers, the person is charged with a felony, the charges are eventually dropped, the agents face no consequences. This month, ICE agents shot and killed two men in their vehicles in Texas and Maine. The agency paused most vehicle stops. The pause lasted hours. The President reversed it. Three weeks before Longoria’s case went public, the sons of a Houston man killed by ICE testified at a congressional hearing about the same pattern — masked agents, no identification, weapons drawn, a body in the morgue and no one charged.
The cui bono is not difficult to trace. The administration was elected on a promise of an immigration crackdown. The 2025 budget expansion added tens of thousands of ICE detention beds, guaranteeing daily per-diem revenue to contractors like GEO Group and CoreCivic, whose stock prices rallied on the news of every major raid. Longoria’s three months in Adelanto were not a bureaucratic glitch; they were a billable unit. The political coalition that benefits from the “tough on immigration” framing needs the bodies, the raids, the nighttime arrests, the viral videos of agents in tactical gear. The agents themselves face no accountability. The apparatus rewards the people who shoot and charges the people who are shot. The structure is not broken. The structure is doing what it was built to do.
Look at the call logs from the San Bernardino Police Department on the morning of 16 August. The local dispatchers had been told by federal agents that Longoria had fired on them. The police arrived at his home to find a man with no criminal record and a video on his phone showing the agents smashing his window and shooting at his truck. They had no reason to hold him. They released him. Within the hour, ICE and Homeland Security Investigations agents were back at the house, demanding the family open the metal gate to their front yard. They had no warrant. The family refused. Neighbors poured into the street. The standoff lasted several hours. The call logs describe the crowd as “hostile.” Officers deployed pepper spray. Several people were arrested.
The federal agents came back twelve days later, at 4:19 a.m. Twelve men in helmets, vests, and night-vision goggles. Assault rifles. Laser sights on five people, including Joana Longoria, Rascon’s fiancée, who was five months pregnant. The family had been represented by counsel for the entire time the federal agents had been looking for Longoria. The agency could have called the lawyers. The lawsuit alleges the agency chose the early-morning tactical raid instead — the “extreme levels of violence that you would see for drug dealers, narco-terrorists, criminals,” as the family’s attorney put it, for a man with no criminal history.
The tactics are the indictment. The unmarked vehicles, the masks, the no-warrant stops, the smashing of windows, the firing of weapons at moving vehicles, the 4:19 a.m. raids on homes where children sleep, the laser sights on pregnant women, the agents who tell families to hurry up while the head of the household is taken out in a muscle shirt and shorts. This is the architecture. Each piece of it is built into the system. Each piece of it is defended, after the fact, by the agency that built it.
The rhetorical architecture the Department of Homeland Security deploys in these cases has a name. Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway documented the pattern in Merchants of Doubt as manufactured controversy: build a public-facing case where the actual evidence is one-sided, fund voices that promote doubt, and let the resulting confusion serve the interest. The DHS version is the manufactured “weaponizing vehicle” controversy. The agency’s narrative goes: the agents feared for their lives; the driver of the vehicle was the aggressor; the case is a question of self-defense. Then the videos come out, the U.S. attorney cannot identify any injuries to the officers, the judge grants bond, the charges get dropped. By that point the story has cycled, the next shooting is on the news, and the previous one has faded. The pattern is documented. Trace has counted thirty shootings. The agency’s defense is identical in nearly every one. The defense works because the public is exhausted, and because no one with the power to discipline the agency is willing to use it.
The felony charge that Longoria faced rested on a single, verifiable lie embedded in the San Bernardino Police call logs. The dispatch record notes the federal agents’ own admission: “Marshal was not struck, med aid will be for a scrape to the arm.” That scrape was the predicate for the entire felony case. The agency’s own contemporaneous communications contradict the “ran over two officers” allegation that justified the warrant and the 4:19 a.m. raid. The lie was not a rhetorical flourish. The lie was the case. It was asserted to a judge, it was asserted to a 4:19 a.m. tactical team, and it was asserted to keep a man in a high-desert detention cell for three months. It was the basis for a tactical raid on a home with children. The charges were dropped, and the agency that built the case remains in operation.
The cui bono is not an abstraction. The private contractors who run Adelanto and the other ICE detention facilities are paid by the head, by the day, by the booking. The agents who shoot and the prosecutors who charge the people who are shot are the delivery mechanism for that revenue stream. The undocumented immigrants in custody are the commodity. The felony charges are the marketing.
The victims are not the cost. They are the product.
The pattern extends beyond California. In Texas and Maine, this month, ICE agents shot and killed two men in their vehicles. The same script. The same deferred “weaponizing” allegations. The same agency silence on the body-camera footage that would resolve the question. The same absence of named officers, named charges, or named accountability. The U.S. attorney in the Houston case said last month that the agents were seeking other men entirely. The fact that the agency’s own contemporaneous communications place the agents somewhere else at the time of the killing is the kind of detail that, in any other context, would have produced resignations, indictments, and congressional hearings. In this context, it produced a hearing where the dead man’s sons asked the country to listen.
The Martin Luther King Jr. who spoke at Riverside Church in April 1967 — the King the country has spent sixty years trying to forget — said the United States was “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” He meant it as a structural claim about a state that had committed itself, simultaneously, to civil-rights legislation at home and to industrial-scale bombing abroad. The agents who shot at Longoria, the agents who killed the Houston man, the agents who killed the men in Texas and Maine this month, are the domestic form of that same structural fact. The violence is not an aberration of the system. The violence is the system, expressed through the bodies of the people the system was built to remove. King said the country would not be judged by the rhetoric of its leaders but by the conduct of its officers. The conduct is on video. The conduct is in the call logs. The conduct is in the bullet holes in Francisco Longoria’s truck, parked in front of his house with the front door that has been nailed back together.
When Daniel Rascon stood before a joint House and Senate hearing in February 2026 to testify about the DHS agents who shot at his father-in-law and raided his home, he did not ask for vengeance. He asked for the law. He asked for the names of the officers who shot at an unarmed man in a truck delivering a water slide. He asked for the indictment of the agents who broke down the door at 4:19 a.m. with assault rifles pointed at a pregnant woman. He asked for the prosecution of the supervisors who authorized a tactical raid on a man whose lawyers they had been ignoring for two weeks. “They should be imprisoned or charged,” Rascon told the country. They are asking for the apparatus to be held to the standard every other law-enforcement agency in the country is held to.
What they are asking for is the rule of law. The current administration has decided the rule of law is optional. The Congress that funds the Department of Homeland Security has decided the rule of law is optional. The state and local officials who decline to use the authority they have to investigate their own federal agents have decided the rule of law is optional. The pattern will continue as long as those decisions continue.
Longoria is a devout Catholic. He has planted tomatoes, squash, watermelon, chilis, and peas in every available inch of soil in the yard of his single-story San Bernardino home. He is wearing an ankle monitor. He checks in with immigration authorities on a regular schedule. He cannot work, so the rest of his family is working longer hours. He is caring for his granddaughter Delilah, a calm baby with big, curious eyes who has brought them a renewed sense of joy. The wall of his home is decorated with graduation and quinceañera photos. A crucifix hangs next to the front door that was broken in the ambush. His truck with the bullet holes and the smashed windows is parked next to the house, unrepaired.
He is not asking for the country to love him back. He is asking for the country to stop shooting at him.
That is the minimum. It is, at this moment, the most that can be asked. The arc of the moral universe is long, King told the country in 1965, but it bends toward justice. He also said, in Memphis two weeks before he was killed, that the arc bends only because specific people, in a specific moment, push it. The people who push it in this moment are the people willing to say what the Department of Homeland Security will not say about its own agents. The people willing to name what the videos show. The people willing to hold the line on a standard the country claims to hold.
The arc bends because specific people bend it. It will not bend toward the Longoria family on its own. They have been asking for a year. They are still asking. The country is still deciding whether to answer.