Parked at a petrol station, Peter Yazzie slipped into his orange high-vis vest before heading to work on a construction site when several cars pulled abruptly into the lot.

Seeing other vehicles or people was rare at 4.30am in Phoenix. But on January 12, there were plenty of both — and they were closing in on Yazzie. Someone yelled at him to put his hands on his car before demanding that he put them behind his back.

“They tossed me on the ground and put a zip tie on my hands, my wrists. That’s when they finally told me that they were with immigration,” he told The Times.

But Yazzie, 34, can’t be deported. He ishalf Navajo and half Laguna — or, in other words, 100 per cent Native American. He pointed this out, telling the agents that inside his car was his driver’s licence, social security card, birth certificate and Certificate of Degree of Indian Blood (CDIB). As Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents searched his car, he was put in one of theirs.

“I wasn’t exactly freaking out too bad because I figured they were going to find my identification and I’ll be let go,” he recalled. But the agents drove away with him inside their vehicle.

“Where are we going? My identification is in there. What’s going on?” he asked the agents. One said that because the registration on the car didn’t match his ID, they weren’t sure whether he had stolen the vehicle — or his identification. He’d been living out of his mother’s Chevrolet Malibu to save on costs while she borrowed his truck. He explained this to the agents, but said they ignored him.

He said: “Dude, I have a job. I have family, I have bills, I have kids.” One of the officers who was riding in the passenger seat replied: “We’ll get them, too.”

After hearing that remark, Yazzie thought: “If there was any respect I would have ever had for them, that was out the window.”

Yazzie was put in to a holding cell with eight others and detained for four hours. All of the other people were Hispanic, including one man who was wearing a bright orange shirt just like his. Yazzie believes he was racially profiled by ICE: “Not only because of how I look, but because within the Phoenix area, it’s a very large population of Hispanics as well as Native Americans. Every job site I go to in Arizona is always full of Hispanics … so I’m sure they saw the orange shirt, and probably living out of the car [and thought], ‘Hey, let’s take that one, too’.”

The Department of Homeland Security said it had no record of detaining Peter Yazzie. “Any allegations our law enforcement are engaging in racial profiling are FALSE and disgusting,” Tricia McLaughlin, a DHS spokeswoman, said.

Source: Drudge Report