Brian José Morales García had only been installing air conditioners in the Texas heat for a few months when the construction crew he was with got pulled over near Fredericksburg by a Texas Department of Public Safety officer.
The routine traffic stop resulted in the 25-year-old’s removal from the country despite his status as a U.S. citizen. The episode highlights what many Hispanic Texans, immigrant rights advocates and immigration lawyers have warned about for years: When local police who are untrained in the nuances of immigration law join forces with the feds, it can lead to U.S. citizens being hassled, detained and even deported.
The federal government reached an agreement with Morales’ lawyers to let him back into the country Sunday, as a civil rights lawsuit challenging his detention continues to wend through the courts.
Morales is back home in Austin and said he is eager to return to work to support his relatives in the U.S. and Mexico. Still, he remains rattled by the experience after spending four months in Mexico professing his innocence.
“Am I supposed to just accept that if I get pulled over again, it’ll be the same thing?” Morales said in an interview with The Texas Tribune. “Will it be the same treatment?”
To be sure, the apprehension, detention and removal of U.S. citizens by immigration authorities is rare. But immigration legal scholars and political observers say incidents like Morales’ are all but certain to become more common as local police increasingly work with ICE.
Law enforcement in Texas is already playing an unprecedented role in President Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign. Hundreds of agencies, from sheriff’s offices in remote border counties to local police in East Texas, have inked agreements to help U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement seek, detain and deport undocumented immigrants.
Through this surge in partnerships, which is also playing out across the country, local authorities are holding undocumented people accused of crimes at county lockups and asking others about their legal status during regular policing duties.
Texas GOP leaders spent years pursuing this system, cementing it further last year with a new law that requires nearly every sheriff in the state to partner up with the feds by Dec. 1. As with past efforts to promote local cooperation, Republican officials dismissed concerns that such work would result in mistakes like Morales’ deportation.
“There are obviously inherent biases of individuals,” state Sen. Charles Schwertner, a Georgetown Republican who carried that bill, said in response to a Democratic lawmaker’s contention that it would give rise to racial profiling. “That said, there are ways to properly train.”
Kate Lincoln-Goldfinch, Morales’ lawyer, said police across the state are targeting people on the basis of their race or ethnicity as they seek to aid ICE, “and this is absolutely what happened in the case of Brian.”
“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,” she said.
Civil rights advocates and immigration attorneys have long argued that local police are prone to this sort of profiling, and wrongfully detaining people, when empowered to enforce immigration laws. That’s because they don’t have nearly as much training and experience as federal immigration officers, who spend more time grasping the complex and ever-changing web of policies that make up U.S. immigration law.
The Trump administration has reduced training to streamline the onboarding process for new local law enforcement partners.
“I think what we can expect is to see more and more of these errors,” said Nayna Gupta, policy director at the American Immigration Council, a Washington, D.C., group that advocates for immigrants. “This story of the U.S. citizen man in Texas is headline grabbing, given how egregious the injustice was — from our perspective, it was by no means an exception.”
The Department of Homeland Security, which has said in previous statements its agents did not arrest a citizen and had instead determined Morales was “illegally in the U.S.,” did not respond to requests for comment Sunday and Monday, after a spokesperson initially said the agency was working on a statement.
Spokespersons for the Department of Justice, Gov. Greg Abbott and Texas DPS also did not respond to requests for comment.
The governor dramatically escalated Texas’ immigration enforcement role during the Biden administration, dispatching DPS officers and Texas National Guard troops to patrol the border under a state crackdown called Operation Lone Star.
Last year, days into Trump’s second term, Abbott ordered DPS officers to coordinate with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to find undocumented immigrants. He said state troopers would focus on people with warrants — without specifying which type — and deport them from the country.
DPS Director Freeman Martin later said his agency was “going after the migrants that pose the largest threat to the communities.”
Lincoln-Goldfinch said her client’s arrest is “an outcome of overzealous immigration enforcement.”
“We don't know what tipped the scales,” she said. “Our hope is that now that he's here and that DOJ has invited him to come back, that will provide sufficient evidence for the general public to believe that this actually is the case of a native born U.S. citizen being detained and deported.”
Morales has said repeatedly he was born in Denver but grew up in Mexico. After authorities stopped the vehicle he was in, he said that he offered to show them his Social Security card and birth certificate, which were at his home in Austin. Officers from various agencies denied the offer, he said.
Morales, who doesn’t speak English and has dual citizenship in Mexico, was held for five days until he signed paperwork to be deported, fearing that he would be detained for months.
He said he decided to return to the U.S. last year to work and also get to know the country he was born in. He previously told the Tribune that U.S. Customs and Border Protection let him enter the country in El Paso when he showed them his birth certificate.
Before installing air conditioning, he worked as a painter, he said. In his downtime in Austin, he likes swinging by local soccer fields and catching professional matches on TV, from Major League Soccer to the top professional league in Mexico, Liga MX, where he roots for C.D. Guadalajara — known as Las Chivas.
In the interview with the Tribune on Monday, Morales said he spent his recent stint in Mexico trying to make the most of time with relatives he does not see often. They tried to keep him in high spirits, but Morales said he was restless to return to the country.
Morales’ aspirations to support his family are shared by many immigrants, who contribute millions of dollars to Texas’ economy through taxes, paying rent and buying goods and services. Roughly 11% of the nation’s undocumented immigrants live in Texas — an estimated 1.7 million people.
Since Trump returned to office, however, those dreams have increasingly collided with local police and their heightened role in trying to apprehend undocumented immigrants.
A month into Trump’s second term, only 28 Texas law enforcement agencies had any sort of agreement with ICE, records show.
Less than two years later, the latest ICE statistics show that 432 law enforcement agencies in Texas have signed a total of 514 agreements with ICE for any of its three types of local partnerships. Two of these are confined to jails, allowing the sheriffs that typically run the lockups to hold people longer until federal officials can take custody of them. Officers can also serve ICE warrants to arrest people accused of violating immigration law.
Well over half the agreements in Texas — 314 of the 514 — are for a controversial program called the task force model, which grants local police limited authority to question people about their immigration status during routine police work, like traffic stops.
The Trump administration revived the task force model, which had been dormant since 2012 following a racial profiling scandal in Arizona led by a sheriff, who directed his deputies to target Latinos. After the Justice Department found that participating agencies in Arizona and North Carolina had conducted discriminatory policing while enforcing immigration laws, the Obama administration ended the task force program.
Recently published ICE data shows the administration is leaning more on states like Texas for its ambitious deportation goals.
An analysis published by the New York Times last week found that ICE is making more than 380 arrests a day in Texas. About 14% of arrests nationwide are through 287(g) agreements, up from about 3% in January 2025. Texas has tallied almost 10,000 detentions through the program.
The agencies that have signed up for the program in Texas include DPS and the Gillespie County Sheriff's Office, whose deputies also responded to the traffic stop that led to Morales’ deportation.
U.S. citizens have been caught up in the blitz of immigration enforcement. A ProPublica investigation found that more than 170 Americans had been detained during immigration sweeps.
The ubiquity of officers enlisted to enforce immigration law has stoked fear. U.S. citizens — unlike immigrants, legal or not — are not legally required to carry their American passports. But because of the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration crackdown, and the heightened likelihood of a busted taillight leading to an immigration check, American citizens of color carry documentation out of fear of being racially profiled.
The rapid expansion of the 287(g) program is thanks to a mix of aggressive encouragement from the Trump administration and political pressure from state leaders who are allied with the president, said Gupta, of the American Immigration Council. She noted that the White House has also sweetened the deal by reimbursing state and local police who participate.
“For smaller local police departments or really any local police departments, many of which are underfunded and under-resourced, that can be a somewhat appealing incentive,” she said. “Those dynamics have absolutely been in play in states around the country.”
And then there are states like Texas that require such participation. The law passed last year by the Legislature, which compels most sheriffs in the state to enter at least one 287(g) agreement with ICE, was the latest move to expand the state’s role enforcing immigration law — long the sole responsibility of the federal government.
A 2023 state law created a state crime for crossing the border illegally into Texas. It went into effect this spring after a yearslong legal challenge.
Meanwhile, a 2017 law prohibits local officials from creating any policies that stop police officers from asking people about their legal status. State lawmakers passed it during Trump's first term, when Democratic-led cities opposed his immigration policies.
As the collaboration between Texas police and ICE has increased, DPS has sought to shield certain records from reaching the public eye.
The state agency released basic information about the incident, such as its exact location and a case synopsis submitted by an officer, and argued that the rest could be withheld under state law that allows police and prosecutors to keep documents under wraps if their release would interfere with the investigation of a crime.
It is not clear what crime is being investigated. The initial traffic stop was for a window tint check. Still, the attorney general’s office ruled in July that DPS may withhold the information.
Earlier this year, The Florida Trib reported, ICE told police in Florida and Texas that they needed federal permission to release any information “obtained or developed” under a 287(g) agreement, arguing the records were “under the control of ICE.”
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This article first appeared on The Texas Tribune.