A security guard at a big-box home improvement store owned by a Trump-supporting billionaire filmed a "brutal" immigration raid, The Daily Beast reported — and then found himself out of a job.
"Ricardo Mendez was positioned at the door of Menards — a chain of midwestern home-improvement stores whose billionaire owner, John Menard Jr., is a GOP megadonor — in the Chicago suburb of Cicero, Illinois, when agents deployed by DHS arrived on Tuesday afternoon," said the report. "Like so many in the city since 'Operation Midway Blitz' began in September, Mendez had been 'on the lookout' since federal immigration officers 'started taking over,' he told the Daily Beast."
In the footage filmed by the Puerto Rican security guard, DHS officers smashed out the windows of a pickup truck, dragged out a Hispanic man, cuffed him, and hauled him off in an "unmarked red vehicle." "After the man was detained, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents in a separate unmarked blue Chevy Tahoe threatened to tear-gas anyone who intervened, Mendez says, before they all drove out of the lot as one ICE officer can be seen in his video flipping him the bird," the report continued.
But as Mendez filmed the incident, his supervisor reportedly demanded he stop filming, and store management later ordered any employees with footage to delete it. Mendez ignored these demands — and later that day, the security contractor O'Brien and Associates, which provides services to Menards, issued him a letter of termination, accusing him of “insubordination” and saying he left his “designated post,” confronted an “ICE employee,” and “almost [got] pepper-sprayed.”
However, Mendez says many of the claims in the letter are not true, and that managers previously told him the lot was off-limits to immigration agents. He told The Beast he has no regrets about what he did.
This comes as the Trump administration continues a surge of immigration operations in Chicago, where locals have engaged in increasingly fierce protest and opposition to raids, and where judges have accused local Border Patrol agents of ignoring court orders to avoid using riot-control weapons on peaceful demonstrators.
