Chief U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Beaverstock on Wednesday rejected the federal government’s effort to dismiss Leo Garcia Venegas’s claims against the Department of Homeland Security. Garcia Venegas, an Alabama construction worker who says federal immigration agents detained him three times despite his being a U.S. citizen, will now be able to force DHS to turn over documents and answer questions as his case proceeds to the discovery phase.
Attorneys for Garcia Venegas say his detentions resulted from DHS policies directing officers to enter private construction sites without warrants and detain workers without individualized suspicion. Garcia Venegas’s side also asserts that DHS officers refuse to accept REAL IDs as evidence of legal status.
“We can now get to discovery,” Garcia Venegas’s attorney Jared McClain said after the ruling, saying his legal team will proceed to take depositions and obtain government documents to determine whether the policies exist as alleged.
Garcia Venegas, 26, was born in Florida to Mexican parents and has lived in Alabama since he was 14. He works in construction, currently as a concrete finisher.
Immigration agents first detained Garcia Venegas during a May 2025 raid at an Alabama construction site. According to the lawsuit, officers tackled and handcuffed Garcia Venegas as he repeatedly said he was a citizen. An officer allegedly removed his Alabama REAL ID from his pocket, but dismissed it as fake. He was released after agents later verified his citizenship.
Less than a month later, the suit says, immigration agents detained him again at another construction site.
Garcia Venegas was detained a third time in May 2026, when the suit says agents followed him home, pulled him from a vehicle, handcuffed and shackled him, and then released him after determining his identity. DHS has disputed Garcia Venegas’s description of that encounter, telling ProPublica that Garcia Venegas was “NOT detained” and that agents had conducted a routine stop of a vehicle registered to someone they believed was in the country illegally.
“I drive to work every morning and I know, at any moment, they could pull me over again,” Garcia Venegas told ProPublica after the third encounter.
[NOTE: DHS itself oversees the REAL ID program. Applicants for REAL ID must establish lawful status, although possession of one does not necessarily establish U.S. citizenship. At an earlier hearing in Garcia Venegas’s case, a DHS official testified that immigration agents could not necessarily rely on REAL IDs when determining immigration status. Beaverstock addressed this validity issue in his decision, asking why the identification was sufficient for TSA but not immigration enforcement: “Help me understand how that makes sense.”]
The case also intersects with a much larger fight over what immigration agents may consider before stopping someone.
Last year, Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote in a case concerning immigration stops in Los Angeles that officers could consider factors including apparent ethnicity, speaking Spanish, location, and type of work when determining whether to briefly stop someone. But Kavanaugh also wrote that citizens and others legally in the country who are stopped would be “promptly” allowed to go after their status was established.
Garcia Venegas’s experience presents a different question: what happens when the person produces identification and agents still don’t accept it?
Allow us to finish these introductions, @SenBlumenthal:
Leonardo Garcia Venegas attempted to obstruct and prevent the lawful arrest of an illegal alien. He put himself between law enforcement and the subject they were attempting to arrest, and he refused to comply with numerous… pic.twitter.com/YjmSKKpWA3
— Homeland Security (@DHSgov) March 3, 2026
His lawsuit alleges that immigration officers continued holding him after he presented his REAL ID during both 2025 construction-site encounters.
DHS has maintained that its enforcement operations are targeted and has denied mistakenly arresting U.S. citizens. Beaverstock’s decision gives Garcia Venegas’s lawyers the ability to seek evidence directly from DHS about its detention protocol and practices.
