When Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials swept into North Carolina, Governor Josh Stein urged people to pull out their phones and record any inappropriate behavior.
It’s good advice. Filming law enforcement in public is one of the few tools ordinary people have to hold powerful federal agents accountable. The right to record police in public is also protected by the First Amendment.
But federal officials have repeatedly chased, assaulted, and even arrested Americans, including North Carolinians, for recording them. This isn’t just unconstitutional. It’s dangerous.
Take Charlotte resident and U.S. citizen Miguel Angel Garcia Martinez. On November 16, after Martinez photographed federal agents in public places around the city, Border Patrol officers stopped his car and told him to step out “voluntarily.” When Martinez refused and drove away, agents chased him for nearly two miles through busy streets.
Video shows ICE agents suggesting smashing Martinez’s vehicle and imagining him being shot. They laughed that the chase was “fun,” even as Martinez swerved into oncoming traffic and medians to avoid crashes. Martinez was arrested and charged with two felonies. A court later dismissed the charge accusing him of using his vehicle as a deadly weapon, finding that it was federal agents who tried to hit Martinez with their vehicles, not the other way around.
Or look at Oregon, where a U.S. citizen, Berenice Garcia-Hernandez, took pictures of unmarked ICE cars in a Chick-fil-A parking lot. ICE officers pursued her in their cars down public streets and violently arrested her. They accused Garcia-Hernandez of aggressively following and obstructing them, but a cellphone video showed that wasn’t true.
In Chicago, federal agents surrounded three members of a local “rapid response” group with multiple vehicles and arrested them in September, simply because they were filming the officers.
Federal officers in Chicago also shot Marimar Martinez multiple times on a public street after she followed them in her car. The Department of Homeland Security accused her of using her vehicle as a weapon and said she had a history of “doxing” officers. Martinez said it was agents who had rammed her. Prosecutors dismissed the charges against her after inconsistencies in the government’s story emerged.
Maybe you think some of these people should have complied or shouldn’t have fled. But what’s more important is that federal agents never should have stopped them in the first place. Exercising your constitutional rights isn’t a crime.
And when people flee an illegal stop, federal officers put everyone at risk by giving chase. Police chases kill innocent people every year. That’s why many local police departments rightly restrict them. Officers in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department, for instance, may only pursue someone when there’s a threat to life or risk of public harm.
Recording federal agents isn’t a threat to anyone’s life. The government claims that recording agents puts them at risk of doxxing and harassment. But law enforcement already has criminal statutes to handle cases of actual threats or harassment. What they can’t do is punish people for recording in public.
The dangers don’t stop with car chases. They also show up at protests, where federal agents often use dangerous crowd control munitions against journalists and others photographing or filming them. These weapons can maim or kill.
Ask photojournalist Nick Stern, who had shrapnel surgically removed from his leg after being struck by a “less lethal” munition while covering a protest in June. Or Lisa Tirado, a journalist blinded in one eye and left with a traumatic brain injury after she was struck by a crowd control round during the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests in Minneapolis. Tirado is now in hospice care, dying from the injuries she suffered.
Federal courts have said repeatedly that attacking journalists at protests violates the First Amendment. But what’s received less attention is that these actions put innocent people in grave danger: journalists, peaceful protesters, and even bystanders.
And for what? So federal agents can operate without the public seeing what they do?
These tactics aren’t about safety. They’re about control. Federal agents don’t want cameras pointed at them because it can force accountability. When they lash out at people who record them, it’s not just those targeted who are in danger; everyone around them is at risk too. Agents’ reckless responses to being recorded are threatening both our constitutional rights and the public’s physical safety.
Caitlin Vogus is a First Amendment attorney and senior adviser at the Freedom of the Press Foundation.
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