Last week in Palm City, Florida, the Florida Highway Patrol and ICE staged a show of force at a gated community like they were raiding a drug lord’s mansion. Their targets? Landscaping trucks. Their crime? Apparently, looking too brown in the wrong ZIP code.
One of those trucks had “American Landscaping” plastered on the windshield. The irony practically wrote itself. Working under the Florida sun, sweating through a double shift, doing work most folks in that gated community wouldn’t touch—and still not “American” enough for the patrol at the gate.
I’ve seen this movie before.
Hundreds of times, I rolled through the old Border Patrol checkpoints on California’s Interstate 5 just south of San Clemente and Interstate 8 just past El Centro, near Yuma.
Everyone knew the drill—slow down, answer a few questions, move along.
Those checkpoints sat like permanent fixtures in the desert—grim reminders that even in America, the Bill of Rights doesn’t always travel with you.
Because here’s what most folks don’t know:
Within 100 miles of any U.S. border or coastline, ICE and Customs operate under what I call “Constitution-lite.”
Inside this zone—which covers two-thirds of the U.S. population—they can stop, question, and detain anyone they “suspect” of being here illegally, without a warrant and with very little probable cause.
And what started at roadside checkpoints has now crept into neighborhoods, onto job sites, and behind gated community walls.
Old Tools, New Targets
Back in the ’80s, under the Reagan amnesty deal, we got the I-9 form—a bureaucratic fig leaf meant to prove employers were checking worker status.
But it had all the bite of a toothless gator.
Employers filed it away, no one checked, and everyone looked the other way.
Then came E-Verify, the government’s digital answer to doing something about illegal hiring. Still no teeth. Still no real audits. Still no consequences for the bosses.
And that’s the system we’ve built:
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Punish the worker.
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Protect the employer.
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Stage a few raids for the cameras.
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Rinse and repeat.**
The Data Doesn’t Lie
In 2019, fewer than 2,000 employers were fined by ICE nationwide.
Criminal prosecutions? A couple dozen at most.
That same year?
ICE detained over 143,000 immigrants—almost all workers, not CEOs.
Even when companies like Koch Foods or Asplundh Tree Experts get caught hiring undocumented workers by the hundreds, they pay a fine and move on. No jail time. No CEO in cuffs.
It’s a shell game where the only people who lose are the ones holding the weed whackers.
Same Playbook, New Streets
We’ve seen this before.
In 1997, during the infamous Chandler Roundup in Arizona, INS agents roamed neighborhoods, stopping brown kids walking home from school—no warrants, no due process, just assumptions based on skin tone and surname.
And now?
We’re back to school raids. Back to arresting kids. Back to ICE staking out Florida landscaping trucks like it’s an episode of COPS.
All the while, the contractors, developers, and homeowners—the ones who profit from this broken system—keep their hands clean.
I know this game because I’ve lived it.
Hundreds of times I’ve rolled through those checkpoints. Hundreds of times, I’ve seen the green uniforms standing in the sun, waving through minivans and pulling over brown drivers.
It was always about optics.
It was always about control.
And now that same control is parked at our gates, our schools, our neighborhoods—reminding every immigrant worker that they may cut the grass, but they still don’t belong.
If we were serious about fixing immigration, we’d start by auditing the employers, hauling in the contractors, locking up the suits who break the law with a wink and a payroll stub.
But we’re not serious.
We’re just staging raids at gated communities while the bosses sip cocktails on their patios, waving to security.
And if you think this is about law and order, you haven’t been paying attention.
It’s about fear.
It’s about keeping workers scared and employers safe.
It’s about arresting people for landscaping while brown.
And it’s been that way for far too long.