George Retes Jr., a U.S. citizen and Iraq combat veteran who worked as a security guard at a licensed cannabis farm near Camarillo, sued U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other federal agencies on 18 February 2026 over his arrest during the farm’s July 2025 raid, and said he was held for three days without seeing a judge or being charged.[1][2] Retes said in the complaint that on 10 July 2025 he drove to his shift at the farm and found the road blocked by U.S. agents.[1] According to the lawsuit, some officers ordered him to leave while others ordered him out of his car, then officers engulfed his vehicle in tear gas, shattered his window, sprayed him with pepper spray, dragged him out and threw him to the ground.[1] Retes says he was held at the farm for hours without being told what he was accused of, then taken to a nearby U.S. Navy base, fingerprinted, shackled and swabbed for DNA without a warrant or probable cause.[1]
He says he was then taken to the Metropolitan Detention Center in downtown Los Angeles, strip searched and held incommunicado for three days and three nights, and never brought before a judge or charged with any offence.[1] About 319 people were detained in the raid on the Camarillo farm, Courthouse News reported, one of the immigration operations in Southern California in which agents used tear gas, rubber bullets and smoke bombs on farm workers’ families, officials, journalists and protesters.[1]
Homeland Security said in an October 2025 statement that while CBP and ICE agents were executing criminal search warrants at the marijuana sites in Camarillo, Retes became violent, refused to comply and blocked their route with his vehicle, and that CBP arrested him for assault.[3]
Retes’ lawsuit, filed in California’s Central District court, claims Fourth and Fifth Amendment violations, assault and battery, negligence, false imprisonment and false arrest, and violations of the Tom Bane Civil Rights Act and Westfall Act, and seeks unspecified damages.[4] The suit names the United States, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Navy, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Customs and Border Protection, together with unnamed individual officers.[5] KQED reported that federal law and court precedent limit such suits and that his lawyers had not yet been able to identify the individual officers involved.[5] The Department of Justice declined to comment on the lawsuit, and Retes’ lawyer said the video of his arrest refutes Homeland Security’s account.[1] Retes told reporters outside the federal courthouse in Los Angeles that he was pursuing the case out of principle rather than anger.[6]
CBS News reported that Retes, 25, served in the Army for four years and deployed to Iraq, and was released after the detention.[2]
