That’s what the man told them. That’s what the masked American thugs who are ICE just ignored again.

Ricardo Gonzalez is forty years old. He was born in Hanford, California. He worked for the city of Long Beach for about eight years, first in the health department and then in utilities, and he left that job in September.

On Saturday he was riding his e-bike through his own neighborhood in North Long Beach when, according to his daughter, an unmarked federal vehicle knocked him off it. Then agents tased him. Twice.

The video shows him handcuffed, face down in a gutter, agents kneeling on his back. He is screaming that his arm is broken. He is begging someone to call a paramedic. He says it over and over, and they keep him there.

Another video shows an agent going through his wallet, looking for an ID. The ID was in his pocket. His family says they never gave back his ID or his glasses.

Ricardo Gonzalez was one of the people who called 911. The mayor says he saw a situation escalating and asked for help. He did what every civics teacher says a citizen should do, and he ended up in the gutter with those same agents kneeling on him.

Every headline says the same thing. U.S. citizen. U.S. citizen. As if that is the part that makes it matter.

It is not.

A citizen is not worth more than anyone else. Not one breath more. Ricardo Gonzalez did not deserve a broken arm because he is a citizen, and a man born in Oaxaca or Lagos or Manila would not deserve one because he is not. The video is the same video. The gutter is the same gutter. The scream is the same scream. A human being was brutalized in the street, and being a human being is the only credential he needed.

Citizenship is a legal status. It is paperwork and geography, handed out mostly by accident of where a woman happened to be standing when she gave birth. It gets you a vote and a passport. It does not get you a soul that weighs more.

Donald Trump wants you to believe that it does. That is the whole engine. ICE expects you to believe it too, and to cheer while it works. The idea that a person’s value, their right to safety, to a lawyer, to not be run down in the street and tased, goes up and down based on documentation.

I know exactly what that idea is, because it is not new. White supremacists have believed it forever. Nazis believe it. It is the same belief in different clothes: that some people matter and the rest are beneath them. Foreigners are scum. They are not owed what a citizen is owed. Not opportunity. Not respect. Not even their lives. A man from somewhere else cannot contribute anything of value, because he is not a man, he is an other, and an other is beneath their own.

They said immigrants were poisoning the blood of our country. Blood. Poison. That is not a debate about visas or even crime prevention. That is the vocabulary of every movement that ever decided human worth could be measured by birth.

And they call themselves Americans. They call themselves Christians. They call themselves decent people.

They are full of shit, across the board.

Their covenant is to hate. Fear holds it up, and cruelty is how they practice what they preach. A stranger is supposed to be the test in their own scripture, and they fail it every single day.

The Constitution is not on their side either. The Fifth Amendment protects any person from losing life or liberty without due process. The Fourteenth guarantees equal protection to any person. Person. Not citizen. The people who wrote those words knew the difference.

We were told this would never touch citizens. The agency’s own leaders said it. If a citizen gets caught up, he is quickly released, they said, and ICE does not take action on Americans. Bullshit. Reporters have now counted more than 500 U.S. citizens detained in this crackdown. A teenager thrown to the ground and bloodied. A man tased while already pinned. People hunted because they matched a description.

You cannot hand thousands of rushed recruits a creed that says worth is a matter of belonging and then expect them to sort it out correctly, in a second, on a street, by looking at faces. And a federal judge found that the stop criteria in Los Angeles came down to things like apparent race, speaking Spanish or accented English, standing at a bus stop or a car wash, doing manual work.

The Supreme Court let the sweeps resume anyway. If you are this far along and still have doubts the American dream is not corrupted, you need to take a long walk and do some deep thinking. This is no longer a fringe belief: the country we once knew is gone.

Nobody at Homeland Security has confirmed why they stopped Ricardo Gonzalez. ICE says “vehicle vandalism”. Nobody has shown a shred of evidence. And I do not care what he is supposed to have thrown. A damaged car is a police report. It is not a ramming, two tasings, a broken arm, and a knee in the back of a handcuffed man.

They lie, and they lie first. In Minneapolis they said two men beat an agent with a shovel and a broom handle. The video shows no such attack, the charges were dropped, and a grand jury indicted the officer for lying. The accusation comes out immediately. The evidence never shows up.

Peace officers are worth our respect, and Long Beach just showed why. Police arrived and found a man handcuffed and bleeding. The firefighters could not get through, so the officers took him to a fire station themselves, took off the handcuffs, and got him to paramedics. Then they went back to their station, and according to the department, some ICE agents followed them into the secure parking lot. The officers told them to leave. If they wanted to file a vandalism report, the police said, call the city.

That is what law enforcement looks like. Identifiable. Answerable. Getting a hurt man to help.

The mayor says he called ICE’s complaint line and has not reached a single person. The elected mayor of the city where this happened cannot get a human being at the agency that did it. Masked. Unmarked. Unreachable. Chasing the police who rescued their victim into the police station’s own parking lot.

I call it fascism and I mean it. An armed force that serves a political program before it serves the law. A target population picked by how people look and sound. Lies told first and corrected, if ever, after a camera forces the issue. Contempt for the civil authorities where it operates. Violence as a routine tool, almost never punished. Check every item against North Long Beach on Saturday.

And to the people who defend this incident, who praise ICE:

You watched the video. You heard a man scream that his arm was broken. You heard him beg for a paramedic. And you decided the agency must be right, because it is the agency, and because the kind of person this happens to must have had it coming.

Some of you are conservative and some of you are rural and some of you are devout, and that is not the point. The point is that you are dead inside.

You cannot be a person in the world without clinging to some tribal superiority bullshit, some belief that your people are the real people and everyone else is a problem. That is not patriotism. That is a hole where the thing that is supposed to feel another human being’s pain should be.

We live in a country with people like that among us, and they are loud, and they vote, and they hide behind “America” and “citizenship” and “make America great again” the minute the footage comes out.

You are a servant of power. You gave your judgment to whoever holds the weapons and called it loyalty. It is immoral. It is selfish, because the price is always paid by somebody else.

The agents who did it chose to do it. Orders do not break arms. Hands do.

Ricardo Gonzalez worked eight years for his city. He called 911 when he saw trouble in the neighborhood in the form of unmarked cars and masked men. He was knocked off his bike, shocked twice, cuffed, and found bleeding in a gutter, and the agency that did it has not explained itself, has not answered the mayor, and has not said one word of regret.

He is a citizen and it does not fucking matter. He is a human being, and so is everyone they have done this to, and so is everyone they are going to do it to next. Fuck every one of you who ignore it, support it or defend it.