ICE agents have raided numerous Alabama construction sites over the past six months as part of President Donald Trump’s crackdown on immigration.
Baldwin County man Leonardo Garcia Venegas has gone through two such raids and been arrested twice despite being a U.S. citizen, according to a federal lawsuit filed Tuesday in the Southern District of Alabama.
Venegas is suing the Department of Justice and U.S. Department of Homeland Security, alleging that the raids violate his and others’ Fourth Amendment rights. He is also suing for assault, battery, false arrest and false imprisonment by the ICE agents.
“Leo is aware of at least 15 raids—not including the raids he experienced—of private construction sites in Baldwin County since January 2025,” the lawsuit states. “On information and belief, those 15 raids—just like the raids Leo personally experienced—were both warrantless and suspicionless.
“In a span of just over three weeks across May and June 2025, Leo experienced two raids on private construction sites where he was working—one on a site owned by D.R. Horton and the other on a site owned by Lennar. Both times that Leo’s worksite has been raided, immigration officers entered the property without a warrant and detained Leo just for showing up to work and trying to earn an honest living.”
According to the filing, Venegas is a natural-born U.S. Citizen with Mexican heritage, born in Florida and living in Robertsdale since the age of 14. He has been working in construction for about eight years.
The lawsuit specifically challenges the policies of the administration allowing agents to raid sites and detain individuals without a warrant.
“Once immigration officers are on a site, they preemptively seize everybody they think looks undocumented. And they detain these workers indefinitely—even those who have a REAL ID—until the officers eventually check the legal status of the people they’ve detained,” the lawsuit claims. “Sometimes it takes 20 minutes; sometimes it takes days.
“As Leo’s experience shows, these unlawful policies have real consequences for innocent, hardworking Americans. Leo was born in this country. Construction work is his career—it’s how he supports himself as he pursues the American Dream. And when he goes to work on private property, Leo expects the freedom, as an American, to work in peace. Yet, twice, Leo got the opposite: Immigration officers, wielding an overly broad grant of authority but no warrant, raided the private construction sites where Leo was working and rounded up all the workers who looked Latino—even citizens, like Leo, who had done nothing wrong. Leo deserves better. And under the Fourth Amendment and federal laws that constrain immigration enforcement, he is entitled to better.”
In addition to Venegas’ claims that the raids violate Fourth Amendment rights, industry leaders say the raids are exacerbating a worker shortage in the state.
“From an economic standpoint, from our economy, taking this magnitude of workers out of our workforce will adversely affect our industry,” Tim Harrison, chairman of the Associated Builders and Contractors of Alabama, told AL.com. “It’s going to create higher prices, going to create slower timelines. It’s going to create some contractors going out of business because they can’t have employees. It’s just not a really good situation.”
