Las Vegas – It was supposed to be an ordinary Saturday afternoon. Two cousins, 15 and 16 years old, were on their way to a birthday party downtown. But they never got there. Instead, their day ended with bloody legs, scratched faces, shaken expressions - and the feeling that they had been criminalized for their appearance alone. According to witnesses and as seen in this cellphone video, the two teenagers were stopped by police near a protest against recent ICE raids, thrown to the ground, and brutally detained without any apparent reason.
“We're minors just trying to go home,” one of the girls reportedly told one of the officers. The response: “It doesn't matter - you guys are illegal.”
The teenagers were shoved against a wall, their arms violently forced behind their backs, their faces pressed into concrete - even though they offered no resistance whatsoever. The video clearly shows bruises and abrasions. The two were not participating in the demonstration, nor were they carrying banners, chanting slogans, or holding any dangerous items. But their mere presence near the protest march seemed enough to arouse suspicion - or rather: their skin color.
“They don’t care if you're a kid - just if you look like an immigrant,” one of the girls later told a local reporter.
The case is making waves. Human rights organizations in Nevada and California strongly condemned the incident. “When ethnic profiling becomes standard practice, we lose our democracy to police control,” said ACLU representative Carla Menéndez. The governor of Nevada also called for a swift investigation.
The Las Vegas Police Department released a brief statement that evening, stating that it was a “case prone to misidentification,” as the “individuals resembled persons described in the search.” No apology was issued.
Since the expansion of ICE and Homeland Security powers under President Trump, reports of racially motivated incidents have been on the rise - especially against teenagers and people of Latin American descent. In the past three weeks alone, the ACLU has documented at least 14 similar cases - three of them in Nevada.
“Children today aren’t learning that they have rights - they’re learning they have to stay silent when they’re in the wrong place at the wrong time,” wrote columnist Isabel Romero in the Las Vegas Review-Journal. For the teenagers affected, the harm is not just physical. They were released after several hours without charges - but with the lasting sense of living in a country that has long broken its promises of freedom and equality.
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