Brawley, California

Driving to a dentist’s appointment in San Diego, George and Esmaralda Doilez noticed a black SUV advancing on them from behind. Avid campers, the couple had been checking out roadside campsites when the SUV flashed its lights and pulled them over. The next thing they knew, men wearing “bandit masks” got out and approached their car. “Who does that?” George Doilez asked a reporter for NBC 7 TV. “Criminals do that. Robbers and thieves do that. Kidnappers do that.”

The masked men removed their masks after Esmarelda Doilez began filming them. They proved to be U.S. Border Patrol agents. The reason for the stop? Their car had been making “U-turns” and “a known alien” was in the area, the agent in charge said through a cracked-open driver’s side window. George Doilez was unconvinced: it looked like racial profiling and harassment to him. Asserting his rights as a U.S. citizen, he refused to consent to a vehicle search or hand over his ID, although he displayed it twice through the window glass.

The encounter had “terrified” him, Doilez told NBC 7’s Shelby Bremer. Watching his wife shake and cry, he felt an instinctive urge to protect her. But any show of physical resistance would end badly, he told himself: “If I fight these guys, I’m going to lose. I could get killed out here.” After a tense 24-minute standoff, the couple’s vehicle was searched by a K-9 unit and they were ordered out of the car. They were eventually released with a warning after a full search turned up only a small amount of legally acquired cannabis.

“This will not be the new normal,” an angry Doilez vowed to the lead agent as he walked away. “You messed with the wrong guy.”

A spokesperson for U.S. Customs and Border Protection defended the its agents’ actions to NBC 7 as “a lawful stop based on reasonable suspicion of criminal activity.” The Trump administration has vowed to make at least 3,000 immigrant arrests a day.

The Doilezes had voted for Donald Trump – twice. Asked by NBC’s Bremer if he regretted that choice, George Doilez replied: “Very much so.” Trump had repeatedly described the targets of his mass deportation plans as “the worst of the worst.” That was a lie, Doilez said. “He stole our vote,”

Doilez says he worries about criminals posing as immigration enforcement agents. “They’re just masked men, armed, kidnapping people,” he said to Dr. Rashad Richey on The Young Turks news network. “They could be anybody at this point. All the stuff that they pulled us over with, you can buy on Amazon.”

He and his wife plan to keep speaking out. “We can’t let them take our rights – then we’re nothing,” Esmaralda said. Her husband urged others not to comply, “because complying is going to get you in a prison concentration camp,” he said. “It might be sooner than we all think.”

Posted on November 11, 2025.