A woman says she and a friend were questioned and detained by a Border Patrol agent because they were speaking Spanish at a Montana gas station, the Washington Post reported Monday.
The women, who are both U.S. citizens, were waiting in line to check out eggs and milk at a convenience store last week when they were approached by the uniformed agent.
“We were just talking, and then I was going to pay,” Ana Suda, one of the women, told the Post. “I looked up [and saw the agent], and then after that, he just requested my ID. I looked at him like, ‘Are you serious?’ He’s like, ‘Yeah, very serious.’”
After the encounter moved to the parking lot, Suda began recording with her cellphone.
“Ma’am, the reason I asked you for your ID is because I came in here, and I saw that you guys are speaking Spanish, which is very unheard of up here,” the agent says in the video.
When Suda asked the agent if she and her friend, Mimi Hernandez, were being racially profiled, he says no.
“It has nothing to do with that,” the agent says. “It’s the fact that it has to do with you guys speaking Spanish in the store, in a state where it’s predominantly English-speaking.”
Despite cooperating and showing the agent their ID cards, the women were questioned by the agent in the parking lot for 35 to 40 minutes.
A representative from U.S. Customs and Border Protection told the Post that the agency is reviewing the incident. Border Patrol agents cannot stop people without reasonable suspicion of violating immigration rules or the law.
