This interview first aired on Nick Valencia Live, Tuesdays and Thursdays at 3 p.m. Eastern / 12 p.m. Pacific — Miguel Escalona’s full account aired on Thursday’s broadcast.
ATLANTA— It was supposed to be a quick stop. On a weekday afternoon in Atlanta, Miguel Escalona pulled into a McDonald’s on Buford Highway—a stretch of DeKalb County known for its Latino markets, taquerías, and bakeries. He wasn’t there for himself. Mina, his English bulldog, was riding shotgun, and she had her heart set on some chicken nuggets.
But before Mina could finish her snack, the parking lot changed.
“It’s like somebody was just waiting for you,” Miguel told Nick Valencia Live. “You know in the movies when somebody’s moving and all the FBI trucks come in? It was kind of like that. I got four cars surrounding me—a couple of unmarked vehicles and two from Forsyth County. And this is DeKalb.”
Out stepped men in tactical gear, carrying large weapons, with ICE logos stamped on their vests.
“They come to me—one in front, one in the back, and two on the sides—and they ask me for my papers,” he said. “I’m like, ‘My papers? Okay, that sounds very generic. Let me give you my ID, my driver’s license.’”
Miguel pointed out that his license had the REAL ID star—a federal security standard meaning his identity had already been verified.
“That means you’re clear, they already checked you out, you’re good,” he explained. “I show him that, and he keeps asking for my papers. And I’m like, ‘What are you looking for, man? This is legal.’”
What saved him was something he almost didn’t have.
“The good thing is, my wife—the day before—was watching some stuff in the news, and she’s like, ‘Babe, why don’t you carry your passport card in your wallet?’ I never thought about it. I only used it to cross from Mexico or Canada. But I put it there. If it wasn’t for that, who knows where I’d be right now.”
Miguel handed over the card. The agent’s reaction stunned him.
“This guy doesn’t even know what a passport card is. And I can’t believe it—if they’re part of DHS, the Department of Homeland Security, and you don’t know what a passport card is?”
He pressed for an answer.
“I asked, what was the reasonable cause to stop me? They said, ‘We’re just doing rounds around here.’ Yeah, yeah, I get it. But what’s the reasonable cause to stop me while I’m feeding my dog? ‘No, man—you know’, it’s because I’m driving while brown, isn’t it?”
The agent denied it.
“‘That’s not what it is,’ they said. And I told them, ‘Put that in writing.’”
They let him go. But the damage was done.
“After that, me and my wife have been freaking out. I just don’t go anywhere, man.”
Miguel Escalona is a U.S. citizen. He’s lived in America for 25 years. He’s carried a U.S. passport for the last 10. And yet, in a McDonald’s parking lot on Buford Highway, none of it mattered to the men with guns and badges. This was no border checkpoint. No active investigation. Just a man, his dog, and a bag of chicken nuggets.
American citizens do get swept up in ICE’s mass deportation operations, and likely far more often than most people realize. It’s a chilling reminder that in the eyes of enforcement, the presumption of belonging can vanish in an instant. For those who fit a certain profile, the line between citizen and suspect is frighteningly thin.
