The official story about Carlos Ivan Mendoza Hernandez started with a label: gang member. But his attorney, Patrick Kolasinski, says that label appeared only after ICE officers had already fired more than six bullets into his client during a traffic stop in Patterson, California — a rural agricultural town in the state's central valley. According to The Guardian US, Mendoza Hernandez, 36, says officers fired on him without justification. The gang designation, his attorney argues, is not an explanation for the shooting. It is a retroactive justification for it.
That sequence matters. Not shooting-then-label as coincidence. Shooting-then-label as procedure. The gang member designation has become one of ICE's most reliable tools — not for identifying dangerous individuals before an encounter, but for insulating the agency from accountability after one goes wrong. When an unarmed or non-threatening person is shot, detained, or deported, the gang label arrives in the paperwork like a receipt. It tells the public: this person was not like you. The violence was earned.
ICE's use of gang databases has faced sustained criticism from civil liberties organizations for years. The agency relies heavily on the CalGang database and similar state systems, which have documented histories of error. A 2016 state audit of CalGang found that nearly 600 people in the database were listed as gang members before they turned one year old. The criteria for inclusion are broad, inconsistently applied, and often impossible to contest — a tattoo, an association, a neighborhood, a prior contact with police that never resulted in a charge. There is no formal due process for removal. Once the label attaches, it follows a person through every subsequent encounter with law enforcement, including immigration enforcement. And when that encounter turns violent, the label does the work of justification the facts cannot.
This is not an isolated failure of one agent in one agricultural town. It is a structural feature of how ICE manages accountability — or more precisely, avoids it. As Tinsel News has reported, ICE's own internal tracking systems have repeatedly failed to account for detained individuals, and the agency has faced mounting scrutiny over the conditions and transparency of its operations. The gang designation is part of the same architecture: a labeling system that operates without independent verification, without meaningful appeal, and with enormous consequences for the people it touches.
The Patterson shooting also fits a pattern that extends well beyond immigration enforcement. Texas prosecutors used a Black teenager's rap lyrics to argue future dangerousness and secure a death sentence — James Broadnax has been on death row for 16 years. The logic is the same: attach a cultural or associational marker that codes the target as inherently threatening, then use that marker to make the violence look proportionate. Gang membership, like rap lyrics, functions as a pre-emptive verdict. It tells the jury — or the public — that the state's conduct needs no further examination.
What makes the Mendoza Hernandez case particularly stark is the timeline Kolasinski has laid out. His client was shot. Then he was labeled. The label did not inform the decision to use lethal force. It followed that decision and was deployed to defend it. That is not intelligence-led enforcement. That is narrative management. And it works, repeatedly, because the burden of disproving a gang label falls entirely on the person who was shot — not on the agency that applied it.
ICE has not provided a public accounting of how Mendoza Hernandez came to be flagged, what criteria justified the traffic stop, or what threat assessment preceded the decision to open fire. The agency has not confirmed whether the gang designation existed before Tuesday's encounter or was added to his file afterward. Those are not minor procedural questions. They are the entire question. An agency that can apply a label retroactively, without independent review, and use that label to deflect scrutiny of a shooting has built a system designed to be unaccountable by design.
Mendoza Hernandez was still hospitalized when his attorney visited him Thursday morning. He is recovering from more than six gunshot wounds sustained during a traffic stop in a town most Americans have never heard of. Congress has handed ICE $75 billion and imposed almost no rules on how the agency uses force. Until there is independent oversight of gang databases, mandatory pre-encounter verification of designations, and a transparent public record of when labels are applied relative to when force is used, the next man shot by ICE will also, somehow, turn out to have been a gang member all along.
