By any reasonable measure, Ernesto Campos Gutierrez is a pillar of his Bakersfield community. A resident of more than two decades, he is a homeowner. He is a business owner. He is an active member of his church. 

There’s no clear reason why he was stopped by an unmarked SUV as he drove to his gardening job on Jan. 8, with a mini trailer containing his equipment in tow. He wasn’t speeding, and his license and registration were up to date, according to court documents.

More than five months later, there are even fewer answers as to why the encounter turned violent.

Campos Gutierrez handed officers his ID, but when they refused to say why he’d been pulled over and demanded his keys, he said no, according to court documents. Agents then forcibly removed his passenger after threatening to shatter his windows with a handheld tool. Then an officer slashed his tires.

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Campos Gutierrez was arrested, he was told, for “alien smuggling” — and detained for hours in a facility about 20 minutes away, despite telling officers he was a U.S. citizen.

He was far from the only one swept up in Bakersfield that day.

Bree Bernwanger, a senior staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California, represents several of those targeted by what turned out to be a series of coordinated raids. She told me immigration agents “were sending their roving patrols to agricultural areas, to Home Depot, to places where farmworkers go for breakfast, and they were timing it with their shifts, so they were clearly going after farmworkers and day laborers.”

These raids weren’t just unusual for their brazenness. They were conducted by a Border Patrol unit hundreds of miles from its typical territory — one that has not just ramped up its activity far from the border but has boasted about legally dubious behavior on social media.

Many of the initial reports about the raids assumed Immigration and Customs Enforcement was responsible. It didn’t occur to most people that such actions would be carried out by another agency, a sector of Border Patrol based in El Centro, a few miles from the U.S.-Mexico border in Imperial County, more than 300 miles away.

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In Facebook posts following the Bakersfield raid, which the El Centro sector named Operation Return to Sender, it boasted: “We are taking it to the bad people and bad things in Bakersfield” and promised “We are planning operations for other locals (sic) such as Fresno and especially Sacramento.”

Since the Bakersfield episode, El Centro agents have descended on more locations far from the southern border, including El Monte and Pomona in Los Angeles County.

Its in-person confrontations and its social media presence are now being closely scrutinized. In two separate legal cases over the past month, lawyers have used the agency’s posts as evidence of agents’ intent to act unlawfully; in both cases, judges intervened to block the Border Patrol’s actions.

The El Centro section is responsible for 70 miles of the U.S.-Mexico border, from the Jacumba Mountains east of San Diego along the rugged desert terrain of Imperial County. Nearly 1,000 agents and 149 support staffers are spread among three stations at El Centro, Calexico and Indio. But the agency is technically allowed to operate within 100 miles of any border — including the ocean, meaning most of California and a vast majority of the U.S. population is subject to its authority.

Under Trump,........

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