On a muggy evening in mid-May, Lorenzo Sarabia Morales was driving home with his co-worker from a 12-hour shift at a poultry farm when the lights of a Georgia State Patrol car flashed behind him. Sarabia and his co-worker, Abraham Mendez Luna, were both concerned about recent rumors of Immigration and Customs Enforcement activity in Moultrie, an agricultural town in southwest Georgia’s Colquitt County. But as they pulled over to the side of the road, they didn’t sense any immediate danger. These seemed to be police officers, not federal agents, and Sarabia hadn’t been speeding.

What the men didn’t know was that they were about to be swept up in a stunning wave of targeted yet imprecise immigration enforcement. At the time, the Trump administration claimed it was after violent criminals who posed serious threats — so the men, who had no criminal records, were shocked when they were arrested and transferred to Stewart Detention Center, a privately owned ICE facility notorious for allegations of abuse and neglect.

The Colquitt County Sheriff’s Office presented the night’s arrests as a successful collaboration between the sheriff’s investigations unit, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Georgia State Police. The operation’s primary goal, as the sheriff’s office put it in a May 13 press release posted on Facebook, was to serve warrants against 11 people for crimes against children.

Through interviews, press statements, and emails concerning Sarabia and Mendez’s case, The Intercept found a gulf between how the Colquitt County Sheriff’s Office presented the operation to the public and what actually happened. Rather than serving existing criminal warrants, local authorities conducted traffic stops, arrested people without licenses, and sent information about the detainees to DHS. Only then, after the men were in custody, did the federal agency issue warrants for their arrest.

Ronald Jordan, a lieutenant at the Colquitt County Sheriff’s Office, told The Intercept in a statement that 19 people were arrested across Moultrie on the night of May 12, and that DHS placed immigration detainers on 13 of them.

“The 13 detainers issued by DHS were received after the subjects were taken into custody,” Jordan wrote.

Georgia State Patrol and DHS did not respond to a request for comment.

“The people we’ve spoken with so far were randomly pulled over or profiled and just arrested on the spot, either for not having a driver’s license or for no charge at all,” said Meredyth Yoon, an attorney with Asian Americans Advancing Justice–Atlanta who has been investigating the May 12 operation. “That’s not a targeted operation based on people having outstanding warrants.”

“The 13 detainers issued by DHS were received after the subjects were taken into custody.”

There was some effort to serve existing warrants from DHS, the sheriff’s office wrote in its release. But the operation hit a snag when “information regarding the presence of DHS personnel began circulating on social media,” forcing DHS to end the operation early.

Rather than abandon their efforts entirely, the sheriff’s office wrote, officers shifted to a “concentrated patrol throughout Colquitt County,”........

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