Las Vegas Sun90%
Former FBI agent says viral botched ICE arrest at Las Vegas airport defies basic police standards 70%
By Ava Chatlosh83%
7/20/2026, 7:00:00 PM
BS Summary: This article contains 27 faulty reasoning types, including Confirmation Bias, Availability Heuristic, and Unattributed Quote, with Negativity Bias as the most egregious example at 17.7% saturation with 194 hits. Analysis detected 1,811 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,098 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 62.9% and a BS Rank of 70% (6,627 of 21,887 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 69.70% of the article peer group.
A botched arrest attempt by federal immigration agents last week at Harry Reid International Airport departed from several standard law enforcement practices, according to a retired FBI special agent who reviewed the incident.
The confrontation July 13 went viral after a video was posted Thursday on social media, showing Phu Nguyen, 57, an Australian citizen born in Vietnam, frantically yelling, “I do not know what they are doing.”
Ray Johnson, former assistant special agent in charge of the FBI’s Las Vegas field office, said the incident was one of the most poorly handled he’s seen.
“I have never seen a scenario where an attempted arrest left one handcuff on a subject and they just abandoned their arrest and walked away just casually down the hall,” Johnson said.
“That was so highly unusual.”
When Metro Police arrived, officers found Nguyen with a handcuff still attached to one of his wrists, officials said.
Police said their investigation determined that agents with U.S.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement had attempted to detain Nguyen but left before completing the arrest.
Johnson, an adjunct professor at UNLV’s William S.
Boyd School of Law, flagged the officers’ lack of identification and their attempt to cover their faces with their hoods during the arrest.
He also singled out the handcuffs they left behind, the second pair of pink handcuffs held by one of them and their failure to call for backup despite backup being readily available from Metro Police at the airport.
Agents are trained to keep eyes on the subject and the crowd while retreating quickly if an arrest must be abandoned, Johnson said.
Instead, the two ICE agents walked away casually.
Metro officers ran a records check and found no outstanding warrants for Nguyen.
ICE agents arrested Nguyen the following day at Los Angeles International Airport, the agency said.
ICE said Nguyen had overstayed his visa and was “taken into custody as soon as he landed in Los Angeles,” adding that “agitators” had attempted to help him evade ICE officers at the Las Vegas airport.
“When I initially saw the video, my reaction was this is an algorithmic AI just making fun of ICE,” Johnson said.
“When I learned that these were actual ICE agents, this was an actual attempted arrest, I was really mortified at what it did to the reputation of law enforcement.”
The agents walking away also left Metro in an awkward spot, Johnson said, because the federal agents were not there to explain their side of the story.
Johnson said Nguyen being put on the ground wasn’t itself unusual — subjects are often taken down if they resist arrest.
What alarmed Johnson was how poorly executed everything else was, falling short of standards set 30 or 40 years ago.
“If I’m that person, I think I’d be like, I just almost got robbed, I almost got kidnapped,” Johnson said.
U.S.
Sen.
Catherine Cortez Masto, D-Nev., called the incident “deeply disturbing, and frankly confusing.”
Other Democrats in the Nevada congressional delegation, including Sen.
Jacky Rosen and Rep.
Dina Titus, also were critical of the ICE agents.
“No one should be tackled to the ground by individuals wearing masks and hoods and only be told afterward that they are law enforcement.
That undermines public trust, creates confusion and puts everyone at risk,” Rep.
Steven Horsford, D-Nev., wrote in a social media post.
The Nevada Latino Legislative Caucus and the Asian American Native Hawaiian Pacific Islander Caucus are calling for a full investigation, urging Gov.
Joe Lombardo to explain how his administration will ensure transparency and accountability for federal law enforcement operating in Nevada.
Lombardo, a Republican, hasn’t commented.
“Joe Lombardo claims that his relationship with (President) Donald Trump keeps ICE out of Nevada — but when Trump’s rogue ICE terrorized this man, he folded to Trump and stayed silent like always,” said Attorney General Aaron Ford, a Democrat who is challenging Lombardo in Nevada’s gubernatorial election in November.
The incident in Las Vegas adds to a growing list of questionable enforcement actions by ICE.
The agency received $75 billion in funding under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act as part of Trump’s mass deportation push — money that has helped expand recruitment and accelerate hiring, in some cases bringing less-experienced officers into the field.
Former instructors have raised alarms that shortened, 42-to-56-day academy curricula are insufficient to prepare officers for enforcement duties.
After the January shooting deaths of two civilians in Minnesota by ICE agents, the agency mandated additional supplemental instruction for officers who graduated under the shortened curriculum.
Beginning in July, the agency also expanded its core training program at the federal center in Georgia from 42 days to roughly 71 days to cover crowd-control tactics and high-risk operations.
In the first week of July, more than 10,000 people were detained by ICE in five days, according to The New York Times.
That increase in activity led to multiple deaths.
On July 7, a Mexican national who had been in the U.S. without legal status for nearly 35 years was fatally shot by an ICE officer in Houston.
He was in the final stages of obtaining legal status through his children.
He had no criminal record or prior deportation order, according to the Houston Chronicle.
Last week, a 25-year-old Colombian man was shot and killed by an ICE officer in Maine.
The ICE officer who fired the deadly shot had told a court that he had suffered lingering cognitive issues after sustaining a serious head injury, CNN reported.
Also last week, a 28-year-old Mexican man died in Florida after a traffic accident while fleeing from ICE.
In Nevada, it is difficult to tell how many people are being detained.
Most arrests occur through 287(g) agreements — partnerships that allow many arrests to happen covertly, without public notice.
Under those agreements, when a Latino immigrant is arrested by local law enforcement, often on a minor charge, instead of being released from custody while their case is pending, they are handed over to ICE instead.
While law enforcement has the data, they are unwilling to give it up, and it is nearly impossible to obtain through Nevada public records law, according to Athar Haseebullah, executive director of the ACLU of Nevada.
“There have been surges in the numbers, and the best place to get information on what those numbers look like is from law enforcement, because we don’t have access to that information unless we pay an exorbitant cost because of our public records law,” Haseebullah said.
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