July 25, 2025
“We’re going to end up shooting some of them.”
At 9:00 on the morning of May 2, 2025, a Florida Highway Patrol officer pulled over a van with 18-year-old U.S. citizen Kenny Laynez-Ambrosio and two undocumented men in it. Laynez-Ambrosio’s mother was driving the men to their landscaping job. The patrol officer called U.S. Border Patrol agents. Laynez-Ambrosio recorded what happened next. The Guardian’s Clare Considine reported the story today.
The video shows a female officer asking if anyone in the van is in the U.S. illegally. One man said he was undocumented. “OK, let’s go,” Laynez-Ambrosio heard one of the officers say. An officer popped the door of the van open and grabbed the man by the neck in a chokehold. In the video, several officers pull the man from the van and tell him to “put your f*cking head down.” While Laynez-Ambrosio can be heard telling his friend in Spanish not to resist, the officers drop the man to the ground with a stun gun.
“You’re funny, bro,” one officer says to another, apparently the one who used the stun gun. The officers laugh.
Another says, “They’re starting to resist more now,” to which an officer replies: “We’re going to end up shooting some of them.”
Later the officers say: “Goddamn! Woo! Nice!” adding: “Just remember, you can smell that [inaudible] $30,000 bonus.”
Diamond Walker and Valentina Palm of the Palm Beach Post added that an officer explained the stun gun: “He was being a d***. “That’s the one we tased.”
The officers arrested Laynez-Ambrosio, a U.S. citizen, and held him for six hours in a cell at a Customs and Border Patrol station, then charged him with obstruction without violence. He was sentenced to 10 hours of community service and a four-hour anger management course.
Eighty-four years ago today, on July 25, 1941, Emmet Till was born in Chicago, Illinois.
In August 1955, when he was fourteen years old, Till went to visit relatives in a small Mississippi town. After the wife of a white man named Roy Bryant accused the Black boy of flirting with her, Bryant and his half-brother, J. W. Milam, kidnapped Till, brutally beat him, mutilated him, shot him in the back of the head, and dumped his body in the Tallahatchie River.
In September 1955 an all-white jury took just over an hour to find Bryant and Milam not guilty. A member of the jury said, “We wouldn’t have taken so long if we hadn’t stopped to drink pop.”
Immune from further prosecution, Bryant and Milam told their story to Look magazine for $4,000. They said they had kidnapped and beaten Till to frighten him, but when he refused to beg for mercy, they drove him to the river. Milam asked, “You still as good as I am?” and when Till answered, “Yeah,” they shot him, tied a 75-pound cotton gin fan around his neck with barbed wire, and threw him in.
“What else could we do?” Milam said. “He was hopeless. I’m no bully. I never hurt a n*gger in my life. I like n*ggers, in their place. I know how to work ’em. But I just decided it was time a few people got put on notice. As long as I live and can do anything about it, n*ggers are gonna stay in their place.”
After Till’s body had been recovered from the Tallahatchie, the county sheriff directed that the body be buried quickly, but Till’s mother insisted that her son’s body be returned to Chicago.
There, she insisted on an open-casket funeral.
“Let the world see what I have seen,” she said.
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Notes:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jul/25/florida-teen-immigration-arrest
https://www.life.com/history/the-murder-of-emmett-till-and-the-sham-trial-that-shocked-the-nation/
https://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/till/confession.html
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/emmett-trial-jw-milam-and-roy-bryant/
You literally take my breath away. I have followed you for many years. I hope you know how much you are appreciated for the perspective you bring to this insane world in which we live. I am quite sure you are the reason I have stayed anywhere close to sane over these past 8 or so years. It is my great honor to support your work.
As it ever was it is. Until and unless white men are removed from positions of authority and are replaced by people who have experienced the generational trauma perpetrated upon them and their ancestors by said white men, nothing will really change. Because the vast majority of cis, heterosexual white men I know are so comfortable in their privilege and power they will do absolutely nothing to disturb it. Sorry folks: this is the truth.