ArcaMax

SAN DIEGO -- Cops lie. That's a fact. Some of you won't like hearing it. But that doesn't make it any less true.

Frankly, I don't like hearing it. My father was on the job for 37 years, from 1966 to 2003. I was raised to look up to law enforcement officers, and to give them the benefit of the doubt -- at least most of the time. Cops are going to make mistakes because everyone does. But most of them are just trying their best to do a tough and thankless job while making it home to their family at the end of their shift.

Still, the truth is that cops don't always tell the truth.

I assume that this has been the case since 1838, when the first publicly funded police department was founded in Boston. It was probably true even before then, in the early 1700s, when evil "slave patrols" popped up in the South to track down runaway slaves and return them to their owners.

Speaking of evil. As Americans should have learned by now -- 15 months after President Donald Trump sent federal agents and U.S. Marines to invade Los Angeles in June 2025 -- the cowboys at Immigration and Customs Enforcement aren't real police.

Under the best circumstances, federal immigration officials enforce laws that are largely civil in nature. In the Trump era, thousands of new ICE agents were hired. Many of them are poorly trained, and they couldn't pass routine background checks. The newbies trample upon due process, brutalize both undocumented and legal immigrants, engage in racial profiling, detain people without legitimate cause and even deport U.S. citizens. And unlike real police, they don't have to answer for these abuses.

In fact, it seems one of the few things that ICE agents have in common with legitimate law enforcement officers is the deceit. Recently, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent Christian Castro was charged with six counts of making materially false statements to federal law enforcement officials. In other words, lying.

The charges mark the first time that the Trump administration has charged an ICE agent involved in its enforcement surge. They stem from an incident on Jan. 14 when Castro, who is 52, allegedly shot a Venezuelan man in Minneapolis during the Trump administration's immigration crackdown in the city. That incident was investigated by the FBI, and Castro allegedly lied to federal agents -- repeatedly -- about the circumstances surrounding the shooting. Castro gave his version of events, and then video evidence gave a totally different version. Hence, the federal indictment.

As far as I recall, the first time I ever thought about cops lying was way back in November 1995 when I saw a story about a convening of police executives at Harvard Law School. Attendees got more than they bargained for when a pair of speakers -- Harvard Law School Professor Alan Dershowitz and New York City Police Commissioner William Bratton -- both agreed that police officers committing perjury by lying on the stand during criminal trials was a real thing. The unlikely duo insisted that "testilying" was a legitimate problem that needed to be dealt with.

In his remarks, Dershowitz went even further when he said that police officers were the "designated liars" of the criminal justice system and that prosecutors and judges were their accomplices because they turn a deaf ear when cops spread falsehoods.

Instead of dealing with the thorny issue of veracity within law enforcement, the policing industrial complex -- which includes rank-and-file officers, retired officers and police unions -- took the easy road. It got defensive. Then it went on the attack against Dershowitz and Bratton. An opportunity for reform passed us by.

Let's look back even further. In 1969, in Frazier v. Cupp, the Supreme Court ruled that deceptive interrogation tactics by police were legal. When cops were told they could lie to suspects, they took that to mean they could also lie to the public.

From there, it was a short walk to the point where police officers also lied to people they worked with -- informants, partners, superiors, etc. Once cops turned on the lying faucet, they couldn't turn it off.

Americans have been much too lenient toward law enforcement officers who lie. We tolerate deception. In fact, you could say that we have encouraged it. And as some people like to say, when you accept bad behavior, you get more of it.

Now here we are. An ICE agent is accused of lying to FBI agents. This can't come as a surprise to any of us.

========

To find out more about Ruben Navarrette and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

Copyright 2026 Creators Syndicate, Inc.