Feds came knocking!
Editor’s Note: I was keeping my mouth shut at the time, but I was talking to someone recently (2026) about this and thought it prudent to write down most of my perspective of what happened, because it was fairly surreal. But there may be inaccuracies stemming from the fact that this is all written 20+ years after the fact.
Hopping off the light-rail, I jumped on my bike and whizzed through the mostly silent backstreets of an industrial area, until I skidded around the corner of a warehouse that my employer - a nutrition company that sold dietary supplements for body builders, where I was doing IT-related things for them - was renting and came face to face with the most police cars I’d ever seen anywhere in my life.
I must have looked like a deer in the headlights of a speeding car, because a huge guy I would describe as Samoan or similar appearance with a badge on a chain around his neck, arms the size of tree trunks, aggressively and authoritatively points at me and yelled “You! Do you work here?” I wasn’t sure how to answer so I simply went “not any more I guess?” accompanied by the nervous laughter I would later find out is apparently a symptom of neurodivergence.
After briefly considering the intrusive thoughts screaming at me to flee, which absolutely would have made things worse I walked over and promptly entered custody of the United States’ finest. None of us present (I saw Tommy and “Bob”) also already sitting on a curb near me while the cops asked me a shitload of questions, who I was, what I was there for, etc. Now in what will probably slightly justify the thoughts at the beginning of this paragraph, it must be stressed that shortly (~12 months or so, if memory serves) prior to this, the INS had (unknowingly to me at this point as I’d had no correspondence) declined to renew my green card and I was working for cash. To say I was shitting bricks would be an understatement, I was sure I was getting deported after this.
The questioning beyond that was, as I recall, very light. I’m not a hundred percent sure, but I think they may have questioned Bob harder than Tommy and I - Bob (not his real name) was Egyptian, and the people they were interested in were Arabic speakers. Or it might have been post-9/11 middle-eastern concern. We’d later learn that they had apparently surreptitiously bugged and monitored the place, and it had been part of a widespread coordinated raid between the DEA and the RCMP, and thus they didn’t actually need any evidence from us - which was just as well because I had zero clue what the fuck was going on. As far as I knew, the dodgiest thing we sold was synthetic testosterone.
With the parking lot interviews out of the way, the three of us sat on the curb, with our zip-tie handcuffs, while a heap of feds and local LEAs (I wanna say Sacramento County Sheriff, but I’m honestly not sure) swarmed all over the building like termites, but looking pretty triumphant. After some time, they ceased detaining all of us (including Bob, he must have satisfied them that he was not one of the people of interest) - none of us were under arrest - and we were free to go, but if we wanted inside the building we had to wait until they were done. I remember considering leaving, but thinking that I was owed quite a few days’ pay and we’d just bought a car, so I hung around to see whether this was all just a giant mistake.
We were eventually informed - I don’t remember by who - that the owner of the company and at least one employee of it, were allegedly involved in smuggling of controlled precursor chemicals for the production of methamphetamine from Canada and apparently distributing it to California gangs. Allegedly, one day when the AC in the office had failed and the warehouse was more comfortable, I’d sat and ate my lunch on a metric ton (1000kg, in four 250kg barrels on a pallet) of what was supposed to be Glutamine, but was allegedly instead Ephedrine.
I’m not being coy with my use of the word “allegedly” here - these barrels were later returned, and as part of the very few days that I worked for the company again, we took those same barrels, shoved them into a container, and they were shipped off for export. Coupled with the fact that I looked years after the fact and it didn’t seem like any charges had actually panned out on the owner of the company, and I am still not exactly sure what to make of it.
But yeah, my full-time employment was over at this point. The owner’s brothers (who owned the liquor store right around the corner from our apartment at the time, who I’d also done IT work for, and were instrumental in getting me the job there) came in a few days later to try and get everything caught up, but when I asked about pay they basically implied that they would pay me out for the time I’d already worked, but they did not have enough cash on hand to keep me (or any of us really) on. I helped them out where I could (ie when they needed help with Quickbooks or similar) but I wasn’t really interested in volunteering too many hours for free, and going forward our arrangement was cash at the end of the day, so I really only went back two or three more times.
One of those times was to reconnect all the computers, which they got back from “evidence” some months later. One of those machines was my old work desktop, which the feds had managed to drop and destroy - the case so badly dinged that the side would not go back on, and the CPU heatsink had pulled the retaining clips from the motherboard. I took a really poor quality photo of it which prompted this memory being dredged up.
I laughed at the time, because they took the office printer away, a low-end laser printer that was only USB, no print server or nothing, but left the Netgear router that was out on the wall in the warehouse. I’m not sure if federal tech seizures have improved in the past two decades and have no desire to find out.
But that’s it, that’s the story of the one and only time I was detained by law enforcement, in probably the least-cool fashion ever (as in it sounds way cooler if I’m terse and sounds progressively less cool the more I explain it). I’m honestly not sure how I ended up not getting deported over it, I’m guessing because they, like me at the time, ran my name with INS, saw my form I-485 “in progress”, ignored the fact that it had been so for three and a half years, and assumed that I was legal.
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