US citizens detained in Montana after speaking Spanish

A Montana woman said she plans to take legal action after a Border Patrol agent detained and questioned her and a friend - both U.S. citizens - after overhearing them speak in Spanish at a gas station.

The incident occurred early Wednesday morning at a convenience store in Havre, Montana, ?a town in the northern part of ?the state, near the border with Canada.

Ana Suda said she and her friend, Mimi Hernandez, were making a midnight run to the store to pick up some eggs and milk. Both are Mexican American and fluent in Spanish, and they were chatting in Spanish while waiting in line to pay when a uniformed Border Patrol agent interrupted them, Suda said.

“We were just talking and then I was going to pay,” Suda said. “I looked up (and saw the agent), and then after that he just requested my ID. I looked at him like, ‘Are you serious?’ He’s like, ‘Yeah, very serious.’?”

Suda said she felt uncomfortable and began recording the encounter with her cellphone after they had moved into the parking lot. In the video Suda recorded, she asks the agent why he was detaining them and he says it was specifically because he heard them speaking Spanish.

“Ma’am, the reason I asked you for your ID is because I came in here and I saw that you guys are speaking Spanish, which is very unheard of up here,” the agent can be heard saying in the video.

Suda asked whether they had been racially profiled; the agent said no.

“It has nothing to do with that,” the agent tells her. “It’s the fact that it has to do with you guys speaking Spanish in the store, in a state where it’s predominantly English-speaking.”

Suda, 37, was born in El Paso, Texas, and raised across the border in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, but has spent much of her adult life moving around the United States with her husband and young daughter. Hernandez is originally from central California, Suda said.

Despite explaining this to the agent and showing him their IDs, Suda said, he kept them in the parking lot for 35 to 40 minutes. Though no one raised their voices in the video, Suda said she and Hernandez were left shaken and upset by the encounter - which ended around 1 a.m.

Representatives from U.S. Customs and Border Protection did not immediately respond to a request for comment Sunday.

Suda said she plans to contact the American Civil Liberties Union to seek legal guidance.