Jaime Zaldaña was driving to work on Interstate 35 through the San Antonio suburb of Schertz on a winter morning in 2010 when his red pickup passed a U.S. Border Patrol unit on the side of the highway. He was 150 miles from the nearest border crossing, in Eagle Pass.

The agents would later write that Zaldaña and two co-workers “appeared to be startled” and looked “straight ahead,” never acknowledging them — reason enough, they claimed, to pull the truck over. Zaldaña was eventually deported as an undocumented immigrant, but not before the U.S. government paid $25,000 to settle his claim the agents stopped him only because of his ethnicity and race, according to public court documents.