Federal court records indicate U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents are using interstate weigh stations in Iowa to arrest and detain drivers suspected of being in the United States illegally.
According to court filings in immigration cases, the operation appears to involve state troopers working in concert with ICE agents to pull over commercial trucks that have driven past interstate weigh stations without stopping as required and then check the documents of the drivers. Instead of simply ticketing the drivers, the troopers are sending the drivers back to the weigh stations where ICE officials are, in some cases, already waiting to arrest and detain them.
“That is wild,” said David Goodner, executive director of the Iowa immigrant advocacy group Escucha Mi Voz. “I know we’ve been getting a lot of calls the last few months from immigrants who are increasingly being picked up by local police for minor traffic stops and then somehow finding their way into the immigration enforcement system. Last week, we had two immigrants from Coralville who were followed from their work site by a North Liberty police officer who pulled them over on the side of I-380. And within a minute or so, the Iowa State Patrol had also pulled up, and the trooper — not the North Liberty officer — started performing an immigration inquiry.”
While immigration checkpoints are common along the nation’s southern border, the use of state police in pulling over commercial truck drivers in Midwestern states has generated protests and some controversy.
One reason for the controversy is that weigh-station violations are an offense for which there is no possible jail sentence in Iowa, but they appear to be used in a manner that contemplates a driver’s arrest and jailing if, in ICE’s view, the driver is subject to immediate, mandatory detention based on their immigration status.
In some cases, ICE officers have taken the additional step of arguing in court that a weigh-station violation is evidence a driver poses a danger to the community and thus cannot be released on bond.
One such case involves Suraj Vasal, who in 2022 came to the United States from India seeking asylum and was then released on his own recognizance.
Court filings indicate that on Feb. 11, 2026, Vasal was driving a commercial semitruck on Interstate 80 in Iowa when he failed to stop at a weigh station. Iowa State Patrol Trooper Nathaniel Rippey pulled Vasal over, ticketed him, and then made an “immigration inquiry” to have Immigration and Customs Enforcement check Vasal’s status.
According to court filings by Blake W. DeVary, an ICE deportation officer based in Des Moines, ICE officers took custody of Vasal during the traffic stop. They initially detained him within the agency’s “hold room” inside the Neal Smith Federal Building in Des Moines, according to the court filings, and then transferred him to the Polk County Jail.
Craig Peyton Gaumer, an assistant U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Iowa, then asserted in court that ICE had a valid warrant to detain Vasal based on the criminal act of failing to stop at the weigh station. Vasal’s attorney, Alexander Smith, argued to the court that DeVary’s claim that a weigh-station violation was evidence of a person posing a danger to the community “is not believable.”
Patrol: Cooperation with feds is normal
The Iowa Capital Dispatch asked the Iowa State Patrol to describe how the weigh-station apprehension process works in Iowa and the manner in which troopers are working with ICE agents at the weigh stations.
In response, the patrol’s public information officer, Sgt. Alex Dinkla, said only that the Iowa Department of Public Safety, of which the patrol is a part, complies with the law and “has always cooperated and assisted, to the extent permitted by law, with the investigative efforts of the United States Department of Homeland Security and the United States Department of Justice and its subsidiary agencies.”
Dinkla said that sort of cooperation “is no different than that which exists with other federal law enforcement agencies” such as the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms.
Last month, Pardeep Saini, 22, of Sacramento, California, was pulled over by Iowa State Patrol Trooper Aaron Taylor on Interstate 80 in Jasper County and instructed to go to a weigh station where, according to court records, ICE officials were already waiting.
At the weigh station, Taylor ticketed Saini for failing to stop at the weigh station prior to being pulled over and turned him over to ICE officials, who arrested him on the grounds that his student visa had been revoked. Saini was then taken to the Polk County Jail and detained. Saini’s attorney then filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court, seeking his client’s immediate release.
“This arrest is part of a new, nationwide initiative by ICE to arbitrarily arrest individuals,” attorney Benjamin Granfield Arato told the court. “ICE officers, in consultation with Department of Homeland Security attorneys and officials, station themselves in courthouse waiting rooms, hallways and elevator banks. When an individual exits their immigration hearing, ICE officers — typically masked and in plain clothes — immediately arrest the person and detain them.”
U.S. District Judge Rebecca Goodgame Ebinger recently ordered the Department of Justice to show cause as to why Saini is not being illegally detained by ICE in the Polk County Jail.
Last November, Iowa State Patrol Trooper Patrick Oetker pulled over Navdeep Singh, a California truck driver who failed to stop at a weigh station while driving on Interstate 80 near Mitchellville in Jasper County.
Singh, who claimed to have valid work authorization and a commercial driver’s license, was then turned over to ICE, taken to the Hardin County Jail and was later denied release on bond.
Use of weigh stations championed by Florida
The practice of ICE and state police using weigh-station violations has become increasingly common under the Trump administration, according to national advocacy groups. The practice appears to have been gained traction last summer in Florida, where the state’s attorney general announced that weigh stations there would begin doubling as immigration checkpoints.
The move followed an accident involving a tractor-trailer driver from India who allegedly made an illegal U-turn on the Florida Turnpike, causing a collision that killed three people. The driver had a valid commercial driver’s license, but is accused of being in the United States illegally.
Last fall, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security claimed it had made 3,000 arrests as part of what it called “Operation Midway Blitz.” More than 200 of those arrests were made in conjunction with Indiana State Police, who have a partnership that gives state troopers immigration enforcement powers.
Homeland Security said 50 of the 200 Inidiana arrests involved commercial truckers, many of whom were stopped for weigh-station violations.
Last fall, U.S. Rep. Byron Donalds, a Florida Republican, introduced H.R. 5177, dubbed “The Weigh Station Enforcement to Intercept and Guard Highways (WEIGH) Act.” The bill, which would codify an executive order by President Donald Trump, would require that all weigh stations along interstate highways review the commercial driver’s licenses of all truckers and verify the drivers’ English-language proficiency.
States that fail to comply with the requirement would risk the loss of federal funding for highways and the revocation of their commercial driver’s license program authority.
Goodner says that in Iowa, there’s an ongoing concern that federal pressure to advance ICE’s deportation goals has trickled down to state and local law enforcement.
“There’s no question that if you have a foreign-sounding name or you don’t have a driver’s license with you, and you get pulled over by the Iowa State Patrol, they’re going to do these immigration inquiries, like, 100% of the time,” he said, “The major question we have is how much pressure the Iowa State Patrol is putting on local sheriffs and local police departments to give them a call for these immigration inquiries when they pull people over.”
