This is the full, unedited video that Dan Mathers, of Key West, filmed from his point of view before and during his arrest by a US Customs and Border Protection agent on July 21, 2025.
This video shows Mathers speaking with the agent, saying he thought the agent — who remains publicly unidentified by his employers — would be taller in person.
Mathers was out on Eaton Street, with a few other locals, filming the unidentified agent — locals say his first name in Bruno — detain a Haitian immigrant and put him in their white SUV.
Members of the Key West Immigrant Support Network, plus Mathers, said the Haitian was eventually released from custody and returned to his family. It’s a small island, Mathers pointed out.
Mathers shared his point-of-view video.
“This week it’s been hard to avoid seeing this online, and the only criticism people cite is, ‘The video clearly cuts, which is why we probably don’t hear the threat,” Mathers told me in a statement.
“So, I thought it was important to show the full video from my point-of-view to fill in that blank and clearly show there was never a threat,” he said.
Mathers, who owns Keys Coffee Co. in Key West, said, “Accusing me of making a threat was a baseless excuse the agent used in his attempt to intimidate and silence a US citizen.”
“Accusing me of making a threat was a baseless excuse the agent used in his attempt to intimidate and silence a US citizen.”
— Dan Mathers, of Key West, who was taken into custody by a US Customs and Border Protection agent after filming the agent detaining a Haitian immigrant on July 21, 2025.
The agent told Mathers was taking him in for “threatening” him.
“He just used it as an excuse to silence a witness,” Mathers said, over the phone Sunday. “I said the same thing to him he said to me: ‘I got you.’ I think he was angry and frustrated and grasping for a reason. He seems to me as someone who has intentionally built a reputation as scary. To have someone question that reputation in front of other witnesses, he felt the need to take me down.”
‘Enforcers of the law’
Mathers was driven by CBP from Key West to a facility in Marathon. He was held in an individual cell for the duration of his detention July 21, which ran from about 4 p.m. to midnight.
Agents did provide food: a pepperoni Hot Pocket and a Capri Sun, and a couple of other snacks. He was left alone in the small locked room, though.
No one offered him a chance to make a phone call until about 9:15 p.m.
Mathers’s wife and friends had no idea where he was until then.
Mathers me that at about 11:40 p.m a supervisor at the Marathon Border Patrol facility approached him and said, “You’re not getting out tonight.”
But the supervisor, who was in plainclothes, returned within five minutes to say, “Looks like you’re getting out tonight. I’m glad I didn’t tell you everything I was about to tell you.”
The supervisor also told Mathers that a lot of people think Border Patrol agents are only “enforcers of the law,” Mathers recalled him saying.
And when “something like this happens,” Mathers said, paraphrasing the supervisor, "agents must get attorneys and judges involved and “then things happen.”
This newly released video — from Mathers’s point of view — shows the two exchanging words.
Mathers told me that the agent he looked shorter than he appears in photos posted on social media taken by locals who’s spotted him detaining immigrants in public.
“He was using his position as an enforcer for our government to terrorize its citizens,” Mathers told me in a phone call today, Sunday, July 27, 2025.
“I felt it was important to use that moment to point out that this was just a man, to start to dismantle that aura of dread he had been cultivating in Key West.
Mathers said his actions were meant to tell the agent, “I want you to understand your behavior and how it reflects on us as a country.”
Full statement
Here’s the rest of Mathers’s statement, unedited:
“This agent had quickly gained a reputation across our tiny island as ‘The Big Bald One’ by threatening bystanders and attempting to scare everyone he came in contact with; people — and I’m talking about citizens and legal residents — were genuinely afraid of him.
So, yes, l made a comment about his height because I thought that addressing that fear directly would be helpful in dispelling some of the anxiety his presence had been engendering across this island.
Unfortunately for me, he was a classic bully, and when someone used their words to attempt to question his reign of terror, he lashed out."
I thought the fact that I’m an American citizen protected me from treatment like this, but I was wrong.
This agent was willing to trample my 4th amendment right for the sake of his ego and to silence first amendment protected speech in pursuit of his agenda - an agenda premised on profiling and incarcerating my neighbors, regardless of their immigration status.Share this post by tapping the button below.”
Update and clarification:
This original story miscalculated the number of hours Mathers spent in federal custody. It was eight hours total, not 10.
Mathers, who lives in Key West, was released just before 12 a.m. But he said he had to sit at the gas station next door for more than an hour to wait for his wife to make the nearly hour-long drive on US 1 up to Marathon.
“I didn’t have my phone, so I couldn’t get an Uber,” Mathers told me.
