Federal immigration agents in Minneapolis dragged Aliya Rahman from her car and detained her, according to a statement released by Rahman on Thursday, after a video of the arrest drew millions of views online.
Rahman, a U.S. citizen who said she was headed to a medical appointment, described being brought to a detention center where she said she was denied medical care and later lost consciousness. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security disputed her account, saying Rahman was an agitator who obstructed immigration officers conducting arrests in the area.
The statement said Rahman was on her way to a routine appointment at the Traumatic Brain Injury Center when federal immigration agents encountered her at an intersection. The video appears to show masked agents shouting commands over whistles, car horns and the noise from protesters, while an agent smashes the car’s passenger-side window.
Rahman’s statement said masked agents dragged her from her car and bound her “like an animal,” even after she said she was disabled. She said she did not move because she was “disabled trying to go to the doctor up there, that’s why I didn’t move,” according to the statement, as officers pulled her arms behind her back.
Her attorney, Alexa Van Brunt, director of the MacArthur Justice Center, said Rahman was in a “terrible and confusing position” and had “no where to go.” In a statement that Van Brunt wrote, she said Rahman’s “only options were to move her car forward in the direction of ICE officers and risk being accused of trying to harm them—which led to Renee Good’s death—or stay stationary, which in the end led to physical violence and abuse.”
The Department of Homeland Security, in an emailed statement on Thursday, disputed that account. The department said Rahman was an agitator who “ignored multiple commands by an officer to move her vehicle away from the scene,” and said she was arrested along with six other people it called agitators, including one person it accused of jumping on an officer’s back.
The department did not specify in the report whether Rahman was charged, and it did not respond to questions about Rahman’s assertion that she was denied medical treatment.
The Rahman video is among a series of viral clips that show federal immigration arrests in Minneapolis amid protests and competing accounts from officials and civilians, the AP said. In videos from the city and surrounding areas, observers described common elements such as whistles, shouting or honking horns, immigration officers breaking vehicle windows, and police using pepper spray on protesters, along with people being forcibly pulled from cars, stores or homes and detained for hours or longer.
The AP reported that in one video, heavily armed agents used a battering ram to break into the Minneapolis home of Garrison Gibson while his wife and 9-year-old child were inside. In the clip, the AP reported, a woman’s voice can be heard asking, “Where is the warrant?” and “Can you put the guns down? There is kids in this house.”
Another video described by the AP showed ICE agents, including Border Patrol Cmdr. Gregory Bovino, detaining two employees at a Target store in Richfield, Minnesota. Both were U.S. citizens who were later released, according to social media posts from family members, the AP said.
In south Minneapolis, the AP reported that Monica Bicking, 40, recorded video that appears to show a federal agent kneeing a man in the face at least five times while other agents pinned him facedown on the pavement. Bicking said she works full time as a nurse at a homeless shelter and does not intentionally attend organized protests, but she said she has begun carrying a whistle after encountering ICE became more common in recent weeks.
“We’re hypervigilant every time we leave our houses, looking for ICE, trying to protect our neighbors, trying to support our neighbors, who are now just on lockdown,” Bicking said, in a quote included in the AP report.
Rahman said that after her detention she felt lucky to be alive, telling the AP that agents dragged her from her car and bound her “like an animal” and that she repeatedly asked for medical care while in custody. She said she was taken to a hospital only after she lost consciousness in her cell.
Her counsel said Rahman was treated for injuries consistent with assault and has been released from the hospital. In the statement, Rahman thanked emergency department staff, saying, “They gave me hope when I thought I was going to die.”
AP journalist Rebecca Boone reported from Boise, Idaho.