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President Donald Trump and his passionately xenophobic and anti-immigrant administration would have us believe that it is their agents of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) who are “under siege,” and yet, it is these masked agents who keep proving that their aggression towards undocumented migrants, potentially undocumented migrants, legal immigrants and U.S. citizens alike is what should be the cause of our collective concern.
Take, for a glaring example, an amNewYork reporter who appeared to have gotten injured after ICE agents grabbed one reporter and shoved another at a New York City immigration court on Tuesday. The incident was captured in video footage that has since been making the rounds on social media.
The video shows a group of people walking onto an elevator, including the aforementioned amNewYork reporter, who was carrying his camera. A masked man wearing a bulletproof vest with the word “police” is seen grabbing the reporter, as other officers shout, “Get the f*** off the elevator.” The NY-based publication identified its injured journalist as its police bureau chief, Dean Moses, who had reportedly gone to film ICE agents as they apprehended an immigrant in the elevator. According to the Associated Press, Moses wasn’t the only media employee to be attacked and injured by ICE during the incident, which also involved freelance photographer Olga Fedorova, whose clients notably include AP. Fedorova was reportedly not seriously injured.
From AP:
A visual journalist identified as L. Vural Elibol of the Turkish news agency Anadolu hit his head on the floor at 26 Federal Plaza in Manhattan after U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents pushed one journalist off a public elevator and shoved another journalist to the floor, according to video and witnesses. A bystander held Elibol’s head and a nurse treated him until an ambulance arrived, witnesses said. Video showed him in a neck brace as paramedics wheeled him out of the building on a stretcher.
Predictably, Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin defended the agents, saying they were being “swarmed by agitators and members of the press, which obstructed operations.”
“Officers repeatedly told the crowd of agitators and journalists to get back, move, and get out of the elevator,” McLaughlin said in a statement. “Rioters and sanctuary politicians who encourage individuals to interfere with arrests are actively creating hostile environments that put officers, detainees and the public in harm’s way.”
Riiiiiight. Poor, under siege ICE agents are under attack by the media, Democratic politicians, rioters and protestors just for doing their jobs and ridding America of the illegal immigrant scourge that is ravaging our “war-ravaged” streets. This is the narrative Trump and his loyalists have run with to justify sending the National Guard to Portland, Los Angeles and other Democrat-run cities where law enforcement, city officials, other authorities and residents consistently deny that what the Trump administration describes is actually what’s happening.
Moses, of course, tells a different story.
“I walked into the elevator behind them, and they started screaming at me,” Moses told amNewYork. “Then they pushed me, grabbed me by my arms, and started pulling me out of the elevator. I tried to hold on, but I got shoved out.”
More from AP:
Video taken by photographer Stephanie Keith showed that during the struggle, another agent shoved Fedorova, who fell backward toward where Elibol lay on the floor. Fedorova said photographers had worked in the hallway outside immigration court for months without incident. The agents making arrests Tuesday, she said, didn’t announce any limits where journalists could go, and they hadn’t made it clear they were making an arrest when they got on the elevator. “If they tell us to get out, to not cross a certain line, we follow their orders,” Fedorova said. “In this case, it was not clear to anyone that this was a detention at all.”
AP also noted that this incident happened just days after a similar incident unfolded in which a federal agent at the same Manhattan immigration court was captured on video shoving an Ecuadorian woman into a wall and onto the floor after her husband was arrested. Both incidents happened in a part of the federal building that is open to the public, including immigrants who are on their way to and from court hearings. In other words, ICE agents are waiting to arrest migrants who are literally trying to do the right thing and go through the legal channels to remain in the country, a situation people who possess the capacity for empathy have been complaining about since nearly the beginning of Trump’s immigration crackdown.
“This abuse of law-abiding immigrants and the reporters telling their stories must end,” New York Gov. Kathy Hochul said in a statement, denouncing the agents’ actions and the MAGA policies that enable them. “What the hell are we doing here?”
State Assemblyman and Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani — who Trump and his MAGA minions just love, by the way — also weighed in on the incident.
“We cannot accept or normalize what has now become routine violence at 26 Federal Plaza. It has no place in our city,” Mamdani said in a statement.
Look, ICE agents can play the victim all they want, but police brutality is police brutality, and the camera shows what it shows.
We see you, just as we see how far this administration has descended into all-out authoritarianism. The least the people, including journalists, can do is keep documenting it.
SEE ALSO:
ICE Agent Relieved Of Duties For Shoving Woman To The Ground
ICE Agents Claim Assaults Are Reasons For Masks, But That’s A Lie
Federal Judge Rules ICE Racially Profiles
ICE Agents Appear To Attack And Injure New York Journalists While Apprehending Migrants At Immigration Hearings was originally published on newsone.com
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