NEW YORK: US agents pounced on two immigrants in the hallway of a New York courthouse Friday, wrestling them to the ground in a forceful display of President Donald Trump’s crackdown on people without papers.
The two men had just attended a scheduled hearing when plainclothes Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers, some wearing black face masks, grabbed them.
The officers yelled for the men not to move or put up resistance and forced them to lay face-down on the ground as they tied their hands behind their backs and arrested them.
The immigrants were then whisked away into an elevator on the 12th floor of the Jacob K Javits Federal Building in Manhattan.
The routine appointment they hoped would be a step toward life in America ended in shock and detention.
AFP was on hand to witness these events because there was a similar arrest at the same courthouse earlier in the week and the agency suspected more might be imminent.
It was not immediately clear exactly why these two men were arrested nor the fate that awaits them.
Trump was elected to a second term largely on a promise to crack down hard on the entry and presence of undocumented migrants and Americans largely support the idea.
But polls show they also find tactics like surprise courthouse arrests by agents with black masks to be harsh.
In recent weeks ICE agents have intensified operations like this in and around American immigration courts.
After Trump swept back into power in January, the Department of Homeland Security revoked regulations that limited agents’ access to protected areas like the courts.
One of the men arrested was a 34-year-old Dominican named Joaquin Rosario who arrived in the United States a year ago, registered with authorities as he came in, and had his first immigration hearing Friday, said a relative of his, Julian Rosario, who declined to say how they were related.
“He was at ease. He did not think anything was going to happen,“ said the relative, who was still visibly upset by what he had witnessed as agents threw the other man to the ground.
Rosario was so unworried he did not even bother to have a lawyer with him, the relative said.
The other detainee looked to be Asian. He arrived on his own and was accompanied by one of many immigration advocacy group volunteers who walk with such immigrants to and from the courtroom. The idea is to make them feel safe.
This time the volunteers screamed out as the agents arrested the two men but this did nothing to halt the raid.
Before this arrest other immigrants with appointments, including entire families, came and went with no problem.
A pair of Venezuelans who refused to give their names were jubilant because their next appointment is not until 2027 -- that’s how backlogged the US immigration court system is.
- ‘Sound the alarm’ -
Human rights groups are outraged by these operations, arguing that they sap trust in the courts and make immigrants wary of showing up for appointments as they try to gain US residency.
“They’re illegal abductions,“ said Karen Ortiz, herself a court employee who was demonstrating Friday against these sudden arrests of migrants.
“We need to sound the alarm and show the public how serious this is and one way we can do that is actually physically putting ourselves between a masked ICE agent and someone they’re trying to detain and send away,“ Ortiz told AFP.
Since returning to power Trump has dramatically tested the limits of executive power as he cracked down on foreigners without papers, arguing that the United States is being invaded by criminals and other undesirables.
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