By Ted Hesson, Brian Snyder and Heather Schlitz
CHELSEA, Massachusetts/BROADVIEW, Illinois (Reuters) -A U.S. immigration officer shoving a woman in a New York City courthouse to the floor. Protesters dispersed with tear gas outside a Chicago detention center. A woman injured during an arrest in the Boston area.
The incidents on Thursday and Friday highlight the growing tensions in major U.S. cities over President Donald Trump’s aggressive immigration crackdown days after a shooting targeting an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Dallas left one detainee dead and two others seriously wounded.
Trump, a Republican, aims to deport record numbers of immigrants living in the U.S. illegally, framing the push around criminals but arresting many without criminal records. Residents in New York, Chicago, Washington, and other Democrat-leaning metro areas have pushed back in recent months as ICE has ramped up enforcement.
Some Hispanic residents have said they are being stopped solely because of their appearance, allegations rejected by the Trump administration. The Supreme Court earlier this month lifted a lower court injunction that had restricted ICE from stopping a person based solely on ethnicity, language or other factors in the Los Angeles area.
Milagros Barreto, a worker advocate with La Colaborativa, a pro-immigrant group in Chelsea, Massachusetts, said she witnessed ICE throw a Guatemalan woman to the ground on Friday despite her being a permanent resident.
Reuters captured images of the woman on the ground, her hands pinned behind her back, being detained by federal agents while her son stood nearby crying. Further images showed her in distress as she was taken away by emergency responders.
The woman was accompanying an extended family member to a court hearing when ICE officers stopped their pickup truck, smashed two of the windows, and took the family member into custody, Barreto said.
The woman’s shoulder was scratched and she aggravated an existing back injury, requiring her to be hospitalized, Barreto said. She gave the woman’s name only as Hilda.
“It doesn’t matter where you come from. If you look like a Latino, you’re a target,” said Barreto, a U.S. citizen originally from Puerto Rico.
Reuters was unable to immediately confirm the details of Barreto’s account or establish the immigration status of the woman detained.
DHS and ICE did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
STANDOFFS IN MAJOR CITIES
California Governor Gavin Newsom, one of the leading Democratic critics of Trump’s immigration crackdown, signed legislation last week that would prevent ICE officers from wearing masks to hide their identities. Critics of mask-wearing says it stifles accountability.
However, Trump officials say officers need to wear them to avoid being targeted. U.S. authorities said on Thursday that the deceased suspect in the Dallas shooting intended to kill and “terrorize” ICE agents.
In a New York City courthouse hallway on Thursday, an ICE officer charged at a woman who begged for officers not to take away her husband, according to ProPublica, which shared video of the incident online.
The woman, Monica Moreta-Galarza from Ecuador, is seeking asylum in the U.S., ProPublica said.
In a rare Trump-era rebuke of ICE, U.S. Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said on Friday that the officer had been “relieved of current duties” pending an investigation.
“The officer’s conduct in this video is unacceptable and beneath the men and women of ICE,” she said.
DHS largely gutted its oversight offices as part of broad government layoffs and firings at the start of the Trump administration, including the office charged with investigating civil rights violations by personnel.
In the Chicago suburb of Broadview on Friday, ICE used tear gas, less-lethal rounds, flash bang grenades and pepper balls to quell protests outside an immigration detention center, the latest standoff in what have become near-daily demonstrations calling to close the facility.
Heavily armed ICE agents paced the rooftop of the detention facility and fired volleys of pepper-balls, pellets that shatter on impact and release clouds of pepper spray, at protesters who were chanting and holding signs.
“People were peacefully standing behind the fence and for absolutely no reason, pepper balls were fired,” Reverend Beth Brown, a pastor at Lincoln Park Presbyterian Church, said amid the sharp cracking sounds of rounds being fired and helicopters buzzing overhead.
DHS said in a statement that “over 200 rioters” blocked access to one of the facility’s gates and that 30 “swarmed another gate” and attempted to enter the property.
Meanwhile in Michoacan, Mexico, the funeral was set to take place on Friday of Silverio Villegas Gonzalez, who was pulled over in a Chicago suburb earlier this month and shot dead by an ICE agent. DHS has said the agent feared for his life, although in bodycam footage the agent can be heard saying that his injuries were nothing major.
(Reporting by Ted Hesson in Washington; Brian Synder in Chelsea, Massachusetts and Heather Schlitz in Broadview, Illinois; Additional reporting by Jim Vondruska in Broadview, Illinois; Editing by Mary Milliken and Rosalba O’Brien)
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