ICE agents arrested a former interpreter for the U.S. Army after he attended his asylum hearing in San Diego.
The man, who reportedly risked his life to aid American troops in Afghanistan for three years, was placed in handcuffs by a pair of immigration officers who concealed their faces with neck gaiters.
His arrest was captured on camera, with the agents moving to cuff him as soon as he walked out of a hearing on the fourth floor of a downtown courthouse, the Times of San Diego reported.
“Yeah, get him,” one agent says to another. “Take him. Go ahead, take him.”
The former interpreter appeared shocked by what was playing out.
“I came here to make a better life,” the man pleaded in the clip. “I didn’t know that this would happen… I worked with the U.S. military. I worked in a very dangerous part of Afghanistan with the U.S. military.”
Attorney Brian McGoldrick asked that his client’s name be kept anonymous because he will likely face persecution by the Taliban if he is ultimately deported to Afghanistan. McGoldrick told the Times that the man was a translator for American troops but also assisted the U.S. Army logistically on the ground in a war zone.
“While he was in Afghanistan, he was threatened repeatedly,” McGoldrick added to NBC7. “His family was threatened repeatedly. He believes that if he returns, he’ll be detained, probably tortured, and possibly even killed.”
McGoldrick said the arrest is particularly baffling because his client’s brother was granted asylum last month in a Texas immigration court.
“What is the government doing, that one brother is being granted asylum and the other brother has to be treated like a criminal to be thrown out of the country,” he said.
McGoldrick said his client was unable to flee Afghanistan when the U.S. abruptly exited the country in 2021. He still managed to reach the U.S. border and was paroled through the government-administered CBP One app on humanitarian grounds, which granted him legal entry into the country. He has since been trying to obtain a “Special Immigrant Visa.”
The Times reported that a judge refused to dismiss the man’s case at last week’s hearing, as the federal government requested. Despite being scheduled for another court date later in the summer, the man was reportedly met in the hallway by ICE agents who quickly detained him.
ICE did not respond to questions emailed by the Daily Beast. McGoldrick could not be immediately reached for comment.
The Trump administration ramped up migrant arrests in recent weeks after Stephen Miller, the White House’s deputy chief of staff, raged at ICE leaders in May for not making enough arrests, asserting they should be detaining a minimum of 3,000 people a day. He reportedly ordered them not to focus solely on criminals but to detain and deport anyone in the U.S. without legal status.
Sources told The Wall Street Journal that Miller went as far as claiming he could travel to the closest Home Depot and arrest dozens of day laborers in its parking lot.
Even before the May meeting, ICE had pivoted from primarily targeting alleged gang members and those convicted of crimes to instead increasing arrests at routine immigration hearings and naturalization appointments.
Kasper Erikesen, a Danish father of four and green card holder who made posts supporting Trump, was among those detained while actively trying to become a U.S. citizen.
Others, like a Venezuelan national attending high school in New York, were detained outside courtrooms after the Trump administration deployed a new strategy of asking for the dismissal of migrant’s asylum claims to then subject them to an expedited removal process.
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