An American citizen has told how she was held by ICE for 48 hours, claiming she was denied water despite proving her legal status.
Andrea Velez, 32, had just arrived at work in Downtown Los Angeles on June 24 when agents grabbed her and forced her into a car.
Velez told NBC4 News Los Angeles that an immigration raid was going on when she was slammed to the ground. Velez, a graduate of Cal Poly Pomona, who works in fashion was taken into custody while her mother, Margarita Flores, screamed at agents to stop.
“She’s a U.S. citizen,” Velez’s mother, an immigrant from Mexico, said through tears. “They’re taking her. Help her, someone.”
Velez said she was sitting in a detention center and was given nothing to drink for 24 hours. In total she spent two days in detention. She said that the ordeal has left her unable to physically return to work.
“I’m taking things day by day,” she told the station.
The incident had been notorious from the beginning. LAPD officers were called to the scene because it was reported as a “kidnapping” but did not intervene when it became clear it was an ICE action—even though it was against a U.S. citizen, ABC& Los Angeles previously reported.
Velez was charged with assaulting a federal officer while he was attempting to arrest a suspect. A federal criminal complaint alleged that the agent was chasing after a man but Velez stepped into the agent’s path and extended her arm “in an apparent effort to prevent him from apprehending the male subject he was chasing.” The complaint added that her arm hit the agent in the face.
Velez denied wrongdoing. She said that during the incident, someone grabbed her and slammed her to the ground. She tried to tell the agent, who was in plainclothes, that she was an American citizen. But he told her she was “interfering” and he was going to arrest her.
“That’s when I asked him to show me his ID, his badge number,” she said. “I asked him if he had a warrant, and he said I didn’t need to know any of that.”
Velez said she repeatedly told ICE officers she was a U.S. citizen. When she was taken into a Los Angeles detention center, she gave officers her driver’s license and health insurance card to prove her citizenship status. She was still locked behind bars.
Velez’s family was unaware of her whereabouts for more than a day until lawyers for the family tracked her down.
Later, the Department of Justice (DOJ) dismissed her case without prejudice, meaning it could be reopened if prosecutors decide to.
Velez’s attorneys told NBC Los Angeles that they are exploring legal moves against the federal government.
Between 2015 and 2020, ICE erroneously deported at least 70 U.S. citizens, arrested 674 and detained 121. It is unclear how many have been mistakenly taken amid the Trump administration’s mass campaign to deport 1 million immigrants per year.
In January, U.S. citizen Julio Noriega was looking for work in Chicago when he was swept up in the mass raids. In May, Georgia college student Ximena Arias-Cristobal was detained after police pulled over the wrong car during a traffic stop. In June, a deputy U.S. marshal was detained in Arizona because he “fit the general description of a subject being sought by ICE.” That same month, a Ph.D. student named Job Garcia was tackled and thrown to the ground by ICE for recording a raid in Los Angeles.
A recent lawsuit claims that at least three American-born children have been removed from the country. The sudden banishment includes a 4-year-old boy with stage-four kidney cancer who was receiving critical, life-saving medical treatment in the United States. He was shipped from Louisiana to Honduras in April.
The Daily Beast has reached out to ICE for comment.
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