LOS ANGELES (AP) — Federal immigration officers in Los Angeles arrested a U.S. citizen during a raid outside a Home Depot store, then two of them got into his car and drove off with the man’s toddler strapped into a car seat in the back, advocates and family said Wednesday, decrying the action.
A video shot by a member of the Los Angeles Rapid Response Network, an immigrant advocacy coalition, shows the man with his hands behind his back and leaning up against his car before being escorted away as two masked agents with helmets and bulletproof vests get into the car and drive away. The man’s 1-year-old daughter appears in a blurred image strapped in a car seat in the back.
People are seen filming the agents in the car and are heard yelling “there’s a baby in the back!” as the agents drive away.
“It was a dangerous act to have armed men get in a car with that child and remove her from the situation,” said Lindsay Toczylowski, co-founder of Immigrant Defenders Law Center. The firm, which handles immigration cases, was contacted by community members for help reuniting the family, but isn’t representing the man because he is American, she said.
Toczylowski said the girl’s relatives later picked up the child from federal offices in Los Angeles.
“They should have followed protocols that had the best interest of that child in mind,” she said.
In an email, an agency spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security said a U.S. citizen got out of his vehicle wielding a hammer and throwing rocks as Border Patrol agents carried out the raid. Officials said he was arrested for investigation of assault and that a pistol was found in his car that is reported stolen out of the state of New York. Officials did not respond to questions about why agents drove the man’s car away with the child.
Five immigrants were arrested during the operation on suspicion of immigration violations, the spokesperson said.
Ed Obayashi, a special prosecutor in California and an expert on national and state police practices, said local police during DUI operations often find themselves with a parent being arrested and kids left alone in vehicles. In those cases, officers usually call a tow company because they don’t want to be responsible for the car, and they take the children into the patrol vehicle to the station where they can be picked up by family.
But he said federal immigration raids entail a different scenario and with onlookers circling to shoot video, he believes officers probably made the best decision.
“I think they were just trying to get the vehicle and the kid out of there and to safety,” he said.
The man’s mother, Maria, told reporters, the family received a call from an unknown number Tuesday to pick up the girl at U.S. Border Patrol offices in Los Angeles. She said the child is fine but asking for her father, who was born in California and works in the restaurant industry. It was not immediately known where the man was on Wednesday.
Maria said she and the girl are also U.S. citizens. She declined to provide her last name to protect her granddaughter’s identity.
“It’s something very frightening,” she said in Spanish after seeing the video. “You don’t know who those people are.”
