Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents have been accused of using a 5-year-old girl as bait to lure her father outside so they could arrest him.
A Guatemalan family from Leominster, Massachusetts, said ICE held the young girl outside the family home in a bid to convince her father to surrender on September 16.
Footage obtained by Telemundo Nueva Inglaterra shows the child, who has autism, surrounded by ICE agents as her mother pleads for her to be returned.
Highlights
- ICE agents allegedly used a 5-year-old autistic girl to lure her father out of their home for arrest in Leominster, MA.
- The girl’s mother pleaded for her return as footage showed ICE allegedly holding the child outside their house.
- Edward Hip, the father with a 22-year US residency and active asylum claim, was asked to come outside.
- Hip was arrested two days later on his wife’s birthday and is now detained at Plymouth Detention Center.
ICE agents allegedly held the girl outside of her home
Image credits: Kevin Carter/Getty Images
The girl’s mother can be heard saying, “These men are in my house. They took my five-year-old daughter. She’s special, she has autism.”
She continues, “Give me my daughter back.”
At one point, an agent asks the girl’s father, Edward Hip, who has been in the U.S. for 22 years, to come over so he can see identification.
The family, who were inside the home, have an active asylum claim and said they could provide IDs through the letterbox.
But the agent is heard insisting, "You can do it right here.”
“He was driving with my daughter when he called me and told me he thought someone was chasing him,” she said.
She added that Hip “managed to run back into the parking lot of [the] house, but they grabbed the girl.”
The mother confirmed she had submitted a harassment complaint against the officers.
“That day they threatened us, saying that if we didn't open the door within 15 minutes they would enter the house,” she said.
Image credits: Telemundo Nueva Inglaterra.
When Leominster police arrived at the scene to assist, they returned the girl to her family.
Two days after the incident, Hip was detained outside the family home by ICE agents on his wife’s birthday.
“Officers came out behind my house, arrested him, took him away ... we are not criminals,” his wife said.
He is being held at the Plymouth Detention Center, and the family said the girl is doing well after the incident.
ICE has not publicly commented on the incident, which comes amid Donald Trump’s massive crackdown on immigration.
The girl’s dad was arrested two days after the incident, on his wife’s birthday
Since he took office, Trump has launched high-profile raids in cities such as Chicago and Boston, rolling out operations like ‘Midway Blitz’ and ‘Patriot 2.0’ that have led to the arrests of hundreds of undocumented immigrants.
His administration has also pushed to rapidly expand ICE’s ranks, lowering hiring standards in order to bring in thousands of new officers.
Civil rights groups and immigrant advocates have accused the administration of deliberately targeting sanctuary cities and using detention as a tool of deterrence, while Trump has defended the measures as essential to what he calls “restoring law and order.”