Moment masked ICE agents leave a child alone on the street as they arrest the person he was walking with
Councilwoman who filmed video says ‘it felt like our community ... is under siege’
Video footage shows the moment a child was left alone on the street after agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested the person the child was walking with on a sidewalk on Fenton Street in Waltham, Massachusetts.
The video was shared with Telemundo Nueva Inglaterra by Waltham City Councilor Colleen Bradley-MacArthur. She filmed the video while taking part in a volunteer neighborhood watch walk.
Masked officers used multiple vehicles to block the road. One officer drove past her.
“You stay here and don't interfere,” the officer said when she asked which agency they were with, according to the councilwoman.
Bradley-MacArthur told NBC that she backed off but continued to record.
“I couldn't believe that they would just leave someone there,” she said. “The masks, right — that's so frightening to see masked men blocking the road, with the lights and the sirens.”
Bradley-MacArthur said she was scared and angry for the child, adding that “it felt like our community — seeing the video today — is under siege.”
She told the network that the ICE agents left the scene without providing any help to the child to get back home. Volunteers from the group the councilwoman was working with escorted the child back home.
There have been further ICE arrests in Waltham in the last few weeks. On Tuesday morning, two men were detained as they were traveling in the same vehicle. One of the men was removed by force after agents asked for identification and subsequently smashed the vehicle window. Last week, federal agents were also spotted outside the district courthouse.
In one of the more high-profile cases of people being snatched off the street by ICE, Tufts University scholar Rumeysa Ozturk was locked up for more than six weeks after writing a pro-Palestinian op-ed in her student newspaper. Ozturk left an ICE facility in Louisiana on Friday night after a federal judge ordered her immediate release. She had been arrested outside her Massachusetts apartment on March 25.
Similarly, a University of Florida student was detained in March during a traffic stop conducted by ICE. Felipe Zapata Velásquez, 27, from Colombia, disappeared after the traffic stop in Gainesville, his mother, Claudia Velásquez, told NTN24, a Colombian news outlet. Zapata Velásquez was detained on March 28 after driving without a license. According to WPLG, he was processing the I-20 form needed to apply for a license when he was detained. He was taken to Jacksonville and given the options of remaining in jail or signing a deportation order. He chose the latter, reportedly without an attorney present, WPLG noted.
Late last month, more than 300 federal agents raided what the Drug Enforcement Administration called an “underground nightclub” in Colorado Springs.
The operation involved agents from the FBI, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, the IRS, the U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Division, and even the U.S. Postal Service, along with local law enforcement, CBS News noted.
Firearms and drugs were also seized in the raid, which took place around 3:45 a.m.
President Donald Trump took to Truth Social at the time to celebrate the raid, writing that it was conducted against “some of the worst people illegally in our Country — Drug Dealers, Murderers, and other Violent Criminals, of all shapes and sizes, and Judges don’t want to send them back to where they came from.”
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