ICE Arrests 18-Year-Old Downtown

By Brandon Cortes, New Haven Independent

NEW HAVEN, CT — Federal immigration agents detained an 18-year-old New Haven man Tuesday shortly after he left a hearing in his criminal case at the state courthouse on Elm Street — boxing in the car he was riding in, breaking a window, and pulling him out, according to the driver.

The driver said an agent also slammed the young man’s relative’s head when he got out to ask what was happening.

The young man, identified by advocates as Jaime, is in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody, according to ICE’s online detainee locator.

Jaime was at the courthouse at 121 Elm St. Tuesday morning for a hearing in a pending criminal case — not an immigration matter. According to court records, New Haven police arrested him on Aug. 30 and charged him with first-degree assault, interfering with an officer, and evading responsibility in a crash that caused serious injury. He was released after posting a $200,000 bond and has not yet entered a plea.

John Lugo of Unidad Latina en Acción (ULA) said Jaime, who is from Guatemala, entered the country without authorization and is separately fighting an immigration case in federal immigration court. Lugo also said that ICE took Jaime to Hartford on Tuesday.

“It’s the same old story,” Lugo said. “It was a very terrifying situation for our volunteer” and the relative.

That volunteer, a veteran organizer with Black and Brown United in Action named Catherine John, was driving Jaime and his relative home after the hearing, which was scheduled for 10 a.m. She said volunteers had watched the area while Jaime met with his attorney, and that the three left through a side entrance without incident.

Around 11:30 a.m., on State Street near Court Street, Catherine John said, several vehicles boxed in her car — she estimated about seven — and roughly 10 agents surrounded it. Some were masked.

She said agents cursed at her and demanded she open the door, and that one appeared to be holding a gun. She locked the doors and told her passengers to stay inside.

Agents then broke a rear window, she said, tried to pull Jaime through it, and finally opened the door and dragged him out.

When Jaime’s relative got out of the front passenger seat to ask what was happening, Catherine John said, an agent asked him if he wanted to fight, then grabbed him and threw him, hurting his head in the process.

Agents told them in Spanish that Jaime would be taken to Hartford, she said. The whole thing, she said, lasted about a minute and a half.

“You didn’t need seven agents for one little kid like that,” Catherine John said. “Watching them get dragged like that, as a mother, that hurts my soul. Nobody should be treated that way.”

Catherine John said she believed the agents deliberately waited until the car was away from the courthouse. “They knew not to be very close to the courthouse,” she said.

She also said a New Haven police officer working at a nearby road-work site watched the arrest but did not intervene.

Afterward, Catherine John said, Jaime’s relative complained of a headache and was walking unsteadily. She urged him to go to the hospital.

While she was driving him there, she said, a New Haven police officer stopped her for using her phone. She said she told the officer what had happened, and that he called a supervisor and documented the incident.

She was not charged.

City spokesperson Lenny Speiller said the city had no information about the arrest. Police spokesperson Officer Christian Bruckhart said he had heard rumors of an ICE arrest but had no report on it, and no information about the traffic stop Catherine John described.

Bruckhart said ICE is not required to notify the city or local police before conducting operations in New Haven.

ICE did not respond by publication time to questions about the arrest, how it was carried out, or the allegation that an agent struck Jaime’s relative. A video of the encounter appears to show a man, boxed in by law-enforcement vehicles, get out of a car on State Street before being thrown to the ground by two masked agents.

Jaime’s attorney in the criminal case, Nicole Shepter, did not respond to a request for comment.

The New Haven Independent is a not-for-profit public-interest daily news site founded in 2005.