ICE Finally Finds One (1) Bad Apple, Takes Him Off Duty. No, Not ‘Fires Immediately.’

Apparently there actually is such a thing as bad publicity, even for the deportation Gestapo. After a viral video Thursday showed an ICE officer slamming an Ecuadorian woman to the floor outside an immigration courtroom in Manhattan, the ICE thug was “relieved of his duties” while the agency investigates.

Distraught after her husband was arrested following a hearing, the woman was crying and pleading with the goon, saying in Spanish, “You guys don’t care about anything!” while he tried to get rid of her. He shouted “Adios! Adios!” before finally losing his shit and hurling her to the hallway floor. (Wannabe cop defense attorneys on Twitter insisted they saw her brush her hand against him, which means she assaulted him and should have been thrown far harder and possibly curb stomped for being a CRIMINAL ILLEGAL.)

In a statement issued Friday, DHS propaganda minister Tricia McLaughlin called the ICE creep’s behavior “unacceptable and beneath the men and women of ICE. Our ICE law enforcement are held to the highest professional standards and this officer is being relieved of current duties as we conduct a full investigation.”

Somewhat surprisingly, McLaughlin didn’t also chastise the ICE goon for making the mistake of having his brutality caught on video, and not hiding his face with a mask.

Here’s a copy of the video reposted by New York City Comptroller Brad Lander, who didn’t see the assault on the woman himself but was at 26 Federal Plaza in Manhattan at the time. (That’s the immigration court and ICE facility where people are still being dragged off after attending their mandatory immigration check-ins and hearings, and where Lander has been arrested twice himself.) Good on him for using his substantial social media following to call attention to it. Needless to say, the video is disturbing; the woman’s children were there to see the whole insane attack, too.

CBS News explains that the incident

appears to have started when the woman and her young daughter desperately tried to cling to her husband, whom federal agents were attempting to take into custody. Agents were seen on video separating the family, with one of them grabbing the woman’s hair. The man was ultimately detained.

There’s video of that, too, in which a CBS Chicago anchor notes that the woman exclaimed as the goons took her husband, “They are going to kill him!” It’s not clear whether she feared the ICE thugs would kill him, or trying to tell them that he would be killed if deported to Ecuador.

The New York Times reports that the woman’s husband was arrested after he appeared at the courthouse for an asylum hearing, but that the “details of her husband’s legal status and the circumstances that led to his arrest remained unclear on Friday.”

The woman was identified by ProPublica reporter Till Eckert as Monica Moreta-Galarza; she said that she and her family were seeking asylum when her husband was dragged off. She was taken to a hospital after hitting her head on the hallway floor, and Eckert stayed with her until she was discharged. “Over [in Ecuador], they beat us there too. I didn’t think I’d come here to the United States and the same thing would happen to me,” she told Eckert.

Also, when reporters aske DHS’s McLaughlin if “relieved of duties” meant suspended or fired, she only said, “That’s being determined pending investigation.” Saying unkind things on social media about Charlie Kirk gets people fired immediately, but apparently flinging someone to the ground so hard they have to go to the hospital gets you put on leave while the bosses decide whether that was a bad thing you did.

On Friday, ICE arrested Dr. Ian Roberts, the school superintendent of Des Moines, Iowa, and accused him of being in the US illegally and without work authorization. The Iowa Department of Public Safety said Roberts was arrested after driving away from a traffic stop by ICE agents. DHS claims that Roberts had been given a final order of removal in immigration court in May 2024.

Things are already looking hinky; ICE claims he entered the country in 1999, but he was already a student at Coppin State from 1995 to 1998. Des Moines Public Schools completed an FBI criminal background check on him before he became superintendent in 2023; nothing was flagged, and he completed all required documentation. He’s the first Black superintendent for the district, the largest in the state. You will forgive us if we don’t take ICE’s word for their claims, or even whether they have the right Ian Roberts.

The district’s website details his long career as a special education teacher, coach, and administrator in multiple schools over the course of two decades, including an award from George Washington University as Washington DC Principal of the Year. The site also notes that Roberts “has written numerous books and publications about educational topics including leadership, empathy and cultural responsiveness. He is passionate about instructional excellence, diversity, equity, inclusion and innovation in education.”

The page says Roberts “was born to immigrant parents from Guyana, and spent most of his formative years in Brooklyn, NY.” Before going into teaching, Roberts competed for Guyana in track and field events at the 2000 Olympics in Sydney, Australia; as superintendent, he likes to motivate kids by challenging them to footraces. He was the focus of an NPR feature story last year when he was beaten by a fifth-grader, although maybe running in a suit and a tie was a factor.

Check the NPR story for the nifty photo of Roberts and a group of kids grinning and holding a sign saying “I RACED AN OLYMPIAN,” as well as this quote that made Rebecca cry: “I am humbled and I stand proud in defeat to elementary school students, all of whom have very promising careers academically and athletically. And I will do it all over again if I can.”

But forget all that heartwarming crap unless you want to be called a domestic terrorist. ICE wasted no time portraying Roberts as a dangerous fraud and even a threat to children.

ICE says that Roberts was arrested with a handgun and a hunting knife in his car, as well as $3000 in cash, and the agency is going all out in smearing him, calling him a “criminal alien” because of an alleged outstanding firearms charges from 2020.

Iowa Public Radio reports it’s unclear whether that claim is in reference to a 2021 arrest in Pennsylvania for having a loaded rifle in a vehicle; he pleaded guilty and paid a $100 fine. And yes, federal law prohibits undocumented people from having firearms.

School district comms director Phil Roeder said in an email to Iowa Public Radio that Roberts disclosed the 2021 arrest during his initial vetting, and that he “provided sufficient context and explanation of the situation to move forward in the hiring process.” Roberts also passed a third-party background check without any problems.

But we can’t quite imagine a white midwestern school superintendent being depicted in the same terms used by Sam Olson the ICE boss in St. Paul, not even if they had a gun in their car (in friggin’ Iowa at that). Respected educator and community leader? Hardly, not if you’re an ILLEGAL. In a statement that echoes the rhetoric we usually get from Tricia McLaughlin, Olson wrote,

This suspect was arrested in possession of a loaded weapon in a vehicle provided by Des Moines Public Schools after fleeing federal law enforcement. […] How this illegal alien was hired without work authorization, a final order of removal, and a prior weapons charge is beyond comprehension and should alarm the parents of that school district.

Fox News, of course, went all in on backing ICE’s depiction of Roberts as a crazed maniac and threat to public safety; here’s a screenshot of part of the Google image results … and notice which outlet chose to go not with file photos of Roberts in a suit, but with ICE’s mug shot, apparently taken after they undid Roberts’s braided hair, making him look appropriately thuggish. There’s a whole semiotics paper to be written about that editorial choice, at least at universities that still allow grad students to write about racial bias.

But the ICE flack was partly right: Parents in Des Moines have been alarmed by the news of Roberts’s arrest. Funny, though; most of the alarm is directed at ICE, as Iowa Public Radio reports:

By 4 p.m., a crowd advocating for Roberts’ release began to grow outside the Neal Smith Federal Building in downtown Des Moines. Students, parents and other community members filled the sidewalks around the intersection. Some people spilled into the street. They chanted “Free Dr. Roberts” and “No justice, no peace.” Others held signs opposing the Trump administration’s mass deportation policies.

Des Moines community member Isaiah Stegman, 45, said even if Roberts did violate laws, involving ICE isn’t the way to handle the situation. He said Roberts contributed to many different communities.

“Regardless of what might’ve been the circumstances of how he first came here or where he was born, he is one of us,” Stegman said.

People flocked to a church meeting Friday night with similar sentiments, sharing stories of how Roberts had motivated their kids; some parents said they’d struggled to explain the situation to their kids — not because they felt betrayed by Roberts, but by their own government.

We have a feeling this story is only getting started; ICE seems determined to turn Roberts into a villain, but it doesn’t look like the people of Des Moines are likely to let it. And we have seen in other cases that when a community rallies very loudly in support of people grabbed by ICE, that can get results, as happened last week when the government finally released Ayman Suleiman, a beloved imam and hospital chaplain in Cincinnati, dropping its attempts to deport him as a “terrorism supporter” and restoring his asylum status.

Watch this space, as the nice lady on MSNBC says.

ICE Goons Arrest NYC Mayoral Candidate Brad Lander, Nation Now Safe From Roving Comptrollers

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[CBS News / NYT / Iowa Public Radio / NBC News]

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