An ICE officer has been “relieved of current duties” after a viral video showed him shoving an Ecuadorian woman to the ground and taunting her, while prying her and her two young children away from the husband ICE officers were arresting.
As the woman yelled at the officers, “You guys don’t care about anything,” the agent told her, “Adios, adios!”
The ICE agent threw her against a wall before pinning her to the ground, then shoved her toward officers telling her to “get out of the building.”
The woman, Monica Moreta-Galarza, was hospitalized following the incident.
“Over [in Ecuador], they beat us there, too,” she told ProPublica in Spanish. “I didn’t think I’d come here to the United States and the same thing would happen to me.”
Homeland Security deputy secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement to The Independent that the officer’s conduct is “unacceptable and beneath the men and women of ICE.”
McLaughlin declined to elaborate when asked if the officer had been suspended or fired, saying, “that’s being determined pending investigation.”
The incident occurred Thursday inside 26 Federal Plaza, headquarters for several federal law enforcement agencies in New York City, as the immigrant man had shown up at the courtroom for an asylum hearing.