A U.S. citizen who was detained by immigration agents and accused of obstructing an arrest, before her case was ultimately dismissed, said she is still traumatized by what happened.
Andrea Velez was in downtown Los Angeles on June 24 when she was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers. She was charged with assaulting a federal officer while he was attempting to arrest a suspect.
The Department of Justice later dismissed her case without prejudice. The agency did not immediately return a request for comment on Tuesday.
Velez, who works as a production coordinator for a shoe company, recalled seeing federal agents when her mother and sister dropped her off at work.
“It was like a scene,” she told NBC Los Angeles. “They were just ready to attack and chase.”
Velez said she felt someone grab her and slam her to the ground. She said she tried to tell the agent, who was in plainclothes, that she was a citizen, but he told her that she “was interfering with what he was doing, so he was going to arrest me.”
“That’s when I asked him to show me his ID, his badge number,” she said. “I asked him if he had a warrant, and he said I didn’t need to know any of that.”
A federal criminal complaint alleged that an agent was chasing after a man, and Velez stepped into the agent’s path and extended her arm “in an apparent effort to prevent him from apprehending the male subject he was chasing.”
The complaint said that Velez’s arm hit the agent in the face.
Velez said she denied any wrongdoing and insisted she was a U.S. citizen. She was taken to a detention center in downtown Los Angeles where she gave officers her driver’s license and her health insurance card, but she was still booked into jail.
She said she spent two days in the detention center, where she had nothing to drink for 24 hours.
Velez said the ordeal traumatized her, and she has not been able to physically return to work.
“I’m taking things day by day,” she told the news station.
Her attorneys told NBC Los Angeles that they are exploring legal options against the federal government.
Her story echoes those of others who have said they were wrongfully detained by immigration agents under President Donald Trump’s push for mass deportations.
Job Garcia, a Ph.D. student and photographer, said he was tackled and thrown to the ground by immigration agents for recording a raid at a Home Depot in Los Angeles. He was held for more than 24 hours before his release. In July, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund said it was seeking $1 million in damages, alleging that Garcia was assaulted and falsely imprisoned.
In June, a deputy U.S. marshal was briefly detained in the lobby of a federal building in Tucson, Arizona, because he “fit the general description of a subject being sought by ICE,” the U.S. Marshals Service said in a statement.
And in May, Georgia college student Ximena Arias-Cristobal was granted bond after she was detained by immigration agents after local police pulled over the wrong car during a traffic stop.
