New York (AP) – Federal agents grabbed and pushed journalists in a hallway outside an immigration court in New York City on Tuesday, sending one to the hospital in the last clash between the authorities that impose the repression of immigration of President Donald Trump and the members of the public who seek to observe and document their actions.
A visual journalist identified as L. Vural Elibol of the Turkish news agency Anadolu hit his head on the floor in 26 Federal Plaza in Manhattan after the immigration and compliance agents of the United States pushed a journalist to a public elevator and pushed another journalist to the floor, according to videos and witnesses.
A spectator kept Elibol’s head and a nurse treated him until an ambulance arrived, witnesses said. The video showed it in a neck clamp when the paramedics took him out of the building on a stretcher. The other journalists, the head of the Amnewyork Police Office, Dean Moses and Olga Fedorova, an independent photographer whose clients include Associated Press, were not seriously injured.
The National Security Assistant Secretary, Tricia McLaughlin, defended the actions of the agents, saying that they were being “invaded by agitators and members of the press, who clogged the operations.”
“The officers repeatedly told the multitude of agitators and journalists who return, move and leave the elevator,” McLaughlin said in a statement. “Romoters and sanctuary politicians who encourage people to interfere with arrests are actively creating hostile environments that put the officers, detainees and the public in danger.”
A message was left that was looking for comments for the Anadolu news agency.
Moses said the situation intensified when the masked agents grabbed him and submitted him to an elevator on the 12th floor while trying to photograph them by arresting a woman who had just left the immigration court.
“I entered the elevator behind them, and began to shout,” Moses told Amnewyork. “Then they pushed me, they grabbed me by my arms and began to get me out of the elevator. I tried to endure, but they pushed me.”
The video taken by photographer Stephanie Keith showed that during the fight, another agent pushed Fedorova, who fell back where Elibol lay on the floor.
Fedorova said photographers had worked in the hallway outside the immigration court for months without incident. The agents who arrested on Tuesday, he said, did not announce any limit to which journalists could go, and had not made it clear that they were making an arrest when they went up to the elevator.
“If we tell us that we leave, that they do not cross a certain line, we follow their orders,” said Fedorova. “In this case, it was not clear to anyone that this was a detention at all.”
The episode occurred only a few days after a federal agent in the Manhattan immigration court was captured in a video pushing an Ecuadorian woman on a wall and the floor after her husband was arrested.
Both confrontations took place in a part of the federal building that is open to the public, and is routinely full of immigration on their way to and from the judicial hearings, the agents who hope to make arrests, activists there to protest the arrests and journalists who document the confrontations.
The elected Democrats, including New York governor Kathy Hochul, denounced the use of force by agents and the aggressive immigration application of the Republican Administration.
“This abuse of respectful immigrants of the law and the reporters who tell their stories must end,” Hochul wrote in a publication on social networks. “What the hell are we doing here?”
State assemblyman Zohran Mamdani, candidate for the mayor of New York City, said: “We cannot accept or normalize what has now become routine violence in 26 Federal Plaza. It takes place in our city.”
(Tagstotranslate) Olga Fedorova (T) Immigration Court
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