“I gave them my ID since they asked,” said Ahmed, a U.S. citizen who has no documented criminal history in Minnesota. “I did everything they asked.”
“What is going on is not right,” said her father, Mohamed Ahmed, who had no access to his daughter during her two days of incarceration.
“It’s wrong. Everyone can see,” he added. “They’re not going after
the ‘worst of the worst.’ They’re terrorizing the community. They’re terrorizing mostly communities of color, but everybody is being targeted now. Nasra committed no crime, but they put her in jail. She’s got bruises.”
Ahmed, who lives with an aunt in the complex off Lower Afton Road in St. Paul, said she had just left home around 11:30 a.m. Wednesday to pick up her prescription medication when two Somali-American men ran past her in the parking lot.
She suddenly found herself in the middle of a group of ICE agents who had been chasing them, she said. The armed agents demanded to see her identification, and she complied.
The situation quickly escalated anyway, she said, with an agent calling her a racial slur and another telling her they were “making America great again.” In
videos of the incident recorded by neighbors and circulating on social media, a dozen masked agents can be seen surrounding her, forcing her to the ground and then into a car.