On April 14, federal agents snatched seafood processing worker Juan Francisco Mendez from his vehicle in New Bedford, Massachusetts, breaking the rear window with a sledgehammer while he and his wife were sitting in the car, pleading with the agents to wait for their lawyer and showing them their asylum application paperwork.
“They didn’t wait for the lawyer to arrive here to be with us and broke the window,” said his wife Marilú Méndez, who recorded the incident on her cell phone. “We have the right to be here too. What they did was unfair.”
On the cell-phone video, Juan Francisco Mendez can be seen fidgeting with his fingers, telling the armed agents wearing green bulletproof vests that he can’t speak until his lawyer is present, that she’s on her way, and that he’ll comply. They ask the federal agents if they have a warrant. Husband and wife assure one another the agents won’t break down the window because they’re being recorded. Moments later, the camera shows shards of broken glass on the back seats.
“They are acting with total impunity,” said their lawyer Ondine Gálvez about federal agents in the cell-phone video once she arrived on the scene. The arrest appears to have been random as federal agents were looking for someone else, but as the couple left their home, they saw men parked outside their house, who began to follow in pursuit.
Mendez had no criminal record and was in the process of applying for asylum. He was fingerprinted in December as part of a process to apply for “derivative asylum,” because his wife and nine-year-old son already had been given protection under asylum status over fears of facing persecution in Guatemala.
Fear is the point. The Trump administration, falling short of its goals to deport millions of immigrants regardless of immigration status, has created brazen scenes of kidnapping, deploying tactics meant to incite…
Auteur: Luis Feliz Leon
