Man Brutalized By Immigration Agents Recounts Arrest | EUROtoday

Orbin Mauricio Henríquez Serrano, like many immigrants residing within the Twin Cities, was scared to enter work on Jan. 11. Immigration brokers had been marauding by Minneapolis and St. Paul for weeks, focusing on neighborhoods with massive immigrant populations and demanding papers from individuals primarily based on their accents. Four days earlier, certainly one of them had killed Renee Good. But a number of of his co-workers at an area tavern, the place he was a prepare dinner and assistant supervisor, had referred to as out, so he felt like he needed to go in.

First, he needed to get gasoline.

He stopped at a Speedway in St. Paul, purchased a Red Bull, and sat in his automobile because it stuffed up. That’s when he seen the immigration brokers surrounding his car. He knew as quickly as he noticed them that they needed to arrest him, all too conscious of the seemingly random ambushes by masked brokers throughout the area just lately.

“They didn’t know who I was, really — until, I think, they scanned the license plates of my vehicle,” he recalled in Spanish.

Millions of individuals have seen what occurred subsequent.

Henríquez Serrano solely remembers items of it, earlier than and after brokers pressed him in opposition to the bottom till he misplaced consciousness. They requested if he was a citizen, and he stated he wouldn’t reply questions. He tried to name a lawyer, figuring the brokers wouldn’t violate his personal property to make an arrest. But they shattered his window and squeezed themselves inside his Jeep Cherokee to wrench him out.

I used to be about 25 toes away, shut sufficient to see Greg Bovino, the roving Border Patrol commander now assigned to the Twin Cities who often targets gasoline stations, barking orders at bystanders and journalists to “back up!”

Henríquez Serrano remembers one agent hitting his hand with a small hammer — probably the identical one they used to interrupt his window — and others calling him an “asshole” in Spanish. The subsequent factor he remembers is waking up behind an unmarked van. He noticed the protesters lined up exterior the Whipple Federal Building, the place brokers detained him. He was stunned at what number of Latino immigration brokers there have been, and the way impolite and unhelpful they have been.

Video of Henríquez Serrano’s limp physique being carried right into a federal agent’s car led many individuals, together with his personal sister, Consuelo, to fret that he had died.

The subsequent morning, he stated, his fingers and toes have been put in shackles, which stayed on for 11 hours. He and different detainees have been taken to the airport, the place they boarded a aircraft for Texas. There, they have been taken to the notorious tent camp referred to as “Camp East Montana,” certainly one of a number of “Alligator Alcatraz” knockoffs across the nation. Multiple individuals have died there since December, together with in a single case that has been dominated a murder.

It wasn’t till then, two days after his arrest, that he was in a position to converse to Consuelo and inform her, and the world, that he had survived.

“He only managed to tell me that he is very injured,” she relayed to medescribing a name that lasted only a few seconds.

Henríquez Serrano spent over a week at the tent camp before he was shackled again and flown to Honduras, where he was born. When he spoke to HuffPost last week, he still had a cough that he’d picked up at the immigration jail.

Everything at the camp was terrible, he said. “Hygiene — there is none.”

“If there were a pandemic in this place, everyone would die because there is no way to be isolated from others,” he said. “There is no ceiling for the individual cells, just one roof for all the cells.”

He said he was never able to speak to an attorney. His only visit to a somewhat shoddy clinic — “I don’t think that’s an accurate word for what that was,” he said — in the facility resulted in some cream and a handful of pills, presumably Tylenol. Henríquez Serrano believed he may have serious damage to tendons around his right knee. He’s working to get an MRI in Honduras now.

“I never had adequate medical attention,” he said, noting that guards “treated me roughly in the areas where I was injured” after his arrest.

Henríquez Serrano said he never spoke to an actual ICE agent or any other representative of the U.S. government during his entire time at Camp East Montana. Like many ICE detention facilities, the immigration jail is privately run and staffed by contractors. He said he would have tried to make a case to stay in the United States legally if he’d been able to.

In fact, he said, he’d tried to apply for asylum in 2019, during the “Remain in Mexico” policy, which required applicants to wait for U.S. court dates while staying south of the border. He planned to make a case that he needed refuge in the United States from violent gangs in Honduras, who he said tried to recruit him before he fled the country. But he was kidnapped in Mexicoand his family paid $14,000 for his freedom, he said. After that, he acknowledged, he crossed the border.

He’d come to the United States in search of a quiet, stable life — and he’d succeeded for six years. He felt he could walk the streets here without looking over his shoulder, a change from Honduras. He spent his free time exercising, playing “FIFA” and “Grand Theft Auto” and cheering on Minnesota United Football Club. (“God willing,” he said, he’ll be able to go to a Minnesota United game one day.)

“My life was work, spending time with my family, and that’s it,” he said.

He had no criminal record in the United States or his home country, he said — aside from a speeding ticket he got a few years ago in Arkansas.

After his arrest, the Trump administration asserted that he had been subject to a 2020 deportation order. Henríquez Serrano said he had never been made aware of such an order, including when he was pulled over for speeding in 2022.

The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to a detailed list of questions. Instead, spokesperson Tricial McLaughlin said, seemingly in reference to Henríquez Serrano’s arrest, “Authority under USC 1357 and of course reasonable suspicion are protected by the U.S. Constitution.” She denied that ICE engages in racial profiling and said that ICE facilities “comply with performance-based national detention standards” — including, she added, “the best healthcare than many aliens have received in their entire lives.”

Henríquez Serrano said he’s relieved to be out of detention, but he’s worried about his safety now that he’s back in Honduras, after so many years living in the United States, the country he had called home.

He wanted people in the United States to know what he knows — that the immigrants President Donald Trump is smearing as criminals actually feed them, build their homes and contribute to society. And he said he was heartened to see people protesting the immigration enforcement surge.

“They are the voice that we Latinos have to suppress because of fear,” he said.

Ashford King provided translation for this story.