An Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer has been “relieved of current duties” after widely shared videos on social media show him tackling a crying woman to the ground inside the halls of an immigration courthouse in downtown Manhattan in front of her two young children.
Videos taken Thursday inside 26 Federal Plaza, headquarters for several federal law enforcement agencies in New York City, show a woman and a young girl clinging to her husband and pleading for his release while he is being hauled away by masked officers.
After the officers pry the woman away from her husband, a woman yells to the officers in Spanish that they “don’t care about anything.”
The agent repeatedly tells her “adios” before abruptly shoving her across the hall against a wall and then pushing her to the ground, where she is pinned down on her back. He then pushes her towards uniformed officers and yells to “get her out of the building.”
Homeland Security deputy secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement to The Independent that the officer’s conduct is “unacceptable and beneath the men and women of ICE.”
“Our ICE law enforcement are held to the highest professional standards and this officer is being relieved of current duties as we conduct a full investigation,” McLaughlin said.
The woman, Monica Moreta-Galarza, who is from Ecuador and seeking asylum in the United States with her family, was hospitalized after the incident.
“Over [in Ecuador], they beat us there, too,” she told ProPublica in Spanish. “I didn’t think I’d come here to the United States and the same thing would happen to me.”
I’m Till Eckert, a ProPublica reporter. For the past 2 weeks, I’ve been going to the same NY immigration courthouse.
— ProPublica (@propublica) September 26, 2025
Nearly every time, I see ICE agents arresting immigrants. Today, a woman was slammed to the ground after begging officials not to take her husband away.
Thread👇 pic.twitter.com/elTzcoskS9
New York City comptroller Brad Lander — who was arrested at least twice inside the building this year while observing immigration court hearings and trying to demand access to the cells where immigrants are detained — said ICE agents “did not identify themselves, did not present a warrant, did not give any lawful grounds” for her husband’s detention.
“An ICE agent violently threw this bereft woman to the ground in front of her kids,” he wrote on X. “She did not pose any threat. She had to be taken to the hospital.”
The family ultimately fled to the office of New York Rep. Dan Goldman for safety, the congressman said.
He called the officers’ actions an “egregious act of excessive force” and demanded Homeland Security Kristi Noem take action.
The incident marks the latest brawl inside the facility, which has emerged as a flashpoint for the Trump administration’s practice of courthouse arrests to speed up his mass deportation agenda.
Thousands of immigrants across the country have faced arrest after showing up for their court-ordered ICE check-ins or routine immigration court hearings.
Unlike federal district court judges, immigration court judges operate under the direction of the attorney general’s office and the Department of Justice. The DOJ’s Executive Office for Immigration Review issued guidance to immigration judges earlier this year to grant motions from government lawyers to immediately dismiss immigrants’ cases, making them easy targets for arrest and removal.
The administration’s actions to strip legal status from immigrants who are in the middle of their legal cases have radically expanded a pool of “undocumented” people who can be swiftly deported. That strategy has generated scenes of masked federal agents patrolling courthouse hallways and hauling away immigrants after they leave their hearings.
Federal law enforcement officers have been stationed in Federal Plaza’s hallways since at least May 20 to make arrests moments after immigrants appear in court.
Last month, a federal judge condemned the administration’s “arbitrary” practice of arresting immigrants as they leave their court hearings, which has created what he called a “game of detention roulette” that violates due process.
Another federal judge last month blocked immigration authorities from rapidly deporting immigrants by using a fast-tracked removal process central to those arrests, warning that the government risks violating due process rights for people who have “long since entered” the country.
