
Last month, after Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents arrested Newark, N.J., Mayor Ras Baraka outside an immigration detention facility, a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) official said on CNN that there would “likely be more arrests coming.”
DHS police came close to delivering on that threat this past week when they invaded the Manhattan offices of Democratic Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) and briefly handcuffed one of his staffers.
“They’re behaving like fascists,” Nadler told the New York Times in an interview about the incident this weekend. On CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.), told host Dana Bash: “I think the administration is clearly trying to intimidate Democrats, in the same way that they’re trying to intimidate the country.
The incident, first reported by the New York City news site Gothamist, occurred Wednesday after DHS agents accused staffers of “harboring rioters” in their offices, which is located in the same building as a federal immigration courthouse. A partial video of the incident obtained by Gothamist shows one officer handcuffing a crying woman while another Nadler staffer demands that agents provide a warrant before entering.