An elderly Los Angeles-area car wash owner is suing federal immigration officials, alleging masked officers shoved him to the ground, dogpiled on top of him, and held him without charges or medical attention for 12 hours during a September immigration raid.
The $50 million lawsuit comes from Rafie Ollah Shouhed, 79, owner of Valley Car Wash in Van Nuys, and names the Department of Homeland Security, Customs and Border Protection, the Border Patrol, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
“The only thing that those ICE agents said to him, as three of them piled on top of him….They said, ‘You don’t f*** with ICE,” civil rights attorney V. James DeSimone, who is representing Shouhed, said during a Thursday press conference.
DeSimone added that surveillance video shows “the callous, casual way” immigration agents are operating across Los Angeles, as officers “immediately resort to force.”
The suit claims that masked agents raided the business on September 9. When the 79-year-old went to inquire about the operation, agents allegedly immediately shoved him to the ground.
Later, as Shouhed sought to vouch for the legal status of employees who were being arrested, he was allegedly forced to the ground, this time with three agents on top of him as he pleaded he needed an ambulance and couldn’t breathe.
The business owner was then allegedly taken to the Metropolitan Detention Center in Los Angeles, where he claims he was denied medical attention, then later released without charge.
The ordeal left him with broken ribs, an injured elbow, and post-concussive symptoms of a traumatic brain injury, Shouhed claims.
“(I told them) I have a heart condition. I’m an old man, begging them, ‘Let me go. I need to go to the hospital,’” he told NBC Los Angeles at the time of the incident.
“I thought this was a nice country, a good country. Why do they do this kind of thing to you?”
The Department of Homeland Security told The Independent the action was a “targeted immigration enforcement operation” that resulted in the arrest of five undocumented immigrations from Guatemala and Mexico who broke U.S. immigration laws, including one who was removed from the country twice in 2015.
“The owner of Valley Car Wash, a U.S. citizen, impeded the operation and was arrested for assaulting and impeding a federal officer,” DHS added.
Widespread immigration raids across the Los Angeles area have been a continued source of controversy.
The Trump administration sent National Guard and U.S. Marine Corps troops into the city over the summer in the face of mass protests against the raids.
The administration also faced a federal lawsuit accusing immigration agents of carrying out “roving patrols” that indiscriminately targeted people for their perceived ethnicity, language, and legal status.
Lower courts temporarily paused such tactics, finding they might amount to illegal profiling, but the U.S. Supreme Court this month gave officials temporary permission to continue following an emergency appeal from the Trump administration.
Last week, California signed a bill that would ban most law enforcement, including federal agents, from wearing face masks. Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, has said the masks are reminiscent of secret police operating in authoritarian regimes.
The White House has said federal officials aren’t bound by the law and will continue to wear masks.
