A family has accused federal immigration agents of seizing their 5-year-old daughter in front of their home in an effort to force her father to surrender to the agents.
Edward Hip, a Guatemalan man who has lived in the U.S. for 22 years, was driving home in Leominster, Massachusetts with his daughter when he got the sense he was being followed, his wife told Telemundo.
Hip managed to run from the car into his home, but the agents grabbed the girl. The agents then challenged Hip to come back out and get his daughter, who was born in the U.S., NBC Boston reported.
Her mother filmed the encounter, which the family says took place last week. The video shows a girl in pink pants sitting on a stool drinking from a bottle of water while at least three agents and a local police officer stand around her.
“They take my daughter,” a woman says at one point on the recording. “She is 5 years old. She has autism spectrum.”
“We didn’t take your daughter, your husband’s—” says a man in plainclothes wearing a vest that says “Police.”
“OK, give me my daughter back,” the woman replies.
Later in the video, a different agent can be heard saying, “Is that your daughter? Come here so I can see those IDs.”
“I can give it through the door,” a man says in response.
“You can do it right here,” the agent says, pointing to the ground in front of himself.
Hip and his wife have an active asylum claim and have two children who were born in the U.S., NBC reported. The agents warned that if they didn’t open the door within 15 minutes, they would enter the house, the wife told Telemundo.
Leominster police were called the scene and recovered the child, who was returned to her family. Two days later, on his wife’s birthday, agents returned to their house, pulled Hip from his car and arrested him.
The girl is in good condition, according to the family, while her father is being held at an ICE detention center in Plymouth, Massachusetts.
In a statement to the Daily Beast, DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said ICE agents never used the girl as “bait” and called the story a “disgusting smear.”
“The facts are the criminal illegal alien target of the operation—with previous arrests for domestic abuse, strangulation, and vandalizing property—abandoned his own child in a car,” she said.
She said Hip ignored law enforcement’s emergency lights to pull over, fled the car, gave the officers the double middle finger, and darted inside his house.
“Disgusting smears like these peddled by the media are leading to a 1,000 percent increase in assaults against our brave law enforcement,” she said, using an often-cited but unverified statistic.
The incident comes as ICE agents have gotten increasingly aggressive in their detention tactics, targeting parents walking their children to school, immigrants attending church, and other groups that were previously considered off-limits.
The new policy reportedly comes from President Donald Trump’s deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, who has demanded that immigration agents make 3,000 arrests per day.
U.S. citizens have also been swept up in the raids.
