Alia Rahman Describes Dragged-Car Arrest by ICE (Full Transcript)

[00:00:17] Speaker 1: By now you've probably seen this video from Minneapolis, a woman being dragged from her car while driving through a protest against President Trump's immigration crackdown. She was arrested two blocks from where an ICE agent shot and killed Renee Good a week before. You heard her screaming, I'm disabled, as agents carried her by her arms and her legs from her own car. Tonight we know her name, Alia Rahman, and in just a minute you'll hear from her for the first time in an exclusive interview. Alia says she was never part of the protest that day. She was simply just trying to go to her doctor's appointment. But in a statement, the Homeland Security Department called Rahman a, quote, agitator, adding she, quote, ignored multiple commands by an officer to move her vehicle away from the scene. She was arrested for obstruction. The Minneapolis police chief, Brian O'Hara, he watched the video, he sees it differently.

[00:01:18] Speaker 2: Obviously, I don't know why law enforcement officers initially approached the vehicle. It pisses me off to see that, to see men doing that to a woman who's disabled. It pisses me off. If those cops worked for me, they'd have a problem right now.

[00:01:39] Speaker 1: With me now, Alia Rahman and her attorney, Alexa Van Brunt. Thank you both for being here. Alia, I want to start with you, because this has been viral. People have seen this video over and over again. People have many opinions. This is what happened to you. It is your life. It is your journey. But the government, they're calling you an agitator. So can you just help me understand? Walk me through what happened in those moments before these agents dragged you from your car.

[00:02:15] Speaker 3: Yeah, thank you for having me, Lila, and happy birthday, Dr. King. I'm really happy that you asked this question, right, because I have been so concerned that folks might be distracted from the real issue at hand by instead debating why I proceeded slowly through a militarized traffic jam full of pedestrians and a cacophony of conflicting instructions. I was on my way to the doctor. I was on a main road that is a direct road from my house to the parking lot. Suddenly there's traffic in the road. There are vehicles blocking it ahead, vehicles that later I understood were ICE vehicles. People around me trying to understand what to do. And I think that you see the rest.

[00:03:02] Speaker 1: So you weren't, I mean, in the beginning of the video, you see the federal agents saying something to you before you were dragged out. They say that you were given what they call repeated warnings. I just heard you say this cacophony of conflicting commands. What were they saying to you? What did you understand to be happening?

[00:03:24] Speaker 3: Well, I think I didn't understand what was happening, right? I am a disabled person who has autism, right? That is a big piece of this. But I think even someone who doesn't have the kind of auditory process and challenges I do would not know what to do with the sentence, move. I will break your effing window. And then back and forth between move, get out, trying to open my door, more threats of breaking a window, which I don't understand the functional purpose of. It's not a warning. It's a threat of violence that really shouldn't be packaged with an instruction. Yeah, I mean, I'm happy to tell you about what my ears hear in that situation. But in my ears, my autism also comes with an auditory sorting challenge where multiple human voices at a loud party or on a chaotic street all sound like they're the person talking to me. And there's one reason you see me looking and trying to identify which lips are talking to me. But of course, that's not possible because ICE officers wear things that cover their mouths and faces, except for their eyes, right?

[00:04:41] Speaker 1: So it is so informative for you to explain what it was personally like for you, for us to have watched the video and now to understand at least a part of what you were experiencing in that, because there is a conflicting report from their vantage point that tries to explain what you were thinking or feeling, and you've done it yourself. But I want to be clear. You say you were not there to protest ICE. You were there on your way to an appointment, and you stopped in the traffic, and they got the conflicting reports and commands. Were you there to protest ICE? Had you ever protested ICE before in that arena? No. So when you went that day and you were detained, as you said, what was that like for you once you were? What happened after they took you?

[00:05:37] Speaker 3: Number one, I experienced a very specific set of dehumanization practices during the six stages of detention and processing that I counted before I went unconscious and was taken out in an ambulance. Number two, during every one of those stages, I clocked ICE agents doing things that indicated they were not aware of what their job was or how to do it. Lots of, where's this? What do we do next? You know, agents had to stop at all five stages. Agents had to stop, ask someone else what to do, where basic things were. There were local staff who seemed to know some of that thing, but I distinctly heard two of them at one point say to each other, we don't want to step on ICE's toes when I was trying to get medical care. And the third is that the practices I experienced with my own body, ears, and eyes do not make sense to me as an immigration or public safety strategy, because they make things less safe. And honestly, I was not separated from a citizen of any other country. I think people believe this is just immigrants in there, and it is not. I was told that if I were a normal human, nothing would be a problem. They said that to you? We have now heard from, oh yeah. You know, when I asked for disability accommodations, and I said, did anybody bring my cane with me from the car? I need that to walk, not stand, but walk, because my balance is bad. They said, there's no canes here. They stood me up in leg irons and said, walk. Push my back. Walk. You can do it. Nobody said, maybe we should find something else. There was no medical screening. I was never once asked for my ID, even told I was under arrest, never charged. Yeah, I sat there, and somebody finally noticed I was not able to balance, even sitting, and they said, I think there might have been a wheelchair around here the other day, because I kept asking, can you at least get a wheelchair? People said, I don't even know if we have those. That's not the answer to that question. That never should be happening. And when they put me in the wheelchair, finally, an officer said, wait, you were driving, right? So your legs do work. What? You know, I refrained from saying, have you ever seen a handicapped parking spot, sir? But the thing is, right, people are going to say, well, none of that stuff is illegal. It's just me. But I have read too many books to think that things are OK when this level of dehumanization is happening, because it means officers are probably trying to get through their day when they have been given orders that are not righteous, and they actually hurt people.

[00:08:43] Speaker 1: Alexa, I have to ask you, and Ali, I ask you to forgive me. My own sister is mobility impaired, and she drives with the assistance, had to accommodate and adapt her car so many different times to be able to still function and live in the same way that she wants to. I get emotional thinking about it. My blood is boiling thinking about that experience. So can you just describe from the legal perspective of it? Yeah, she has been was detained. The DHS says that she was arrested for obstruction. Are you aware if she is facing any charges? I have to for a second compartmentalize the dehumanization just to get through the question. You have to forgive me. Have you heard that she is facing any charges?

[00:09:39] Speaker 4: I have not heard, and if she were, they would be completely baseless, because the people who violated laws at that scene were the DHS officers, and in particular, every officer in the way they treated her once they found out she had a disability, because Ali was very upfront about it. She told the officers, I am a woman with a disability, I have autism. She yelled it. She yelled it on the video, and they escalated at that point, and then subjected her to a very brutal use of force, pulling her out of the car, slamming her down on the ground, and then carrying her like an animal is the only way to describe it. That violates every police standard and how you are supposed to interact with somebody in a car, and it violates every standard in how you are supposed to interact with somebody with a disability.