Federal agents dragged U.S. citizen Aliya Rahman from her car and detained her without charge in Minneapolis

On January 13, 2026, masked federal agents blocked an intersection in Minneapolis and, in a confrontation captured on widely circulated video, smashed the passenger-side window of Aliya Rahman's car, cut her seatbelt, opened the driver's-side door, and dragged her out. Rahman, a 43-year-old Minneapolis resident and U.S. citizen who is autistic and has a prior brain injury, was on her way to a routine appointment at the city's Traumatic Brain Injury Center. She told agents repeatedly that she was disabled and could not process their shouted commands over the surrounding noise; officers carried her by her arms and legs to a detention vehicle. The stop happened blocks from where, a week earlier, an ICE agent had fatally shot Minneapolis resident Renee Good during the same federal deployment, Operation Metro Surge.

Rahman was taken to the Whipple detention facility, where she said she repeatedly asked for medical care and disability accommodations and was ignored and mocked by agents; she lost consciousness in her cell and was taken to a hospital, where she was treated for injuries consistent with assault. She was never charged with a crime. A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson disputed Rahman's account, calling her an "agitator" who "ignored multiple commands by an officer to move her vehicle away from the scene" and saying she was arrested along with six other people the department also called agitators.

The MacArthur Justice Center took Rahman's case, with director Alexa Van Brunt describing her as caught in a "terrible and confusing position" with "nowhere to go" -- moving her car risked being accused of driving at officers, as agents had claimed before killing Good days earlier, while remaining stationary "led to physical violence and abuse." News organizations that reviewed the same video footage did not document Border Patrol Commander Gregory Bovino at the scene of Rahman's arrest; wire reporting on the incident separately described him leading a different arrest of two Target store employees elsewhere in the Twin Cities that week.

Updates

2026-04-16 — MacArthur Justice Center filed federal tort claim over the arrest [4, 5]

Rahman's attorneys at the MacArthur Justice Center and Friedman Gilbert + Gerhardstein filed a Federal Tort Claims Act claim against the Department of Homeland Security, naming DHS, U.S. Customs and Border Protection, and ICE, seeking accountability for the January 13 arrest. Attorney Jessica Gingold said agents "battered," "assaulted," and were "negligent in their medical care" toward Rahman. Rahman had not been charged with any crime in connection with the arrest.