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Footage Shows Father's Seizure as He Held Toddler During Wife's ‘Harrowing’ ICE Arrest
"This is a sickening example of Trump and ICE's blatant disregard for humanity as they terrorize our families and communities. It is shameful, cruel, and it must end."
Nov 07, 2025
A man whose wife was arrested by federal immigration authorities on Thursday morning in Fitchburg, Massachusetts said Friday that his toddler daughter had been "traumatized" by the chaotic altercation during which he appeared to have a seizure and the agents threatened to take both parents away and turn the child over the state.
Carlos Sebastian Zapata told the Boston Globe that he became unconscious while trying to stop the agents from pulling his wife, Juliana Milena Zapata, away during a traffic stop at about 7:00 am while Zapata and the couple's 1-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Alaia, were taking her to work at Burger King.
Their car was suddenly surrounded by several vehicles and federal agents began banging on their windows.
When Zapata tried to stop the agents from taking his wife away, one officer "pressed on his neck," according to the Globe, and he lost consciousness while Alaia was in his arms.
As a video taken by an eyewitness showed, Zapata said he "had convulsions or something. I don’t know what they did to me, but they were pressing on my neck.”
The video appeared to show the 24-year-old father having a seizure as Alaia cried and horrified onlookers yelled at the immigration agents. Local police ordered the bystanders to stay back.
WARNING: The violence and cruelty is hard to watch, but impossible for families to endure.
This is a sickening example of Trump and ICE's blatant disregard for humanity as they terrorize our families and communities.
It is shameful, cruel, and it must end. pic.twitter.com/ZGNOYtpVMO
— Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley (@RepPressley) November 7, 2025
“I wasn’t letting go of my wife because they wanted to take her away,” Zapata told the Globe. When he began having convulsions, he said, "that’s when I let go of my wife."
He said the agents told the couple that they would either arrest Milena Zapata and allow Alaia to stay with her father, or they would arrest both parents and turn the child over to a state agency.
US Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) called the incident "harrowing" and condemned the masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents who had "brutalized" the family, and the Trump administration for its nationwide mass deportation campaign.
"If this video left you feeling scared, I want you to know, so am I," said Markey. "If you're feeling angry, so am I... What we saw in this video is just another example of the violence and terror being perpetrated all across our country. This is not normal. This is what dictators do."
Zapata told the Globe that he and his wife were from Ecuador and entered the country several years ago. They have a pending asylum case and had authorization to work.
Tricia McLaughlin, assistant secretary for public affairs at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), said on social media that Milena Zapata was a “violent criminal illegal alien.”
The Globe reported that "according to court records, Milena Zapata was accused of stabbing a woman with scissors in the hand and throwing a trash can at her during a dispute over a relationship she believed the woman had with her husband. She was charged with assault and battery with a dangerous weapon."
Zapata told the Globe that his wife had been attending all her court dates as ordered and that the situation had been "blown out of proportion."
“We came here to work, not to cause harm or anything like that,” Zapata said.
DHS accused Zapata of "faking a seizure," saying he refused medical attention after his wife was arrested.
He told the Globe that Alaia has been distraught since her mother was detained; Milena Zapata is reportedly being held at Cumberland County Jail in Maine.
“She misses her mom a lot, she stays very close to her mom,” Zapata said. “She asks about her mom, she says, ‘Mami, mami, mami’ all the time. I don’t know what to tell her... Sincerely, she is traumatized.”
Community members are planning to hold a vigil in Fitchburg on Saturday, and the mayor's office has offered assistance to the family. The city has received more than 5,000 calls about ICE's treatment of the family.
"The violence and cruelty is hard to watch, but impossible for families to endure," said Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) of the video that circulated on social media Friday. "This is a sickening example of Trump and ICE's blatant disregard for humanity as they terrorize our families and communities. It is shameful, cruel, and it must end."
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Why I Am Joining the People’s Hunger Strike for Gaza
I have joined the hunger strike in grief at the annihilation of Gaza, and to protest the use of my tax dollars to transform the Gaza Strip into a graveyard for its people and international law.
Sep 25, 2025
On September 25 I will begin a weeklong water-only fast as part of The People’s Hunger Strike that was launched outside the John Fitzgerald Kennedy Federal Building in Boston on September 4.
Its goals are to raise consciousness about the deliberate starvation of the people of Gaza and to pressure Massachusetts senators, whose offices are in that building, to sponsor a version of the House "Block the Bombs" bill (HR 3565) that would stop the US from sending Israel the kind of high-impact weaponry being used against civilians in the Gaza Strip in violation of international law.
The Horror of Forced Starvation
The People’s Hunger Strike is the brainchild of a Boston physician Miriam Komaromy. She had not previously been actively involved in organizing for Palestine. But “when forced starvation was imposed on the Gaza population it brought me up short,” she told me. “I said this cannot be. The reality of parents starving and watching their child starve to death—I couldn’t bear it.”
Responding to a Palestinian call urging people of conscience around the world to join a solidarity hunger strike initiated in the West Bank, Dr. Komaromy reached out to members of Boston’s Doctors against Genocide and Healthcare Workers for Palestine-Boston as well as the Boston chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace. Soon they had numerous cosponsoring groups supporting the planned hunger strike, and some 35 people had pledged to undertake one-week fasts.
Many of those who joined the action were new to the issue; others had long been involved in organizing for Palestinian rights. All were affected by what Jeannie—a hunger striker whose Irish heritage taught her something about deliberately manufactured famine—described in the following way: “For almost two years, we’ve seen the images of the displaced, whose homes, schools, hospitals, water, and entire society have been bombed, as they walk through the rubble seeking food and shelter. The woman whose milk has dried up screaming with grief over her dead baby; the face of a skeletal child, crying and holding out an empty pot; a father weeping over the shrouded corpses of his entire family. These images don’t stop coming.”
The Gaza I knew
Those images and the unfolding genocide that has been meticulously documented by human rights organizations including Israeli groups, genocide scholars and, on September 16, the United Nations International Commission of Inquiry, have overwhelmed me. I have a personal relationship with the Gaza Strip going back to my first visit in 1988 as part of a human rights delegation when Israel was using “force, might, and beatings” (Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s phrase) to suppress the first Intifada, an unarmed uprising of the entire civil society.
"We have a duty to do all that we can to stop the genocide that is funded and promoted by our government.”
During the more than a dozen visits I subsequently made to Gaza as head of a foundation supporting its mental health services, I made many friends and experienced this tiny piece of land as a place of extraordinary hospitality. I saw firsthand how its population was demonized by Israel, imprisoned in what has been called an "open air prison" since 2007, and subjected to repeated sustained military bombardments well before the seismic events of October 7, 2023.
I have joined the hunger strike in grief at the annihilation of Gaza, and to protest the use of my tax dollars to transform the Gaza Strip into a graveyard for its people and international law.
Our Duty to Stop Genocide
Several people I work with in the Boston-based Alliance for Water Justice in Palestine have also joined the fast. Judy, who recently finished her week without food, says she fasted because “I am angry and heartbroken watching the people of Gaza endure forced starvation and seeing what it does to their bodies, spirit, and to their future. I joined the strike to pressure our government to stop sending Israel weapons.”
Jude, who is in treatment for cancer herself, hopes to personalize and make visible the impact of the Israeli-created famine and the long-term harm it is causing. She adds: “I can retreat from this strike at the first sign of harm. This is not true for our counterparts in Gaza who are exhausted; without food, water, medicine, or shelter; and under constant attack. We have a duty to do all that we can to stop the genocide that is funded and promoted by our government.”
Kathy hopes that the hunger strike will send a loud message to her elected representative, Minority Whip Katherine Clark (D-Mass.), who has not signed onto the House "Block the Bombs" bill despite “countless calls from her constituents over the last two years concerning the weapons the US has sent to Israel with Massachusetts tax dollars. The result has been the extermination of entire generational families living in Gaza, as well as the killing and maiming of massive numbers of civilians including babies, children, courageous journalists, and doctors. We want her to stand with the Congressional Progressive Caucus which has endorsed the Block the Bombs Act.”
It is too late to save the lives of more than 65,000 Palestinians, many slaughtered with US weapons and 83% of them civilians according to the Israeli army’s own data. It is too late to bring back the hundreds of children who have already died from forced starvation. But we hope that the hunger strike will amplify our message: Let Gaza Live!
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Class Action Suit Challenges Trump's Unconstitutional Attack on Due Process
“All people in the United States are entitled to due process—without exception,” said an attorney at the ACLU of Massachusetts.
Sep 24, 2025
Several New England affiliates of the American Civil Liberties Union have filed a new class-action lawsuit that challenges the immigration detention policies of US President Donald Trump.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Massachusetts announced on Tuesday that it is joining with the ACLU of New Hampshire, the ACLU of Maine, ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, the law firm Araujo and Fisher, the law firm Foley Hoag, and the Harvard Immigration and Refugee Clinic to sue the Trump administration over its policy of denying bond hearings to people detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
The ACLU of Massachusetts described the denial of bond hearings for ICE detainees as "a violation of statutory and constitutional rights" that are "upending decades of settled law and established practice in immigration proceedings." The end result of this, the ACLU of Massachusetts warned, is that "thousands of people in Massachusetts will be denied due process."
The complaint contends that the US Department of Justice (DOJ) has been denying ICE detainees their rights by "systematically reclassifying these people from the statutory authority of 8 U.S.C. § 1226, which usually allows for the opportunity to request bond during removal proceedings, to the no-bond detention provisions of 8 U.S.C. § 1225, which does not apply to people arrested in the interior of the United States and placed in removal proceedings."
The ACLU of Massachusetts said that the administration's misclassification of detainees stems from actions taken by the Tacoma Immigration Court in Washington, which in 2022 started "misclassifying § 1226 detainees arrested inside the United States as mandatory detainees under § 1225, solely because they initially entered the country without permission."
The lawsuit has been filed on behalf of Jose Arnulfo Guerrero Orellana, an immigrant who resides in Massachusetts and has no criminal record, but who was detained by ICE last week and has been denied the right to challenge his detention. The complaint asks that due process be restored for Orellana and others who have been similarly detained and held unlawfully.
Daniel McFadden, managing attorney at the ACLU of Massachusetts, argued that the administration's actions violate fundamental constitutional rights.
“All people in the United States are entitled to due process—without exception,” he said. “When the government arrests any person inside the United States, it must be required to prove to a judge that there is an actual reason for the person’s detention. Our client and others like him have a constitutional and statutory right to receive a bond hearing for exactly that purpose."
Annelise Araujo, founding principal and owner at Boston-based law firm Araujo and Fisher, argued that the administration's detention policy "violates due process and upends nearly 30 years of established practice."
"The people impacted by this policy are neighbors, friends, and family members, living peacefully in the United States and making important contributions to our communities," she said. "Currently, the only recourse is to file individual habeas petitions for each detained client—a process that keeps people detained longer and stretches the resources of our courts."
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