Wilder, Idaho— When Canyon County Sheriff Kieran Donahue described the October raid on a popular community horse racing venue here, he hailed the detention of 105 undocumented immigrants and flatly rejected allegations that agents used zip ties to restrain some of the dozens of children present.
Then he was presented with photographic evidence. Images obtained by CBS News appear to show the zip ties and bruised wrists of Anabel Romero's 14-year-old daughter SueHey, a U.S. citizen who was tending to her 6- and 8-year-old siblings when the agents descended on the crowd in military-style gear and herded them into a confined area.
"God bless her. I'm sorry she went through that," said Donahue, a self-proclaimed cowboy who participated in the raid on horseback. "But law enforcement is not evil because we contained everybody and detained them until we sorted it out. That's not evil."
Mistreatment of children during a militarized police action that involved armored vehicles and flashbang grenades has sparked fresh questions about tactics being employed nationwide in the name of the Trump administration's wave of immigration sweeps. On Tuesday, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a federal civil rights lawsuit highlighting the mistreatment of families attending the weekend recreation event at La Catedral Arena, many of whom were American citizens of Hispanic descent.
The incident in this small agricultural community about an hour outside of Boise has largely been overshadowed in the national headlines by the immigration surge in Minnesota, where the tactics used by federal immigration agents on children have attracted widespread scrutiny. In one instance, a family alleged that agents deployedtear gas that landed under a car with six children inside. One viral image showed5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos, who was wearing a hat with bunny ears and carrying a Spiderman backpack as he was being detained.
But the ACLU argues the Idaho raid signals a frightening normalization of harsh and sometimes violent action by federal law enforcement in the presence of children. Those incidents, the suit alleges, will leave physical and emotional scars.
"They have done long lasting damage to children," said Jenn Rolnick Borchetta, the ACLU's deputy project director on policing. "At this moment, when the United States Congress is confronted with a question of how to reign in ICE…the answer is they need to reign in ICE to protect our children."
The administration denied that children at the Idaho horse track were ever zip-tied. A Homeland Security spokesperson told CBS News those claims were a "conspiracy theory."
But those who were temporarily detained tell a different story. In an exclusive interview with CBS News, 14-year-old SueHey described the moment law enforcement officers — who she said refused to identify the agencies they worked for — herded her onto the racetrack with hundreds of other detainees and, she says, zip-tied her hands.
"I'm just like there crying, like I'm struggling to breathe," she said. "I can't even get the words out."
Source: Drudge Report
