ICE Rousts Journalists Doing Their Jobs at Manhattan Federal Court House

Our news colleague Dean Moses had a run-in with the law the other day. Or, more precisely, he had a run-in with lawless federal law enforcement agents. Moses is a photojournalist for amNY, the feisty subway tabloid. He covers the courts, police, and firefighters.

The courts used to be a place where America’s penchant for due process played out in an orderly way and everyone’s rights were protected. But these days, Moses and his colleagues spend a lot of their time not in the courtrooms but in the hallways of the federal court house in Manhattan, monitoring agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement executing their novel tactic of seizing migrants who show up, as required, for immigration hearings.

The journalists are doing exactly what journalists are supposed to do: record the actions of the government. They have witnessed masked ICE agents dragging off migrants and even detaining elected officials seeking to support the migrants. But something new and disturbing happened the other day to Moses and two of his colleagues. They were physically muscled out of doing their job by the very ICE agents they were covering. A spokeswoman for Homeland Security said the journalists, as well as unnamed “activists,” were obstructing the operations of the ICE agents.

But that is not what a video shot in the moment shows. It shows two women, whom Moses understood to be migrants, leaving a hearing, boarding a courthouse elevator followed by several burly, masked agents. So, Moses did what a reporter is supposed to do: He boarded the elevator, too, to see what was going on. That’s where another day at the courthouse turned into a trampling of Moses’s constitutional right to cover the news.

The agents grabbed Moses and physically forced him off the elevator. During this exercise of brute force, two other journalists just outside the elevator were knocked to the ground. One, later identified as L. Vural Elibol with the Turkish news agency Anadolu, was injured badly enough that he needed to be taken to the hospital on a stretcher. Another photojournalist, Olga Federova, was also knocked to the ground but managed to keep on shooting photos from the ground.

Moses is a well-respected journalist. New York’s own emergency services hold him in high regard. The FDNY appreciates his work so much that they use some of his photos of fires in their annual Medal Day program. He is no stranger to being in harm’s way. But this was next level. Moses is large in journalistic presence but rather small in physical stature. The ICE agents towered over him. The notion that he was somehow a threat to them makes sense only if taken as fear of his pen or camera, not his physical prowess. “I’ve never seen them be that violent with the press,” the photojournalist who recorded the scene, Suzanne Keith, said to the Daily News. “Normally, they do yell at us a lot, but they don’t put their hands on us.”

The Homeland Security spokesman, Tricia McLaughlin, said agents are stressed out about “hostile environments that put officers, detainees, and the public” in danger. “Rioters and sanctuary politicians who encourage individuals to interfere with arrests are actively creating hostile environments,” she said. Although journalists in the hallway that day say they were the only ones there other than migrants and ICE agents.

Free speech advocates (shouldn’t we all be free speech advocates?) see a different pattern in the elevator incident. “This violent assault on journalists by ICE officers in New York is another stark example of federal law enforcement and immigration officials failing to respect the essential watchdog role of an independent press,” said Tim Richardson, who directs the program in Journalism and Disinformation at Pen America, the writers group. “This latest incident is part of an alarming trend of attacks on press freedom by the administration, putting journalists’ safety and the public’s right to information at serious risk.”

Richardson noted that a journalist was arrested in Chicago covering an ICE-related protest and that Mario Guevara, a Spanish-language journalist in Atlanta, was arrested at an anti-ICE protest and has been held in ICE detention for more than 100 days under threat of deportation. “My father’s vocation is journalism,” wrote Guevara’s son, Oscar. “He is a storyteller, a truth seeker, a man who believed—and still believes—that people deserve to know what’s happening in their communities, in their governments, and in the world around them. He is neither a threat nor a criminal.”

The same can be said for journalists in general. Dean Moses was neither a threat nor a criminal when he was muscled off that elevator. It is true, as Homeland Security says, that journalists should not obstruct law enforcement. But it is equally true that law enforcement should not—must not, constitutionally—obstruct journalists.

“We will not be pushed around and told to look the other way,” amNY said in an editorial. “We will not be bullied into leaving Federal Plaza. Moses will return there to fulfill his role of documenting ICE’s actions and informing New Yorkers about what’s happening in their courts.

“We do not need ICE to roll out the welcome mat, but we do need them to respect us and the rule of law. And since Moses and other reporters are not afraid to show their faces, the ICE agents should act in kind and take their damn masks off.”