The 54-year-old woman had her shirt half-raised and unconsciously spread out onto the sidewalk. Federal immigration agents nearby were on guard when people yelled at them.
American citizen Arturo Hermosilo was in his work van and recorded it all when an agent ordered him to back up and make space for an ambulance along the way for the women.
As he was turning around, another agent began slamming the window and the mirror in the side view and shoving it in. He couldn’t see behind him and felt a bump.
Elmosilo opens the door and tells the agent that he cannot move. But soon they dragged him out of his van.
“I told them I wouldn’t do anything illegal,” he said.
Elmosilo was arrested and sent to the Metropolitan Detention Center in downtown Los Angeles. The woman said she was unconscious when an agent hugged her until the point she struggled to breathe, and she had passed away when she had heart surgery at the Holy Cross Medical Center in Providence. The doctor told her she had a heart attack.
The June 19 immigration, just outside the Lowe Home Improvement Store, was one of many in Southern California, encapsulating the chaotic method adopted last month to detain people.
(Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)
The June 19 immigration, just outside the Lowe Home Improvement Store, was one of many in Southern California, encapsulating the chaotic method adopted last month to detain people. A federal judge on Friday determined that there was sufficient evidence that agents were using racial profiling to target people, and ordered the halt of indiscriminate sweep, saying they had violated the fourth amendment.
Homeland Security Director Tricia McLaughlin said in an email response to an era when people “slashed the vehicle into a law enforcement vehicle” during the June 19 operation.
“CBP agents were also assaulted during surgery and verbally harassed… Nonetheless, CBP arrested 30 illegal aliens in Hollywood and nine illegal aliens in San Fernando and Pacoima,” she wrote.
The Times asked for clarification as to which operations would involve federal vehicle charges, but neither McLaughlin nor the agency answered follow-up questions.
The video of the witnesses, as well as an interview with Hermosillo and the 54-year-old woman, tells a different story, highlighting the public’s rage and criticism of the immigrant sweeps.
“Virgin Mary, help me, don’t abandon me.”
Refusing to give her last name because of her immigration status, Mathilde said that when the 54-year-old got the words that federal immigration agents were in the area, she was selling Tamales at the entrance to a car park shared by Lowe and other businesses.
Mathilde was nervous and began to overthrow her position. She was about to put away her umbrella when the white car with colored windows was pulled up.
“I saw two agents leave,” she said in a phone interview. “I didn’t run.”
She said the agent who ran to her never identified herself and provided a warrant or requested document for her immigration status. Instead, she said, he grabbed her from behind.
“I could feel his vest in my ears,” said Mathilde, who is about five feet tall. “I told him I couldn’t breathe.”
Mathilde said the 54-year-old was selling Tamales at the entrance to a car park shared by Lowe’s and other businesses when he received the words that federal immigration agents were in the area.
(Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)
A second agent appears to handcuff her to grab her. She said one of the agents unintentionally lifted her shirt up and tried to expose her bra. She reached out to pull her shirt down, and the agent used more force as if she was resisting.
What happened next is that Mathilde cannot completely remember.
“I don’t know if I was stunned or if they threw me away,” she said.
However, she woke up on the ground and began pleasing with her agent.
“I told them: I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe, my heart hurts,” she said. “But they didn’t listen. They ignored me.”
She said she looked up at the tree holding a framed photograph of the Virgin Mary and began praying. “Mary, help me, don’t abandon me.
She said a third agent came in and said he was an emergency personnel and asked if she had any medical conditions. She told him she suffered from high blood pressure and diabetes and her heart was hurting.
He took her pulse before the agent could dial 911. She said the agent left her on the ground.
Videos filmed by people on site and shared on social media show Mathilde on the ground, surrounded by agents, unconsciously. In another video, the firefighters are caring for her, but the small crowd shames the agent for hurting the woman, especially the agent who appears to be Latino.
“You have Latino blood,” shouted a woman to her agent in Spanish.
“Does this feel good?” cried another woman.
“They’re not going to break me.”
When paramedics arrived to transport Mathilde to the hospital, three federal agents were trying to drag Elmosillo out of his van.
The video shows the agent dragging Elmosilo’s leg out of him. The second agent tries to do the same thing before trying to take Hermosilo’s arm, but loses his grip and collapses. The third agent with the vest written “Medic” will join soon thereafter.
“Hey, let him go!” woman screams in the background.
“What a god, why [do] Do you guys behave like animals? ” says the woman recording the video.
“What did he do?” the man screams at the agent trying to get people back together.
This video shows three agents struggling to pull out Hermosillo. When he exits the van, he is wearing shoes on one foot and is pushed down to the hot ground, allowing him to handcuff.
“What is your name?” The recording woman screams at Hermosilo, responding with his name.
“Please tell me where you came from. We can leave you from prison. Where did you come from? What is your address? We want to call your family,” people call.
In another video, Elmosilo is seen standing behind a white van, “counterfighting, counterattack.”
“We’re going to fight for you!” the woman cried out to him.
Upon being taken into custody, he said the agents accused him of obstruction and took him to the Metropolitan Detention Center in downtown Los Angeles, he said, the agent chuckled at him.
“They told me I would never go outside and I said I was making the lawyer better,” he said.
He got mad when an agent told him he didn’t understand why the public was cleaning up most of the immigrants.
“That’s because you are Nazi,” Hermosilo told the agent.
He said he told him he had been in prison for nearly a decade. Hermosilo tells his agent he’s fine with it.
“I didn’t seem to break me,” he said. “I’m going to continue to educate here. I’ll continue to organize here.”
He said that a short time later, a homeland security agent had come in to talk to him.
“They told me, ‘You were never arrested. You’re just in custody, but you can’t leave LA County for six months or a year,” and they were trying to go on a crime, but they had let me go. ”
He said he signed the release document.
“They took me out the street without shoes or phone,” he said. “It was inside the car so I had nothing.”
Elmosilo said he recorded the case but refused to provide it to the era as part of his defense against the federal government.
“You know the difference between them and us,” he said. “It means our struggle comes from love, and all they have is hatred.
“My struggle is for the love of my people.”
“The doctor said I was lucky.”
When Mathilde was placed in Gurney and moved to the ambulance, she was taken three miles to Providence Holy Cross Medical Center.
There, the doctors treated her partially blocked artery with the heart and told her she had a mild heart attack.
“The doctor said I was lucky that they weren’t too choked or that they would need to have an open heart surgery,” she said.
She stayed in the hospital for five days and was prescribed cardiac medication for anxiety and anxiety medication that developed after the incident on June 19th.
“I can’t sleep because I have nightmares,” she said.
Anxiety creeps up to her. Sometimes she said she could feel the agent’s breath as he held her tight. She said she had bruising on her legs, arms and belly and couldn’t even cook.
When she came to the US 29 years ago, it was not what Mathilde of America imagined.
She and her husband came for work and a stable income. They wanted to send money to the house, so the husband’s parents, who were bouncing off from one relative’s house to another, were able to have their own place. They also wanted to raise a family, but in countries that offer better opportunities. She said her 28-year-old daughter is an assistant nurse and her 15-year-old son wants to go to college and become a structural engineer.
“Both of them were struggling with the sacrifice,” she said. “But we wanted a better future for our children.
“We wanted to make things better.”