Aliya Rahman speaks during a forum on use of force by Department of Homeland Security agents, on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, on February 3, 2026. (Photo by ROBERTO SCHMIDT / AFP via Getty Images)
On January 13, Aliya Rahman was on her way to a doctor’s appointment when ICE agents smashed the glass out of her car windows at a Minneapolis intersection, pulled her out of her car, hauled her down the street by her arms and legs, and detained her. RahmanÏ—a disabled Bangladeshi-American woman with a traumatic brain injury and autism—blacked out from her injuries on the floor of the Whipple detention center. When she woke up in the emergency room, she learned that she was being treated for “injuries consistent with assault,” according to her lawyers.
Now, Rahman plans to ensure her ordeal comes at a cost to the agency that harmed her. On April 16th, Rahman’s legal team filed a federal tort claim against ICE, seeking monetary restitution for their client’s treatment at the agency’s hands. It’s a tactic more and more people are using to seek accountability for mistreatment and violence done by federal agents.
“I was never asked for ID, never told I was under arrest, never read my rights, and never charged with a crime,” Rahman said. Since her detention, ICE’s official X account has posted video footage of the moments before her arrest, implying that she has broken the law: “18 U.S.C. § 111 criminalizes impeding or interfering with federal officers.”
It’s a “blatant misinformation campaign,” Rahman’s lawyer, Jessica Gingold, told Mother Jones, adding that because of these posts, Rahman has received threats and harassment online. Her client, she said, was “going about her daily life, trying to go to the doctor, and ended up unconscious on the floor in a detention center.”
Under US law, it is near-impossible for a person to file a civil rights lawsuit against an individual federal agent, the way someone who’s been hurt by a local or state police officer could. But an increasing number of people hurt by ICE and DHS agents are filing tort claims—demanding monetary compensation for what has been done to them—through a byzantine process governed by the Federal Tort Claims Act.
“Under the Federal Tort Claims Act we can file a claim for monetary damages. That’s what we can ask for,” Gingold, of the MacArthur Justice Center, told Mother Jones. “We can’t ask for systems change under the FTCA. But we do feel strongly that [if] more people do this, demand their due for the harm that’s been wreaked over this country…that itself could make systems change happen, right?”
An ICE agent told the Washington Post that the agency received 400 tort claims in fiscal year 2025. Among the claimants: an undocumented immigrant in Chicago seeking $1 million in damages after he said he was body-slammed and put in a chokehold by a DHS agent, a 79-year-old US citizen in California who is seeking $50 million after federal agents shoved him to the ground and broke his ribs, and the wife of a farmworker who died of injuries sustained during an ICE raid is seeking $47 million.
And Rahman, now, is likely to be one of the most public faces of this tactic: since her arrest, she’s continued to speak up for immigration reform, attended the State of the Union as Ilhan Omar’s guest—and she’s been arrested a second time, for standing up during the State of the Union. (She was released without charge.)
“Our nation lacks rules and accountability around what a person claiming to be law enforcement can do to another human being, and I am not afraid to keep working on this problem even after ICE is gone,” Rahman said in February.
But though ICE and DHS are facing billions of dollars in potential tort claims, the process is likely to be slow. Filing a tort claim, Gingold said, is relatively simple: you start by filling out a form. “What’s required is not much: you just need to be able to say, this is the harm that happened.” Then, the agency has six months to agree to pay, or contest your claim. Often, though, they ignore tort claims altogether, Gingold said. If that six-month clock runs out, then a person harmed by an ICE agent would have the opportunity to take the agency to court.
“If the agency gets enough of these and understands that treating people inhumanely, ignoring disability, targeting people for their race is costly, that can lead to changes in how they function,” Gingold said.
