“I’m Disabled!”: Ali Rahman Breaks Silence on Brutal ICE Arrest and the Dehumanization of Federal Detention

In the heart of Minneapolis, a city already scarred by tension between its residents and law enforcement, a new video has emerged that has shocked the conscience of the nation. It depicts a scene of raw, unbridled chaos: a woman, identified as Ali Rahman, being forcibly dragged from her driver’s seat by federal agents as she screams a desperate, four-word plea: “I’m disabled!” For the first time since the video went viral, Ali Rahman has spoken out in an exclusive interview, providing a harrowing account of the events that led to her arrest and the subsequent “dehumanization” she says she experienced while in federal custody.

The Doctor’s Appointment That Never Happened

On the day of her arrest, Ali Rahman was not heading to a protest. She was not an “agitator,” a term later used by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to justify the intervention. According to Rahman, she was simply a patient on her way to a long-scheduled doctor’s appointment. She was driving on a main thoroughfare—a direct route from her home to the medical parking lot—when she found herself caught in a “militarized traffic jam.”

The scene was part of a larger protest against President Trump’s immigration crackdown, occurring just two blocks from where an ICE agent had fatally shot Rene Good only a week prior. For Rahman, who lives with autism and auditory processing challenges, the environment was a sensory nightmare. She describes a “cacophony of conflicting instructions” from agents whose faces were obscured by masks.

“I am a disabled person who has autism,” Rahman explained. “Even someone who doesn’t have the kind of auditory processing challenges I do would not know what to do with the sentence ‘Move, I will break your effing window,’ followed immediately by ‘Get out!’”

A Threat of Violence, Not a Warning

The video shows agents pulling Rahman by her arms and legs from her vehicle. She insists that what the government calls “repeated warnings” were, in her ears, threats of violence. Her autism includes an auditory sorting challenge, making it impossible to identify which set of lips is speaking when multiple voices are shouting at once—especially when those lips are hidden behind tactical gear.

The DHS statement claimed Rahman ignored multiple commands to move her vehicle away from the scene. However, Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara, who reviewed the footage, expressed a visceral disgust at the tactics used. “It pisses me off to see that, to see men doing that to a woman who’s disabled,” O’Hara stated, adding that if the officers involved worked for him, they would be facing immediate disciplinary action.

The Six Stages of Dehumanization

What happened after the cameras stopped rolling is perhaps even more disturbing. Rahman describes being taken through “six stages of detention and processing” before she eventually lost consciousness and was transported away in an ambulance. During her time in custody, she claims she witnessed a complete lack of professional protocol and an environment where medical needs were treated with mockery.

Rahman, who requires a cane for balance and walking, says her requests for her mobility aid were met with indifference. “They said, ‘There’s no cane here.’ They stood me up and said, ‘Walk. You can do it.’ There was no medical screening. I was never once asked for my ID.”

In one particularly galling exchange, after Rahman repeatedly requested a wheelchair, an officer allegedly remarked, “Well, you were driving, right? So your legs do work.” This fundamental misunderstanding of mobility impairment and the dismissive attitude toward disability accommodations are at the heart of Rahman’s claim of systemic dehumanization.

A Legal and Moral Crisis

Ali Rahman’s attorney, Alexia Van Brunt, has labeled the arrest and the use of force as “completely baseless.” Van Brunt argues that the agents violated every established police standard for interacting with individuals in vehicles and, more importantly, every standard for treating people with disabilities.

“Ali was very upfront about it. She yelled, ‘I am a woman with a disability!’ It’s right there on the video,” Van Brunt said. “They escalated at that point and subjected her to a very brutal use of force, slamming her down and carrying her like an animal.”

As of now, Rahman has not been formally charged with any crime, despite being told she was under arrest for obstruction. The case has sparked a wider conversation about the intersection of federal immigration enforcement and the rights of American citizens with disabilities. For Ali Rahman, the experience was a terrifying reminder of how quickly “public safety” can transform into a “leisure to liability.”

“I have read too many books to think that things are okay when this level of dehumanization is happening,” Rahman concluded. Her story is a stark warning of the human cost that occurs when rigid mandates and tactical aggression replace empathy and common sense. As Minneapolis and the rest of the country watch for the next move from the DHS, Ali Rahman’s voice remains a powerful testament to the resilience of those who refuse to be silenced by the very systems meant to protect them.