MINNEAPOLIS, Minnesota — A Minneapolis resident who says federal immigration agents dragged her from her car in January and left her unconscious in a detention cell sued the United States on Tuesday, November 10, in the U.S. District Court for the District of Minnesota. The lawsuit, filed by the MacArthur Justice Center alongside the Minnesota firm FG+G on behalf of Aliya Rahman, lays out eight counts against the U.S. government, including assault, battery, false arrest and false imprisonment, negligent supervision and negligence, her lawyers announced. Every account of what happened to Ms. Rahman in January in the paragraphs below is her allegation, drawn from her lawsuit, her earlier federal tort claim and her civil-rights complaint — the government has not admitted them, and its past public response is set out separately in this report.
Source: MacArthur Justice Center
What she says happened on January 13
According to her legal team's case account, Ms. Rahman — a United States citizen who lives with autism and a traumatic brain injury, both of which affect her cognitive and physical functioning — was driving on January 13, 2026 to a regularly scheduled appointment at the Hennepin County Traumatic Brain Injury Center when she ran into a traffic jam near the intersection of Park Avenue and East 34th Street in Minneapolis. The jam sat inside the sixth week of Operation Metro Surge, the Department of Homeland Security enforcement operation for which, her claim states, DHS sent more than 3,000 federal law enforcement officers to the Minneapolis area. She says she was not at the intersection as an observer or protester, but as a patient trying to reach her doctor's office nearby.
Her claim alleges that federal officers — some holding cans of tear gas — surrounded her car, shouting conflicting orders to 'go' and to 'move' in a very loud environment that left her confused and scared as she tried to process the instructions. Even though her driver's-side window was rolled down, she alleges, an officer came around the back of the car and punched her front passenger-side window, shattering glass onto her face and body. Officers then grabbed at her from both sides, one pushing from the passenger side while another pulled her out through the driver's door, dumped her on the ground, and carried her by her arms and legs to a DHS vehicle, her case account says. Videos of the interaction were captured by bystanders and circulated widely at the time. Mother Jones, reporting on Tuesday's lawsuit, summarized her account this way: six masked officers arrested her despite her telling them she was a U.S. citizen, and she later blacked out in a cell.
Source: Mother Jones (via TalkFuse summary)
She alleges she told the officers she was disabled and autistic and that they ignored and mocked her, according to her lawyers' case page. At the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building in Fort Snelling — the ICE detention site at 1 Federal Drive — she says she repeatedly asked for medical care and for disability accommodations, her pleas were ignored, and she eventually lost consciousness in her cell. Her claim states she arrived at the Hennepin County Medical Center emergency room at or around 1:05 p.m. that day and was released that afternoon. She was never charged with a crime, and, her claim says, the government never gave her any paperwork for her arrest. Her lawyers say she lives with lasting injuries and trauma from the encounter.
The government's position
The allegations above are Ms. Rahman's, and the Department of Homeland Security gave a different public account of the January encounter at the time: DHS labelled her an 'agitator' who ignored commands to move her vehicle, according to later reporting summarizing the department's response. No DHS or ICE response to Tuesday's lawsuit itself appears in the announcement from her lawyers or in the Mother Jones reporting reviewed for this story, and the lawsuit's claims will now be tested in court, where the government will have the opportunity to answer them formally. Nothing in this report should be read as a court finding against any individual officer; the officers involved are not named in the announcement, and one stated aim of the suit, Mother Jones reported, is that discovery in the case could identify the masked officers involved.
The long road to Tuesday's filing
Tuesday's lawsuit was the third formal step in a process her lawyers laid out in their announcement. First, on April 16, 2026, they submitted an administrative claim against the federal government under the Federal Tort Claims Act (FTCA) for unlawful use of force and detention — a required first step before suing the United States for the actions of its employees. Six months passed without a response, her lawyers said, which is what freed her to file the formal lawsuit now. Second, on June 23, 2026, her team separately filed a civil-rights complaint with DHS's own Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, asking the department to investigate; that complaint alleged violations of her First, Fourth and Fifth Amendment rights and of Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, the federal disability-rights law, as well as DHS regulations and policies on disability accommodations, use of force, arrest and detention practices and medical care.
"I am one of many who have been impacted by this government's vile abuse of power. And while this lawsuit stems from what happened in January, the terror did not start there and has not stopped." — Aliya Rahman. "Today, we sue to demand accountability for the government's lawless actions that have led to Aliya's immense physical, emotional, and mental suffering." — Jessica Gingold, senior counsel, MacArthur Justice Center. "We cannot normalize the government's extreme abuses against people trying to live normal lives. Today, we say no more." — Al Gerhardstein, of counsel, FG+G
Wider context: Operation Metro Surge
The January encounter did not happen in isolation. It took place during Operation Metro Surge, the federal immigration enforcement surge in the Minneapolis–St. Paul area that began in late 2025 and drew sustained protest and litigation in Minnesota. Mother Jones, in its Tuesday report on the lawsuit, put two rival scale figures side by side: the City of Minneapolis estimates the surge caused $700 million in damage to the city, while DHS says 4,000 people were detained. Both figures are attributed claims from that reporting, not findings of Ms. Rahman's case. For diaspora readers — including Punjabi families in Minnesota and elsewhere who followed the surge through the winter — the significance of Tuesday's filing is that it moves one of the surge's most widely seen encounters from video and press coverage into a courtroom, where sworn filings, government answers and discovery will create a public record that advocacy statements alone cannot.
What happens next
The United States must now answer the complaint in federal court; no hearing date or damages figure was announced in Tuesday's release, and her lawyers did not put a dollar amount in their announcement. Through the case, her lawyer told Mother Jones, the officers' names and records can be sought — the route by which a suit against unnamed masked officers can become a case against identified individuals. Separately, the June civil-rights complaint to DHS's civil-rights office remains the department's own internal channel; no outcome of that complaint was reported on Tuesday. Until the government files its answer, the public record consists of Ms. Rahman's allegations, the videos from January, and DHS's earlier characterization of her as an agitator who ignored orders — three pieces readers should keep distinct.