Aliya Rahman was driving to see her doctor — the 39th such appointment since she’d suffered a traumatic brain injury in 2024— when the two cars in front of her suddenly came to a stop in the middle of traffic.
Almost immediately, she heard someone loudly blowing a whistle and quickly realized she was in the middle of an Immigration and Customs Enforcement operation.
The 43-year-old Rahman — who is also autistic and sensitive to loud noises and crowds — next heard a “cacophony of conflicting commands,” beginning with someone barking, “ ‘Move or I will break your f***ing window,’ in my passenger side.
Rahman talked to The Independent via Zoom the past week to enlighten the public about her ICE ordeal and shed light on how a lack of compassion about her condition devolved into a nightmare after being dragged to a reviled detention center, where she was repeatedly mocked over her disability before she blacked out and landed in a hospital.
Even after the Wisconsin native was finally released, without charge, Rahman faced an onslaught of crude comments about her autism. She’s also received death threats and threats of sexual violence. “I’ve gotten a lot of hate messages,” she said.
Describing the initial traffic stop, she said: “I asked that officer, ‘Where do you want me to move to?’ because the side streets were blocked, so things just kind of got louder from there,” Rahman said.
She explained to The Independent that she has an autism-related auditory issue that makes multiple voices in a crowded space all sound like they’re the same volume. To work around that, she tries to look at people’s mouths as they speak.
“But you can’t do that with ICE officers who cover their face and who are yelling — I wouldn’t even call them instructions,” she said.
Soon, everything seemed to fast-forward to the moment, which has now been viewed online thousands of times, where ICE agents ripped her out of her car as she cried out that she is disabled and autistic.
In response to that viral video, the Department of Homeland Security would later call Rahman an “agitator” and said she “ignored multiple commands by an officer to move her vehicle away from the scene. The images showed ICE officials not only dragging her but also carrying her by her limbs despite her plea for compassion.
The Department of Homeland Security said on X that it arrested her Rahman obstruction and hauled into a detention facility.
Minneapolis has become a flashpoint since President Donald Trump sent ICE and Customs and Border Protection officials into the city. The administration did so ostensibly to crack down on the city’s Somali population in the wake of a welfare fraud scandal.
It quickly turned deadly. Just a few days before Rahman’s arrest, ICE official Jonathan Ross allegedly shot and killed Renee Good and a few days later, CBP officials shot and killed Alex Pretti. In between those two killings, Rahman’s detainment became another flashpoint.
Moreover, it happened only a few blocks away from where Good was killed. A former software engineer, Rahman said she gamed out in her head the probability of her own death at the time of her arrest.
‘The driver was laughing, couldn’t stop laughing’
Interactions with law enforcement can turn deadly, but autistic people often face higher risk of that given that stimming — short for ‘self-stimulatory’ behavior wherein autistic people engage in repetitive actions, often with their hands or with various sounds or other body movements — can be interpreted as sudden movements.
A lack of eye contact can be viewed as a sign of dishonesty or difficulty processing instructions — common characteristics of autism, can be viewed as insubordination, especially to law enforcement.
“The driver was laughing, couldn’t stop laughing,” she said.
“I asked him why he was doing that at a time like this, and he radioed, ‘We’re bringing in a body.’ So, yeah, I was like, what’s going to happen to me between here and wherever they’re going, if they’re bringing in a body?
“And from the moment I was put into the SUV until I went unconscious in the detention center, the sound of the word ‘bodies’ and the laughter of the agents was just a predominant piece of audio that just, that my brain was just ruminating on,” she said.
‘Nothing compared to what I experienced inside that detention center’
What followed was hours of confinement in the Whipple Building, a Minneapolis federal lockup that has been blasted by Democratic officials as severely lacking in medical care, where detainees are afraid to shower and reportedly sleep on concrete floors.
“People are very horrified by what happened there. Of course, it is horrific,” Rahman said of being dragged from her car. “But for me, it’s, first of all, nothing compared to what I experienced inside that detention center, both what happened to me and what I saw happening to others.
“They couldn’t find an interrogation room for me because, well, there’s already a body in there,” she said.
Despite telling people that she was disabled and autistic, ICE did not offer accommodation. Furthermore, they did not bring her cane with her and when she was asked about accommodations, they told her if she were “normal,” this would not have happened.
“Everybody heard me yelling this right out there. I was yelling because I am autistic, but I also have a brain injury,” she said. Eventually someone Rahman thinks was local staff offered a wheelchair, but even then she faced questions about her disability.
Like many nonwhite and female autistic people, Rahman did not receive a diagnosis of autism until well into her adulthood — in her case, 2022.
“When I was very young, that was treated as a discipline issue, an issue that made me, like, not girly enough, an issue that, you know, nobody in my life knew that that’s what that was,” she explained. She started reading about autism around the age of 12.
“And then I went through a series of talking to practitioners over the course of my life, psychiatrist, therapist, and I was diagnosed with a lot of other things before someone finally was like, ‘maybe we should get an autism evaluation,’ in my 30s.”
The Independent reviewed documents showing Rahman’s diagnoses of both autism and traumatic brain injury, as well as her schedule of doctor’s appointments, including one for the date she was hauled out of her car, Jan. 13, 2026.
‘At that point, I stopped asking for a lawyer’
Still, she says, agents and staff at the Whipple detention center were not receptive to her pleas about her conditions.
“The man who starts to wheel me there, he stops for a second and he says, ‘Hold on, you were driving, right?’” she said.
“I said, ‘Yes, yes, I was driving.’
He goes, ‘So your legs do work,’ because he’d had to put me in a wheelchair.” That all made her heart rate began to shoot up.
“At that point, I stopped asking for a lawyer,” she said. “I was like, I just have to make it through this alive.”
Eventually the woman who offered a wheelchair said Rahman needed to see a doctor. Rahman passed out. She then woke up in the Hennepin County Medical Center Emergency Department. To her, the treatment was night and day compared to the Whipple Building.
“They knew what autism was, they asked if they should turn the lights down,” she said. “It really shows you that this is doable, yeah, instead of focusing on eradicating autism, which is impossible, yeah, unrelated to Tylenol and and just a really disgusting project.”
She would eventually be released and her attorney said she was not charged with anything.
The Independent reached out to the Department of Homeland Security and ICE’s press office for comment but neither had responded as of press time.
‘I’ve gotten a lot of hate … death threats, rape threats’
While many people on social media expressed shock at how ICE could treat an autistic person that way, Rahman said they should not be surprised.
“Who is to say that when I said I’m autistic and disabled, that didn’t inspire law enforcement to come down on me harder?” Rahman said. “People who don’t know about disabled folks in our lives don’t always have great views of who we are as people or what we deserve in terms of humanity and compassion.”
In addition, Rahman does not fit the stereotype of what society sees as the default version of autism. The latest Centers for Disease Control and Prevention statistics released last year showed that most people diagnosed with autism are boys and many of them are white.
“You can feel the absolute disregard for the humanity of people of color,” she said. “And so if you don’t think someone’s a human, you don’t care if they’re disabled.”
In the days after her detainment by ICE, Rahman said she received numerous hateful messages.
“I’ve gotten a lot of hate messages saying that I’m an r-word who should be deported, or death threats, rape threats, all kinds of stuff,” she said.
The MacArthur Justice Center’s Alexa Van Brunt, who serves as Rahman’s attorney said that they are “currently gathering evidence in order to pursue legal remedies for the gross violation of Aliya’s rights that day.”
“We are grateful to the community members who were at the scene who have shared photos and videos with us and who have uplifted and affirmed Aliya’s experience,” she said.
Rahman said that her brain that helps her recognize patterns–much in the way many autistic people’s brains do–is sending off big warning signs.
“My autistic brain really gravitates towards patterns and sounds and numbers, and what that tells me is that what we have on the ground is not new, and if we don’t understand it in terms of the larger pattern, we are in even more trouble than we were before,” she said.
On Tuesday, Rahman, alongside the brothers of Renee Good, spoke about her treatment by ICE on Capitol Hill.
More than anything, she said, she doesn’t want people to see ICE leaving as the end.
“That’s the problem to solve,” she said. “I am not OK with this ending with me. I am not OK with pity for me being where people stop.”
Source: independent.co.uk