ICE Maced the Wrong Septuagenarian

A 72-year-old woman who was pepper-sprayed in the face by a masked ICE agent in Inwood two weeks ago is now suing the federal government, with the help of a high-profile civil rights attorney.

Linda Wolff was standing on a sidewalk filming ICE agents on July 30, when an officer wearing a gaiter, cap, black rubber gloves, and an ICE POLICE bulletproof vest sauntered up to her and sprayed her face at close range. The incident was captured on video in a now widely-circulated clip.

Speaking to Hell Gate on Thursday, Wolff explained that she'd rushed to Inwood from a pilates class, after seeing a call for a rapid response to an ICE sighting at the corner of Isham Street and Seaman Avenue. When she arrived, she found an ICE vehicle with a flat tire being towed, and agents milling around. 

Wolff says she got into a yelling match with the tow-truck driver after she called him out for helping the agents. In the video, as she and the driver yell at each other, a tattooed ICE agent strolls up to them, and silently sprays Wolff in the face. 

Later in the video, after the NYPD arrives, she confronts the agent: "You just maced me." He responds, "I'm gonna do it again." "In front of the cops?" she asks. He nods: "Yep." 

"It's egregious to me because she wasn't physically interfering with the ICE officers. She wasn't stopping them from doing their job, and they walked over with such confidence that they would not be held accountable," Wolff's attorney, John Burris, told Hell Gate. "There was a level of arrogance that they displayed that's most troubling to me."

Burris, a civil rights attorney who has previously won major police brutality settlements for high-profile clients such as Rodney King and Tupac Shakur, filed federal torts claims with the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Wolff's case, and added that his firm is handling similar suits challenging ICE overreach around the country, including several in Minneapolis. 

In May, New York passed a slew of new laws to protect its residents from ICE. This included introducing the right for private citizens to sue individual ICE agents in state court, called the Bivens Act. Burris said he was now considering filing an additional lawsuit on behalf of Wolff under that new law. "Obviously, we're better off in New York State court than we are in federal court," he explained. 

Wolff would be the first New Yorker to sue an ICE agent in New York under the Bivens Act. However, Wolff will have to identify the officer. While the agent was masked, she said she feels confident she'll find his name due to the videos bystanders took of the incident, and his prominent tattoos, despite the fact that his face was mostly obscured by the gaiter. (Another new New York law banning ICE agents from wearing masks was blocked by a judge last week.)

ICE and DHS did not immediately respond to a request for comment. But ICE previously told other news outlets that its officers were surrounded by an "unruly, combative, and verbally assaultive crowd" that refused to move out of the way, and that officers resorted to "appropriate" measures. 

Wolff said she's been protesting at the Newark ICE detention center Delaney Hall—where three people have died this year so far—almost every day since late May. She's never filed a lawsuit before, she said, but she has been pepper-sprayed. "I've been maced three times. I was shot with a rubber bullet in the chest. I don't know if you know what happened at Delaney in the beginning of June, we were assaulted every day," she said. "But it's sort of part of the job."