BREAKING🚨 A dad who fought beside U.S. Special Forces is DEAD less than 24 hours after ICE kidnapped him outside his house — and REFUSED to give him his inhaler.
Now the autopsy has been released and is blaming his death on METH, something his family says he never touched.
Mohammad Nazeer Paktiawal, 41, fought alongside U.S. Army Special Forces in Afghanistan for more than a decade before he and his family were evacuated in 2021 and resettled in Richardson, Texas.
ICE agents seized him outside his home on the morning of March 13 as he was getting his six children ready for school. By 9:10 the next morning he was dead at Parkland Hospital.
The medical examiner ruled it an accident — first reported by Houston Public Media's Andrew Schneider — anaphylaxis complicating acute asthma, with the toxic effects of methamphetamine, cardiovascular disease and cigarette smoking listed as contributing.
His family says they never knew him to use meth or any illegal drug, and that he had not smoked in years. No agency has explained how a man in custody less than a day was exposed to it.
His wife has said he relied on an inhaler for his asthma, and that ICE agents refused to take the device when they took him.
Scott Shuchart, a senior ICE policy official from 2022 to 2025, said there should be no access to methamphetamine for detainees at all, and asked why an asthma-type reaction could not have been treated on site.
The county had refused for weeks to release the report, after an ICE assistant field office director said disclosure could interfere with a federal criminal investigation that has never been publicly described.
Sen. Richard Blumenthal, pressing for the records, asked bluntly what crime is being investigated. The death certificate also lists the date of his fatal injury as March 12, the day before ICE took him.
Homeland Security posted that there was no record of his military service. A certificate from the 3rd Battalion, 3rd Special Forces Group thanks Paktiawal for his "sacrifice and service." DHS also cited arrests for alleged SNAP fraud and theft. No charges were ever recorded.
Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin promised Rep. Julie Johnson an investigation into the death roughly two months ago. DHS has not said where it stands.
BREAKING🚨 Employers are WEAPONIZING deportations in order to STEAL THOUSANDS of unpaid wages — THREATENING workers who complain with ICE and the police.
Three construction workers finished their masonry jobs last fall and never saw a dollar of the roughly $10,000 they were owed. When one of them texted the subcontractor that he would file a wage theft report, the employer wrote back that he would not pay anything, told him to get lost, and added: "I will get ICE and the police to your house to bring you back to the dusty taco eating place you come from … I know where you live." None of the three had work authorization.
Renato, 48, a construction worker in Everett who came from Brazil, went through a decade of invoices after the business he worked for dissolved and found he was short about one paycheck a month. Total: $22,000. He asked for it in March. He says his employer told him, "I can solve this problem with one phone call, just like I did with the other employee." The man had boasted before about getting a previous worker deported. Renato pushed his chair back and walked out.
"I can't sleep," Renato said. "I have to drink energy drinks to stay awake during the day and at night I cannot sleep."
Workers filed 3,384 wage theft complaints with the state attorney general from January through May, roughly 16 percent above the same period last year. 261 came from construction.
Leela Ramachandran, co-director of the Metrowest Worker Center in Framingham, handled another case: a 25-year-old man went to New York with his wife and baby to return equipment and collect about $33,000 from his business partner. The partner pointed at him and said, "this is the guy I have problems with." ICE agents swarmed them, shoved the wife and baby, and detained him. He had no criminal record. His family paid bond.
Asked about it, an ICE spokesperson said the agency "does not comment on unverified, anecdotal scenarios" and that the administration is carrying out the largest deportation operation in history.
Wage theft cases taken to Greater Boston Legal Services are down nearly 50 percent from 2024. The Brazilian Worker Center in Allston has seen its cases cut in half.
"Because we lack papers or documents, we stay silent," said Maria, 27, whose brother-in-law went unpaid for six months of overtime.
BREAKING🚨 An off-duty ICE agent just pled GUILTY to throwing a 68-year-old attorney to the ground for filming him.
The ICE agent’s punishment? One year of supervision, NO jail time.
Adam Saracco, 41, was off duty on Dec. 27 when Robert Held, a 68-year-old Chicago attorney and former Air Force fighter pilot, followed him from the Broadview ICE processing center and stood filming as Saracco pulled into a Brookfield gas station.
"He got very angry that I was filming him. He ran up to me and grabbed me and threw me on the ground … and he tried to grab the phone out of me," Held told an officer at the scene.
A woman who was stopped at the light said she pulled around because she saw an old man being tackled to the ground. "I started beeping my horn … and I said get off him!"
Held has an artificial hip. He said he used all his strength to hold onto the phone.
On police body camera, Saracco said: "I don't want anybody sticking their camera in my face. I don't know what he's trying to do with this. I tried to grab his phone." In the same footage, an officer asks where the federal agent claim is coming from. Saracco did not identify himself as an ICE agent, and told police only that Held "followed me from my work."
Brookfield police tried to get a felony charge, since Held was over 60 and on a public sidewalk. The Cook County state's attorney's office rejected felony approval and said the case belonged in misdemeanor court.
When the charge was first filed, DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin called it "gross" that "our officer is facing charges," said the department stood firmly behind him, and described Held as a "known ICE agitator." Held's response: "Every word of that is a lie."
Saracco is the first and only ICE agent charged in Cook County over conduct toward protesters and civilians during Operation Midway Blitz, which produced thousands of arrests. He declined to say anything in court Wednesday.
Earlier this week, 10 people filed police reports hoping to force local investigations, including Marimar Martinez, who was shot by a Border Patrol agent last year.
BREAKING🚨 The ankle monitors ICE is strapping onto Haitian immigrants in Ohio have a 75-mile range. Ohio's only immigration court is 188 miles from where they live.
About 50 Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, were ordered to the Cincinnati ICE field office on July 31 and told to bring every immigration document they had. When they arrived, they were pressured to take $2,600 and deport themselves, or wear an ankle monitor instead. Every one of them refused the money.
"Being deported to Haiti right now is a death sentence," said Guerline Jozef of the Haitian Bridge Alliance. Armed gangs control much of the country, and the State Department still has a Do Not Travel advisory for Haiti citing crime, kidnapping and collapsed health care.
Two days later, on August 2, a dozen Haitians walked out of their check-ins with monitors on their ankles, said Katie Kersh, managing attorney at Advocates for Basic Legal Equality in Ohio. Kersh said she watched ICE officers pull out brand-new ankle monitors that hadn't been charged. Instructions were handed out in English and Spanish only, in a community whose first language is Haitian Creole, so she brought her own translator. One of her clients works night shifts and told an officer she would have no time to charge the device. The officer told her to charge it while she was sleeping.
Kersh asked whether her clients could use a wrist monitor or a daily facial-recognition check-in instead. She said an officer told her, "we are being told from headquarters that we have to ankle monitor them specifically."
The monitors are set to a 75-mile radius. Ohio's only immigration court sits in Cleveland, 188 miles from Springfield, so a Haitian ordered to appear now has to ask an ICE officer for permission to reach their own hearing.