Virtual Ministry Archive

BREAKING🚨 Masked ICE agents THREW a 69-year-old nurse face-first onto concrete outside a New Jersey detention center. Now she's demanding $500,000 and her day in court. On Memorial Day, Norma Bowe, a registered nurse and Kean University professor, was running her free mobile clinic out of a camper van outside Delaney Hall, the ICE detention center in Newark, New Jersey. She had just held her stethoscope to the chest of a 10-year-old girl who was hyperventilating because her father was locked inside, as Erika Hayasaki first reported in The Guardian. Then Bowe saw agents dragging a young woman across the pavement by her arms. Her shirt was torn off down to her bra. She was screaming for help. Bowe, with a red stethoscope around her neck, moved toward her. Her claim says one masked agent shoved her from behind while another came in from the side. She flew through the air, bounced once, and landed with her head on the concrete. Someone in the crowd yelled, "She's a medical professional!" Strangers helped her up. According to her claim, the agents didn't. As she went down, Bowe said, she thought of Alex Pretti, the Minnesota nurse federal agents shot dead after he stepped in to help a woman they had shoved. She was left with a concussion, a fractured kneecap, three meniscus tears and a bruised eye socket. Months later she still has headaches and trouble sleeping, and her knee makes it hard to care for her infant grandchild. Two days after it happened, she went back to Delaney Hall with her face still scraped up and kept running the clinic. Homeland Security, which runs ICE, claimed its officers "used the minimum amount of force necessary." Videos shot from several angles appear to show Bowe being shoved and landing face-first. The department hasn't answered the specific allegations in her claim. The ACLU of New Jersey filed the claim on July 29. It was one of 54 claims filed against the federal government across 17 states and DC. The government gets six months to respond before it can become a lawsuit. Even then, she would be suing the United States, not the agents. A judge, not a jury, would decide the case, and she couldn't get punitive damages. Her lawyers still haven't identified the agents. Photos exist, but the masks make it nearly impossible. "If this is what they're doing to me outside with impunity," Bowe said, "what the heck are they doing to the people inside?"