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Arlington/Falls Church Commonwealth’s Attorney Parisa Dehghani-Tafti is exactly right; this story (“A Virginia man who says he woke up in hospital with a brain haemorrhage after being apprehended by ICE is now facing another alarming hurdle, with his attorney claiming an ankle monitor prevented doctors from carrying out an MRI needed to assess the extent of his injuries.”) is “deeply disturbing.” What the hell happened here? It’s good to see Dehghani-Tafti digging into this; we definitely need answers about this incident which “reportedly happened around 6:30 a.m. on 11 August in Arlington, Virginia, when Mejia Hernandez was walking to work…He says he was then struck by what he believes was a Taser or stun gun. From that point, his memory disappears. He does not remember how he was injured, who transported him or what happened immediately afterwards. He eventually woke up in hospital with serious facial injuries consistent with blunt force trauma. His injuries reportedly included black eyes, significant bruising, cuts and seven stitches to his lip.”
As Dehghani-Tafti says:
“This is deeply disturbing. I am committed to upholding the rule of law and holding all individuals who violate the law in our community accountable in the appropriate ways. No one is above the law – not any individual, not law enforcement, and not federal officials – no one.
I have reached out to the Arlington County Police Department and to the Attorney General’s Office for support. I have urged the ACPD to immediately conduct a thorough investigation to determine what happened here.
Anyone who has information, photos, video, or any evidence is urged to come forward and submit it via email to CWAtips@arlingtonva.us. Please include name, address, and contact information if submitting any evidence. Evidence submitted anonymously may not be admissible in a court of law.”
Also, see this by Aaron Parnas:
EXCLUSIVE: I’ve obtained a detailed account from the attorney representing Jose Mejia Hernandez, a man who says he was violently apprehended, hospitalized with a brain bleed, and held by ICE with almost no communication to his own family for three days.
On the morning of August 11, at around 6:30 a.m., Mejia Hernandez was walking to work when a truck sped up on him and two men jumped out and ran toward him. Scared and not knowing who they were, he ran. While fleeing, he says he was hit with what he believes was a stun gun or Taser. He has no memory of anything after that, not how he was injured, not how he was transported, nothing, until he woke up in a hospital many hours later with serious facial injuries consistent with blunt force trauma.
According to his attorney, two ICE agents stayed at his bedside the entire time he was hospitalized. He was never given a private moment with his own doctors. When he asked the ICE agents what happened to him, they told him they didn’t know. He says hospital staff seemed reluctant to speak openly in front of the agents, and that medical staff appeared to communicate more with ICE than with him directly. A nurse eventually told him quietly, in Spanish, that he’d suffered a brain bleed and brain swelling, but he says he never got a full explanation of his diagnosis or how he got hurt.
Meanwhile, his wife and stepchild had no idea where he was for about three days. Neither DHS nor the hospital, according to his lawyer, ever notified his family that he’d been detained, injured, or hospitalized.
When ICE decided to discharge him, he says he didn’t even understand he was being released. He was driven from the hospital, given food and told to contact his family, then taken to an ICE office where they strapped a GPS ankle monitor on him and handed him a Notice to Appear.
By Friday he felt significantly worse and went back to the hospital, where he was again diagnosed with a traumatic brain injury and brain bleed and stayed for two more days. His lawyer says doctors couldn’t even complete the imaging they needed because of the ankle monitor. When he later went to his ISAP appointment still in pain, dizzy, with doctors saying he needed an MRI, ICE reportedly refused to remove the monitor unless he could produce a specific MRI appointment date and time, forcing him to bounce back and forth between the hospital and immigration offices just to get basic care while suffering from a brain injury.
His attorney is now demanding a full accounting: who was involved, what force was used, why his family wasn’t notified, why ICE was reportedly more involved in his medical communications than he was, and preservation of every record, custody log, and communication tied to this case. Mejia Hernandez still needs an MRI and further evaluation for a serious neurological injury.
