DHS still has a civil rights team. Aliya Rahman is testing it.

Aliya Rahman alleges that federal agents violated her civil rights as a disabled person.Leila Navidi/Zuma

When Aliya Rahman’s lawyers approached her about filing a complaint with the civil rights office of the Department of Homeland Security, she almost laughed in their faces.

“It’s hard to imagine that sending a letter to DHS to ask them to respect our civil rights will do anything,” said Rahman, a disabled US citizen who was dragged from her car and detained by DHS agents during Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis. Today, Rahman, who also has an ongoing civil tort claim against DHS, filed that complaint anyway. 

On January 13, ICE agents detained Rahman as she tried to drive to a doctor’s appointment, punching out the window of her car and carrying her by her arms and legs, ignoring her requests for mobility and communication aids, which Section 504 of the federal Rehabilitation Act is meant to guarantee. Eventually, the pain caused her to black out in her cell. Rahman contends that the agents’ aggressive treatment violated her civil rights as a disabled person.

“We request that DHS take corrective action to not only redress these violations, but also to ensure all individuals with disabilities who interact with DHS officers are treated with dignity and respect,” Rahman’s lawyers wrote in their complaint.

Rahman described how ICE agents harmed her in congressional testimony organized by Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.): “Shooting pain went through my head, neck, and wrists when I hit the ground and people leaned on my back…I was carried face down through the street by my cuffed arms and legs while yelling that I had a brain injury,” Rahman said:

“Agents repeatedly had to stop and ask how to do tasks. I received no medical screening, phone call, or access to a lawyer. I was denied a communication navigator when my speech began to slur. Agents laughed as I tried to immobilize my own neck. I asked for my cane and was told no, pulled up by my arms, and prodded forward in leg irons by an agent saying “Walk! You can do it. Walk.” Agents did not know if the facility had a wheelchair. When I was finally placed in one to be taken to interrogation, an agent taunted: “You were driving right? So your legs do work.”

Section 504 prohibits discrimination against disabled people in programs and organizations that receive federal funding, which includes ICE. But Rahman’s experience, her lawyers said, was “not an aberration.” In one 2022 complaint, a Border Patrol officer allegedly took away the crutch of a child they apprehended and didn’t provide an alternative. Between 2019 and 2023, at least seven people with mental health disabilities were placed in solitary confinement in ICE custody. And in 2025, a Deaf DACA recipient was reportedly denied access to an American Sign Language interpreter for weeks. 

DHS’ Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties (CRCL), an internal body meant to investigate exactly these types of abuses, was gutted by then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem in March 2025, reducing its workforce from over 150 full-time federal employees to fewer than 40 a year later, nearly all of whom are contractors.

DHS spokespeople did not provide current employment figures when asked, but stated that all of the office’s “All of the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties’ legally required functions continue to be performed, but in an efficient and cost-effective manner and without hindering the Department’s mission of securing the homeland,” further alleging that “these offices obstructed immigration enforcement by adding bureaucratic hurdles and undermining DHS’s mission. Rather than supporting law enforcement efforts, they often functioned as internal adversaries.” 

Before CRCL was functionally dismantled, a complaint like Rahman’s would be read by its staffers, who would then issue recommendations. Now, though, she doesn’t necessarily expect that it will be read at all. “I don’t think I’m going to hear from these folks,” Rahman said. “Typically, what they do is put out social media content when they’re mad at me.” (DHS has issued posts implying that Rahman’s conduct was criminal.) 

“I’m still rocking my supervillain braces, my shoulders aren’t healed yet,” Rahman told me June 22, showing off her shoulder support gear. “I’m just trying to put my body back together.”

Thanks to her injuries, Rahman can only leave the house two or three days per week, she said. But as she heals, she’s become an advocate for others who have been detained or harmed by ICE, particularly those who are also disabled, many of whom don’t have the privileges she does: that she is a citizen, that she has savings, that she speaks English and has access to lawyers. 

“Many of them also had disabilities or chronic illnesses that were impacted by how they were handled, or they developed them afterwards,” Rahman said, and have learned—like her—that disclosing their disabilities can draw officers’ ridicule rather than accommodation. 

“People will say things like, you’re not disabled, you wear eyeliner,” Rahman said. “The guy inside [Whipple Detention Center] was like, ‘Your legs work, you were driving, right?’” Online, she sees families with autistic kids saying that they are terrified of any interaction with law enforcement. She doesn’t blame them. 

“I experienced people doubling down on violence when I raised that I was disabled, and that is not a society we can live in,” Rahman said.