Fox News reporter, Jennifer Griffin, condemned the ICE arrest of a former interpreter for the U.S. Army after he attended his asylum hearing in San Diego.
“This should anger every American,” Griffin, the network’s national security correspondent, posted on X.
Video taken outside a federal court in San Diego on Thursday shows a man being taken into custody as he calmly told masked ICE agents that he worked as an interpreter for the U.S. military in Afghanistan.
“I came here to make a better life,” he said. “I didn’t know that this would happen… I worked with the U.S. military.”
The man, whose identity is being withheld for fear of retaliation from the Taliban, legally entered the U.S. through the CBP One app following the U.S withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021.
He was granted parole and was in the process of applying for a Special Immigrant Visa when the arrest occurred.
“They want to deny him even the opportunity to have his asylum case heard by having his case dismissed, putting him into expedited removal and trying to spirit him out of the country,” his attorney Brian McGoldrick said.
McGoldrick said the interpreter and his family were “threatened repeatedly” in Afghanistan and if he returns he will be “detained, probably tortured and possibly even killed.”
“He just came here trying to get asylum for what he did for our country, and this is how we’re treating him,” the lawyer added.
Adding to the confusion, McGoldrick said the man’s brother was granted asylum in Texas last month.
“What is the government doing?” he asked, “That one brother is being granted asylum and the other has to be treated like a criminal?”
