A Greater Boston Legal Services attorney says her husband was taken into custody violently when masked immigration agents stopped him on his way to work Wednesday, smashed his car window and detained him.
Leslie Perlera Gonzalez said her husband Edgar Hernan Elias Escobar called her minutes after he left home to go to work on a construction job in Malden.
“He said, ‘Babe, please come, I’m scared,’” she recounted. She heard him tell someone that his wife was coming, and then heard the sounds of screaming and glass shattering in the background. Then she heard her husband say, “Ow, you’re hurting me. Why are you doing that?”
Perlera Gonzalez got to the scene minutes later and saw Elias Escobar had been sideswiped by an unmarked car. He was still seated and had a “taser pointed at his face,” as several individuals with masks kept her away from him.
Perlera Gonzalez said Elias Escobar was bleeding and saying, “I gave my ID, but you didn’t look at it.” Officers had tried to take him out of the vehicle with his left arm, but his “neck snapped when it occurred,” she said.
“They kept telling me, ’Your husband is unlawfully here,’” Perlera Gonzalez said in a phone interview. “I told them that I am a U.S. citizen, that I’m an attorney, that the process for him to stay was underway. They kept saying, ‘He’s not lawfully here.’”
Elias Escobar, originally from El Salvador, was in the middle of adjusting his immigration status through a relative petition with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, said Margaret Morgan, managing attorney of the immigration unit at Greater Boston Legal Services. Perlera Gonzalez declined to provide his current immigration status.
She said she and Elias Escobar have been married for more than a year, and that he has no criminal record in the United States or in El Salvador.
A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said that during the arrest, Elias Escobar “refused to comply with officer commands to roll down his window.”
Asked about the window shattering, the spokesperson said, “The officers took appropriate action and followed their training to use the minimum amount of force necessary to resolve the situation in a manner that ensured the success of the operation and prioritized the safety of the public and our officers.”
Elias Escobar was taken to MelroseWakefield Hospital after his arrest. The Department said medical staff found no injuries and discharged him, and he will now be placed in deportation proceedings.
Now, he is in an ICE detention center run by the Plymouth County Sheriff’s office. Perlera Gonzalez said she’s been able to talk to her husband only once since then.
“It’s incredibly jarring because I see the worst of the worst on a daily basis — I can’t make sense of why this would happen to him,” she said. “I’m now scared for anyone who looks like him, and I’m telling my family members who are citizens to carry their ID with them everywhere they go.”
She described Elias Escobar as the kind of person who stops for injured animals on the street, and the “kindest, sweetest person I know.”
Perlera Gonzalez isn’t sure if his detention is a result of her work for an organization that works in immigration advocacy.
“I don’t know, and it would scare me to think of that. All I can say is, I care so deeply for the clients that we serve, and I hope that’s not the case,” she said.
“People going about their daily lives should not be subjected to violent police activity, including undocumented immigrants,” said Jacquelynne Bowman, executive director of Greater Boston Legal Services. “What happened to Hernan and Leslie should not happen to anyone — we will pursue justice in this case.”
Perlera Gonzalez declined to comment on further details about a potential lawsuit.
