Filmed - and beaten to the ground

A woman is standing on a public street in Columbia Heights, Washington, D.C. She is filming. Nothing more happens. An ICE agent has a problem with his vehicle immediately after an operation. He needs help. Everyone can see it. The camera too. The agent shouts at her to move along, she lets herself be carried away into insulting him - three people had been arrested shortly before, in the usual ICE manner, emotions were running high. She stays where she is. Then he moves. He crosses the street and knocks her to the ground. No warning. No danger. No justification. We are already investigating in order to hold the agent accountable. She kneels dazed on the street because she was watching. A woman asks, "Oh my God, are you okay?"

The trigger is so small, yet so shameful. A man in uniform feels humiliated, but the operation was also borderline, a case that will also go to court. Someone films while the agent, with the help of a passerby, moves his vehicle. Someone says angry words, calm, but too much. Violence follows. Not out of fear. Not in self-defense. But out of wounded pride.

The video shows no confusion, no chaos, no accident. It shows what can also come to Europe, because there is far too little resistance to the United States in all areas. The walk across the street. The blow downward. Anyone who films is supposed to learn what happens. Because images remain. Because they do not disappear. Anyone who strikes believes they are regaining control. A woman kneeling on the asphalt is not an isolated case. It is the result of a war against the population itself, the country itself, one that punishes observation and expects silence. Those who do not look away become targets. Not because someone filmed, because someone watched, because someone spoke up. We know this ourselves, we have documented it hundreds of times.

And that is exactly our fight. To act against it, to prevent it, to get people back out of unjust detention. To confront it, to document it while it is still possible. We must become faster. And we must become even better. Not someday. Not later.

Support our humanitarian and journalistic fight against this. It only works together, not just for today, but also for tomorrow. We are not on this world to end up kneeling dazed on the asphalt in the dirt at the end.