A 33-year-old man from Nashua who was arrested inside a city courthouse in February appears to be detained at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Rio Grande, Texas.
Video surveillance shared by the New Hampshire Judicial Branch, and first reported by WMUR, shows two agents with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms following Arnuel S. Marquez Colmenarez into the elevator to the third floor of Nashua Circuit Courthouse shortly before his scheduled 1 p.m. arraignment. One was wearing a sweatshirt with what appear to be the letters “ATF” on the upper left hand side, underneath a jacket, and the second was dressed in plain clothes.
Marquez Colmenarez was in court because of charges stemming from an earlier DUI arrest. Court documents note he failed to appear.
One agent then tapped Marquez Colmenarez on the shoulder before he exited the elevator, identified the pair as federal agents, and tackled him when he tried to flee. An elderly man with a cane was hit during the encounter and fell to the ground. WMUR reports that the person sustained minor injuries but refused medical transport.
A Hudson police officer, Jered Neff, who was in Nashua as a court liaison officer for his police department that day, filed an incident report where he described assisting the officers in arresting Marquez Colmenarez after hearing a commotion near the elevators and outside an office.
Neff wrote that the two unnamed federal agents confirmed they were working with ATF and ICE to arrest people without legal status who “are responding to Nashua Circuit Court for arraignments or other hearings.” The agents then showed him a photograph that matched Marquez Colmenarez.
According to the Boston Globe, Marquez Colmenarez told Nashua police officers he was from Venezuela. A man with the same name and country of origin shows up in ICE’s detainee locator, but the Rio Grande Processing Facility did not return a call from NHPR seeking to confirm it was the same person arrested in Nashua.
Agents from ATF and other federal agencies are assisting the Department of Homeland Security with immigration enforcement.
Other cases of immigrants arrested at courthouses have drawn attention across the country, including one in Boston where a man was detained in the middle of his criminal trial by immigration officials.
