The van pulled up to John F. Kennedy International Airport on a recent Thursday evening. Around it, passengers poured out of taxis and headed toward their gates. Inside the van, Prince Gbohoutou gripped his seat belt in fear.

The government was about to put the 26-year-old tattoo artist from Maryland on a flight to his native country in Africa.

A month earlier, Gbohoutou, a recently married asylum seeker from the Central African Republic, had gone to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement appointment in Baltimore hoping to get a work permit. Instead, the New Carrollton resident was detained in front of his American wife and told he was being deported.

Now, ICE agents opened the van’s door and ordered him out. But Gbohoutou, with shackled hands, said he held fast to the seat. He was afraid to return to the Central African Republic, where he said his mother had been killed.

As suitcase-toting bystanders looked on, Gbohoutou said, an ICE agent struck him on the legs with a baton while others tried to yank him out of the van.

Read more here