Did ICE use a 5-year-old autistic girl to pressure a father’s arrest in Mass.?

A mother living in Leominster says that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) held her 5-year-old daughter last week to force the arrest of her husband, a Guatemalan man living in the country for the past 25 years.

The Department of Homeland Security disputed the mother’s description, calling it a “disgusting smear.”

“ICE agents never used a 5-year-old girl as ‘bait,’” Tricia McLaughlin, a Department of Homeland Security official, said in a statement. “The facts are the criminal illegal alien target of the operation — with previous arrests for domestic abuse, strangulation, and vandalizing property — abandoned his own child in a car."

A video first published by Telemundo Nueva Inglaterra , a Spanish-speaking television station, appears to show federal agents surrounding a young gi