The first frame of the video Carolina Molina posted across her social media accounts shows a masked U.S. Immigration Customs and Enforcement agent pointing a gun at the camera.
“Yeah, you record us. You almost ran us over,” he yells.
“I didn’t almost run you over,” she responds. “You’re so full of s—.”
The agent threatens to arrest Molina, the footage shows, before she tells him she’s a U.S. citizen and pans the cellphone camera, capturing at least four other agents standing outside of her blue Toyota Supra wearing tactical vests that read “police” and “ERO” for Enforcement and Removal Operations.
After Molina, 36, posted video of the encounter Monday, it racked up tens of thousands of views and reignited scrutiny over the aggressiveness of the Trump administration’s crackdown on illegal immigration. The gun in the agent’s hand can be seen raised and held at the center of Molina’s open driver’s side window.
“I don’t think I comprehended it in that moment, but looking back on it, it really felt like a Renée Good situation,” Molina told The Washington Post, referring to the mother of three who was fatally shot by an ICE agent in January during an immigration enforcement operation in Minneapolis. Federal officials said the officer fired in self-defense after Good attempted to run him over, an account a Post analysis of video footage found was not accurate.
Earlier this year, a different ICE agent who participated in the Minneapolis operation was charged with two counts of aggravated assault for pointing a gun at another driver while operating a vehicle on the highway, according to news reports.
Rep. Don Beyer (D), who represents Falls Church in Virginia, where the recent encounter occurred, said Tuesday his office has been in touch with Molina and is “demanding answers and consequences.”
“While I am relieved that she is safe, the habitual dishonesty and dangerous and unjustified escalation seen in this video matches what we have seen from ICE agents across the country,” Beyer said in a post on X. “This kind of misconduct and threat of force against members of our communities cannot be tolerated.”
Last month, after state lawmakers passed a bill banning law enforcement officers from wearing masks, a federal judge temporarily blocked officials from enforcing it. The state argued the law was necessary to keep Virginians safe from aggressive policing tactics and restore trust in law enforcement, though the judge ruled the legislation was an unconstitutional attempt to regulate the federal government.
A statement from the Department of Homeland Security didn’t identify Molina by name, but said “an anti-ICE agitator” drove in circles around the agents and “attempted to harm officers” during a “targeted immigration enforcement” operation “by weaponizing her vehicle against them — all in an attempt to help illegal aliens get away.”
“Fearing for their safety, ICE officers conducted a vehicle stop of the driver,” the statement said, adding the possibility that criminal charges could come.
Neither of the videos Molina shared publicly show the Northern Virginia native attempting to hit the agents with her car. While Molina recorded from her cellphone, the dash cameras on her vehicle captured the moments leading up to the interaction and during it that afternoon.
As the agent gets out of his vehicle with his service weapon drawn, he can be heard asking “Are you following us?” Before that, Molina’s dash cameras show her pulling into an office park just before 3 p.m. She maneuvers around a stopped vehicle before rolling down her window to yell at an agent seen walking to a gray Dodge Durango.
“You’re a ho,” she says, according to the video. “You’re f—ed up.”
Then, she turns and pulls into a parking space. Molina, a licensed professional counselor, told The Post that she was there to visit an immigration lawyer to pass out business cards. She offers psychological evaluations to immigrants and their families who may need one for asylum applications, visas or to determine hardship.
Molina said she sometimes comes across potential clients sitting in the offices she visits.
“I realized when I saw that there were so many more … unmarked vehicles, I’m not about to go put people at risk because of my loud mouth and go into a lawyer’s office and possibly bring attention to that office,” she said. So, Molina said, she put her vehicle in reverse and began to leave.
“That’s when he blocked me in,” she said, referring to the Durango, which the video shows pulling in front of her. Two other unmarked vehicles pulled in behind her. “The whole situation was like an intimidation tactic,” she said.
Before she had entered the office park, Molina said, she saw two agents detaining a pair of men who appeared Latino off Columbia Pike. She saw the detainees fall, she said, and yelled at the agents.
A daughter of Salvadoran immigrants, Molina said she understands what her community is going through. She knows people who have been deported and others whose parents are undocumented. Her parents got their citizenship during the Clinton administration, when immigration enforcement was “so different from what’s going on right now,” she said.
She described herself as a longtime vocal advocate for the Latino community and other minority groups, and said she believes she’s “put into certain situations where my voice is the biggest advocate.”
Watching the arrest from her car, Molina said she wondered what questions were swirling through the detainees’ heads: “You really don’t know where you’re going to end up. You don’t know if your family knows,” she said.
The DHS statement said the agents’ operation Monday was to target “criminal illegal aliens, whose crimes included a hit-and-run and drug trafficking, and illegal aliens with final orders of removal.” It did not say whether anyone was detained.
After the gun was put in her face and the agents threatened to arrest her, Molina said, they took photos of her license plate. Then, they were gone.
She stopped recording and retreated to a nearby parking lot. There, she said, she asked herself, “Did this really just happen?”
In the moment, she said she was not scared, just relieved “that I get to go home to my family.”
Mariana Trujillo Valdes edited the videos for this report.