A Muslim woman in the U.S. has filed for a federal lawsuit after police officers in the city of Los Angeles forced her to remove headscarf.
Nusaiba Mubarak, 26, has alleged that her civil and religious rights were violated when officers from the Los Angeles Police Department pulled her from a Police Commission meeting and forcibly removed her hijab last year.
She was attending the Police Commission meeting last September to denounce the 2018 killing of Albert Ramon Dorsey when the incident happened.
Mubarak told an online news conference she was “aggressively manhandled by three police officers nearly twice my size’’ when she was standing in line at the meeting, waiting to comment on a deadly Los Angeles Police Department shooting the year before.
She accused the police officers “who without any warning grabbed me and pushed me to the wall, handcuffed me, and shoved me into another room where I was stripped of my hijab and humiliated.”
Narrating her ordeal, Mubarak said the episode left her “shocked and quite terrified.”
Mubarak is represented by attorneys from the Council on American-Islamic Relations chapter of Los Angeles, who expressed concern at the growing attacks on Muslim women by law enforcement agents in the U.S.
“Muslim women across the country are having their hijabs senselessly removed by police officers, during even traffic stops for minor traffic violations, in court houses, in correctional facilities, and when having their booking photos taken,” said Lena Masri, CAIR’s national litigation director and one of Mubarak’s attorneys.
