That is what videos later showed. But that wasn't what Immigration and Customs Enforcement alleged after Reid's July 22 arrest.
Reid was one of the targets in an aggressive public-relations tactic in the Trump administration's war on illegal immigration, an enforcement campaign praised for record-low southern border crossings but widely criticized for its treatment of U.S. citizens.
Protesters, observers and passersby taken into custody by federal agents were declared terrorists and attackers in hundreds of social-media posts by U.S. officials and departments since the start of the immigration sweeps in cities. This includes Minneapolis, where two citizens were excoriated by officials after they were killed by federal agents in January.
The Wall Street Journal found that the Department of Homeland Security, created in 2002 to protect Americans, has turned its force against citizens.
Of the 279 people accused by officials on X of attacking federal officers in the past year, 181 were U.S. citizens, the Journal found. Close to half of those Americans were never charged with assault. None have been convicted at trial.
Yet names, mug shots and other identifying details posted by the government put a bull's-eye on them. They had to explain the accusations to family, friends and employers. In a few cases, their home and workplace addresses were leaked online, drawing death threats.
Some shouldered the costs of posting bail, securing defense attorneys and taking days off from work to appear in court, including cases where videos debunked the assault claims. When citizens were exonerated, government accounts fell silent about the outcome of their cases, the Journal found.
Federal prosecutors in cities with high-profile immigration operations said they have been pressured by Justice Department leaders to aggressively pursue assault charges, even in cases undermined by contradictory evidence or ones that fail to appear worthy of prosecution. Some have quit in response. Others say the time spent on flimsy cases takes them away from prosecuting drug cases, public corruption and gun-related crimes.
So far, 15 Americans accused of assault by the U.S. government on social media have pleaded guilty -- 10 to lesser charges, including a man at a Southern California protest who threw rocks, a woman in Portland, Ore., who brandished a knife and a man who spit on an officer in Los Angeles. Another 51 cases are pending.
After a federal agent in Minneapolis fatally shot Renee Good, a 37-year-old mother, Vice President JD Vance called her a "deranged leftist." Kristi Noem, as DHS secretary, said Good tried to run over a federal agent in "an act of domestic terrorism."
Alex Pretti, an intensive-care nurse at the city's VA hospital, was accused by White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller of trying to "murder federal law enforcement" after Pretti, 37, was killed by agents on Jan. 24.
The killings in Minneapolis set off a public backlash after videos upended the government's public accusations. The Trump administration said last month it would shift to more targeted immigration enforcement in Minnesota. On Thursday, President Trump fired Noem.
A DHS spokesperson said the agency is "taking appropriate and constitutional measures" to uphold the rule of law and protect its officers from "dangerous rioters." The First Amendment "protects speech and peaceful assembly -- not rioting," the spokesperson said.
Federal officers face daily threats, many perpetrated by "violent left-wing rioters," said White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson. "The Trump Administration will never hesitate to defend heroic law enforcement officers who put their lives on the line to keep American communities safe."
On Pam Bondi's first day as attorney general, she directed U.S. attorneys in a memo to "aggressively" investigate those who obstruct or attack law enforcement officers. Last March, the U.S. government tweeted among the first of about a thousand warnings.
Federal agents on the front lines in Los Angeles received a bellicose directive in June from Gregory Bovino, then-Border Patrol commander-at-large.
As in other federal assault cases, videos from police cameras and surveillance footage cast doubt on agents' claims that Reid attacked them.
The agents had come on a tip. Residovic had a buddy at the jail who texted that two immigrants were about to be released, information generally prohibited from being shared with immigration agents under D.C. law. The friend told Residovic to make the operation "not seem so obvious," according to court documents and body-cam footage.
Reid refused orders to step away, telling an officer, "I can go over here." Agents took her into custody, and she was later charged with assaulting and interfering with federal officers -- a felony crime that can carry a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison.
After Reid was taken into custody, an agent put Reid's phone inside her bag and placed it in a government vehicle. The phone was still recording.
In another part of the recording, agents went back and forth about exactly how Reid, a veterinary assistant at an animal hospital, had assaulted them -- first, it was a raised knee, then an elbow. The next day, Reid was accused in a criminal complaint of "forcefully" pushing an agent’s hand against a cement wall.
Three grand juries declined to indict Reid for felony assault. Prosecutors reduced the charge to a misdemeanor, which doesn't require a grand jury. Reid, whose recordings were submitted to the court, was acquitted of the misdemeanor charge at trial.
"If I didn't have the video, I would 100% be in jail right now," Reid said.
Federal agents have acted as if civilians have no right to observe or record them, said David Bier of the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank in Washington. "Once you adopt those positions then everyone's a viable target," he said. The consequences -- physical intimidation, tackling, arrests and hours in custody without access to a lawyer -- "amounts to going after the political opposition," Bier said.
Constitutional experts say aggressive policing tactics can deter people from exercising their First Amendment rights, which include the freedom to witness or protest government activities in public places.
Three weeks after Reid's arrest, Justice Department employee Sean Charles Dunn threw a Subway sandwich at a federal agent patrolling around a nightclub in Washington. A bystander's video went viral.
The White House posted its own video days later, showing 20 federal agents descending on Dunn’s home.
Dunn’s federal assault case was one of the few that went to trial. Both sides in court played the same video of him throwing the sandwich.
Jurors had a good laugh, Dunn recalled, and acquitted him, but the case was costly. Dunn was fired from work, got death threats and had to relocate.
"Dragging someone through the courts and causing them to lose their job and doxxing them -- that's the point," he said. "If they get a conviction, even better."
Witness by choice or chance
Over the past year, arrests of Americans on suspicion of assaulting federal officers have been tied largely to three types of encounters, according to a Journal review of more than 200 videos: during demonstrations, while recording officers and when driving.
Protesters
U.S. Air Force veteran Dana Briggs, 71, joined protesters in September outside an ICE facility in Broadview, Ill. A confrontation with agents ended with the arrest of Briggs and 11 others for assault. DHS called them “violent rioters” in a tweet.
Briggs was charged with assaulting a federal officer by allegedly making “physical contact” with an arm. Four other protesters were charged for shoving, pulling and resisting officers.
A federal agent swore in a court filing that video footage corroborated his account of assault. Police body-camera footage and bystander videos show what happened.
Prosecutors dropped Briggs’s felony charge to a misdemeanor. Then they gave up.
The government “sought to strike hard blows” in charging Briggs, wrote U.S. Magistrate Judge Gabriel A. Fuentes. “It swung and missed -- multiple times.” The judge granted the government’s request to drop charges.
Observers
The day after Good was shot in January, Bovino walked toward a Target store in Richfield, Minn., flanked by half a dozen federal agents. Target employee Jonathan Aguilar Garcia raised his phone and started recording.
The videos went viral. Days later, DHS posted a video saying “This individual was arrested for assaulting federal law enforcement officers under 18 U.S.C. 111.”
No charges have been filed against Garcia.
Drivers
Federal government officials have accused 32 U.S. citizens in posts on X of intentionally using their vehicles as weapons. One pleaded guilty to an assault charge; three had their cases dismissed. None of the others identified by the Journal were charged, according to a review of court filings.
In November, a video of Border Patrol agents dragging a woman out of her car in Chicago flooded social media. Tricia McLaughlin, of DHS, tweeted that the woman in the video, Dayanne Figueroa, blocked agents in a government vehicle with her Mercedes-Benz and then intentionally rammed it. The tweet alleged that Figueroa kicked and injured two federal agents trying to subdue her.
"All of our statements go through a thorough review and legal process based on the facts we are given from officers and supervisor reports on the ground," said McLaughlin, who helped direct social-media strategy at DHS until she left her post last month as a spokeswoman for Noem.
Videos showed instead that the government vehicle sideswiped Figueroa, a U.S. citizen who was driving to work.
After the collision, masked agents with weapons drawn seized Figueroa.
witnesses yelled at the agents, "You hit her."
Figueroa was released hours later and never charged. She testified at a Dec. 9 congressional hearing that the agents neither identified themselves nor said why she was being detained.
After an ICE agent fatally shot Good on Jan. 7 in Minneapolis, government officials alleged that Good, who is survived by a wife and three children, was trying to ram the agent with her SUV.
A Journal visual investigation found Good had turned her wheels away from the agent, w ho appeared to be out of harm’s way when he shot her three times.
Scare tactic
Reid was held by federal authorities for roughly two days. During that time, she wasn’t allowed to make a phone call, she said, not to worried friends or her employer, who wanted to know why she had missed a shift.
Before her arrest, Reid had hoped to fly to Alaska to be a dog handler in this month’s Iditarod race. But,
That happened to Lukas Borja,
Prosecutors declined to file charges.
Reid said her life,
While Reid rode handcuffed in the back of the government vehicle,minutes away from their destination,one of the federal agents questioned Reid’s poking her nose into police affairs."That was a pretty successful scare tactic," said Borja,