After a violent confrontation between a man and an agent from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), in which others joined the fray and beat the officer, leading him to shoot the man in the leg, an angry crowd gathered, quickly drawing hundreds.
ICE agents attempted to disperse the crowd with flash-bangs and tear gas, and a family in a car trying to get home got stuck in the middle. They were returning from the grocery store and didn’t realize a protest was going on until it was too late, according to the mother, Destiny Jackson. The flash-bangs deployed the airbags and overturned a car seat, after which her husband, Shawn Jackson, said agents hurled flash-bangs and tear gas into their car filled with all six of their children, ranging in age from 6 months to 11 years.
“Officers threw flash-bangs and tear gas in my car,” Shawn told a reporter on the scene. “I got six kids in the car … My 6-month-old can’t even breathe. This was flipped over,” he said, pointing to a child’s car seat. “My car filled with tear gas; I’m trying to pull my kids from the car.” He said he argued with ICE agents for five minutes, trying to tell them he needed to call an ambulance.
The mother, Destiny Jackson, told the reporter that her 6-month-old baby stopped breathing and lost consciousness. She administered CPR to the infant while concerned bystanders poured milk on her other children to counteract the effects of the tear gas once they had reached her house, which was close by. Three of the children, including the baby, were rushed to the hospital. They are all doing well.
Destiny said that an officer had approached the car and yelled at them to move on, using expletives, and they had responded that they would start to drive as soon as he moved safely out of the way. But he remained standing there, and then she saw an officer roll a tear gas canister underneath the car.
When asked how she felt about protesting, she said she had not protested before.
“My kids were innocent, I was innocent, my husband was innocent — this shouldn’t have happened,” Destiny said. “We were just trying to go home.” She added that although she felt “traumatized” by the incident, she was angry enough to consider going out to protest in the future.
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