ICE Attacks Car Full of Kids, Leaving Six-Month-Old Baby Unconscious

A 6-month-old baby was hospitalized after federal law enforcement agents in Minneapolis struck a car full of children with a flash bang, before flooding it with tear gas.

Parents Shawn and Destiny Jackson told Kare11 that they were driving their six children home from a basketball game Wednesday when a protest stopped them in their tracks.

At least 200 protesters had begun to gather after a federal agent shot and injured a Venezuelan immigrant fleeing from a traffic stop Wednesday. Federal immigration officers appeared to use flash bangs, tear gas, and pepper balls in order to disperse the crowd.

Destiny told Kare11 that she watched a law enforcement officer throw a flash bang under her car, and it detonated. “Literally, all we heard was boom, and our car went up and we came down, and every air bag deployed out of the car,” she said.

As the parents urged their children to get out of the trapped vehicle, tear gas began to seep into the car. Destiny recalled her eldest telling his mom, “I can’t, Mom, and I can’t breathe.”

“Officers threw flash bangs and tear gas in my car. I got six kids in the car.… My 6-month-old can’t even breathe. This was flipped over,” Shawn told Fox9, referring to his child’s car seat. “My car filled with tear gas, I’m trying to pull my kids from the car.”

As bystanders rushed the children to the safety of a nearby house, they had to go back for the 6-month old who had stopped breathing. “He was the last person to come in, he was just like, lifeless, like, he had like, foam, like, around his mouth, and you can, he had tears coming out of his eyes,” Destiny told Kare11.

Destiny said she performed CPR on the child while others called emergency services, who arrived shortly after. “While we were in the ambulance, they were still throwing those bombs,” Destiny told Kare11. “And I remember the ambulance people were just telling my kids, like, ‘It’s OK, you’re safe in here.’”

While the Jacksons were OK physically, the terrifying experience has left its mark on her children. “My 11-year-old, who is autistic, keeps talking about it,” Destiny told Kare11. “He was talking about it all night. I couldn’t sleep because I was scared.”

The Trump administration has been actively provoking unrest in Minnesota, deploying an additional 1,000 federal immigration officers after an ICE agent shot and killed Renee Good, a mother of three. After the protest Wednesday, President Donald Trump threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act in order to deploy the U.S. military to Minnesota—a move sure to escalate tensions, not assuage them.

Although the Jacksons have never attended a protest, Destiny said she was now inspired to join the demonstrations. “My kids were innocent, I was innocent, my husband was innocent, this shouldn’t have happened,” she told Fox9. “We were just trying to go home.