The father of three children who were hospitalized in Minneapolis on Wednesday night accused federal agents of launching flash-bang munitions and tear gas into their family van after they were caught up in protests against the Trump administration’s deadly immigration crackdown.
“Officers threw flash bangs and tear gas in my car. I got six kids in the car,” Shawn Jackson toldKMSP. “My 6-month-old can’t even breathe.”
The explosions were strong enough to trigger the car’s airbags.
“They were innocent bystanders driving through what should have been a peaceful protest when things took a turn,” Destiny Jackson, the children’s mother, said.
Destiny Jackson said that US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents “began to start throwing tear gas bombs everywhere.”
“We were trying so hard to get out the way but didn’t want to harm anybody with our car in the process,” Jackson added. “One of the bombs rolled under our truck, and within seconds our truck lifted up off the ground, and the airbags deployed, the car doors locked themselves, and the car began to fill with the powerful tear gas. We fought hard to get the doors open and get all of the kids out. Bystanders had to help.”
Shawn Jackson told KMSP while holding up his child’s car seat: “This was flipped over. My car filled with tear gas; I’m trying to pull my kids from the car.”
Destiny Jackson said she performed CPR on the infant after the baby stopped breathing and lost consciousness.
Three of the children—the 6-month-old infant and two others, ages 7 and 11 years—were taken by ambulance to a local hospital for treatment.
“My kids were innocent, I was innocent, my husband was innocent, this shouldn’t have happened,” Destiny Jackson told KMSP. “We were just trying to go home.”
Jackson said that neither she nor her husband have ever protested before—but now they feel they have good reason to do so.
“I’m mad as hell,” Shawn Jackson said during an interview with Sky News. “But now there’s gonna be hell on wheels. They’re definitely gonna have to pay for this.”
“This just shows how they don’t care,” Jackson said of the federal agents. “I was arguing with the officers to call the ambulance for five minutes... He knew there were [children] in the car; he didn’t even try and help.”
Also on Wednesday in Minneapolis, a federal officer shot and wounded a man who the US Department of Homeland Security said was an undocumented Venezuelan pulled over during a “targeted traffic stop.” DHS said the man fled after exiting his vehicle, that a fight ensued when an officer caught him, and that the agent shot the man in the leg after a pair of bystanders came to the targeted individual’s aid and attacked the officer.
Protests have been mounting in the Twin Cities following last week’s killing of Renee Nicole Good by ICE officer Jonathan Ross and the Trump administration’s subsequent effort to portray the victim as a domestic terrorist.
Demonstrators are also condemning what many opponents call the invasion and occupation of Minneapolis and other cities, as well as the Trump administration’s wider campaign targeting undocumented immigrants for roundup, detention, and deportation.
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, a Democrat, said that “armed, masked, undertrained ICE agents are going door to door ordering people to point out where their neighbors of color live.”
State and local officials in Minnesota have implored the Trump administration to end its operation in the state. Meanwhile, Trump threatened Thursday to invoke the Insurrection Act—which hasn’t been used since the Los Angeles uprising in 1992—to deploy troops to quell Twin Cities protests.
The ACLU, the ACLU of Minnesota, and a trio of law firms on Thursday filed a class action lawsuit on behalf of people “whose constitutional rights were violated” by federal operatives in the state.
“The people of Minnesota are courageously standing up to the reign of terror unleashed by the Trump administration,” plaintiffs’ attorney Robert Fram said in a statement.