ICE protester permanently blinded after feds shoot him point blank with 'nonlethal weapon'

A protester claims immigration agents taunted and laughed at him after blinding him by firing a non-lethal weapon directly at his face at close range during a confrontation in southern California.

Video shows a Homeland Security agent grab a protester and drag them away, and then another federal officer fires a non-lethal weapon point blank at 21-year-old Kaden Rummler as he steps forward from the group holding a megaphone, reported the Los Angeles Times.

The demonstrators had gathered Friday outside a federal building in Santa Ana to protest the fatal shooting of 37-year-old Renee Good two days before in Minneapolis by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer.

Rummler was permanently blinded in his left eye, he told the newspaper, and he said his tear duct was destroyed and the “flaps of my eye are barely holding on."

“[Doctors] pulled a piece of plastic the size of a nickel from my eye,” Rummler said, and he said they also found pieces of plastic and glass in his skull, metal in his stomach lining and metal lodged millimeters way from his carotid artery. "[I'll have to live with metal pieces there for the rest of my life."

“I focused on the voices of the people, the voices of my friends and comrades,” Rummler added. “I believe that’s what kept me alive, hearing them continue the fight despite how aggressive our oppressors were.”

Rummler said he begged federal agents to call an ambulance, but he said said they instead taunted him, “laughing at the fact that I would never get to see out of my left eye again,” he said.

The first protester, Skye Jones, was taken into custody during the incident and held for nearly three days until his release Monday.

“When confronting those who enforce ICE terror, they will snatch us out of a crowd, they will shoot us point blank with pepper-ball bullets, and they will throw us to the ground,” Jones said. “Repression is inevitable when demanding justice, so we must not cower at it.”

Santa Ana police said demonstrators tossed orange cones at federal agents, but said they were unaware of any other violence at the event, and Homeland Security assistant secretary Tricia McLaughlin disputed accounts by Rummler and Jones.

“This is absurd. DHS law enforcement took this rioter to the hospital for a cut and he was released that nigh," McLaughlin said. "Make no mistake: Rioting and assaulting law enforcement is not only dangerous but a crime.”