ICE Agents Pepper-Sprayed One-Year-Old in Illinois on Film

As every day goes by, ICE agents are becoming more and more violent. We aren’t dealing with your traditional, run-of-the-mill ICE agents or even feds anymore. These new ICE agents fall into two buckets: people desperate to pay their bills, and Trump loyalists who genuinely believe in his agenda. Neither is mutually exclusive.

VIA Occupy Democrat X (formerly Twitter)

He caught the incident on film, and sure enough, after the spraying, the camera pans out to the one-year-old who is visibly struggling to breathe, face full of tears.

The video was filmed outside of Sam’s Club in Cicero, and you can see Veraza clutching his face after the reported pepper-spraying incident. Agents reportedly sprayed through his open window as they drove by. Right after you see the agents spray the cloudy substance into the car, Veraza’s wife tells him to stop the vehicle because both she and the child were also hit. The aftermath was the daughter in distress in her mother’s arms, struggling to keep her eyes open.

“My daughter was trying to open her eyes. She was struggling to breathe,” Veraza told reporters at a press conference.

In a statement from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to the Associated Press, they completely denied that the incident had even happened:

“There was no crowd control or pepper spray deployed in a Sam’s Club parking lot,” assistant secretary Tricia McLaughlin said.

Mind you, this incident was all caught on camera.

In the press conference that Veraza held, he stood firm and said that neither he nor his family were protesters. He decided to leave the shopping trip and drive away when he saw a helicopter hovering overhead and cars honking. They were reportedly sprayed as they drove off.

This also isn’t new for ICE agents either; other incidents show them targeting rideshare drivers at the O’Hare (Chicago) international airport, also deploying pepper spray in a neighborhood preparing for a Halloween parade, and snatching employees at a landscaping company.

DHS is also reporting an 8,000% rise in death threats against immigration law enforcement personnel since Trump’s administration took over. Not sure what they expect, though, with how they treat people.

I don’t care what your political ideology is; causing this kind of destruction and chaos with no due process is probably one of the most un-American things about Trump’s administration.

We cannot be a nation that prides itself on democracy but then whips out pepper spray on a one-year-old baby.

But in the end, the Veraza family’s story is not an isolated incident; it reflects something much more profound and more troubling about the way power is being exercised in the name of “security.” When law enforcement can act with no accountability, harming even a one-year-old child, and still have those actions denied by the very institutions meant to provide oversight, we lose more than just faith in our government- we lose a piece of our humanity.

If this is what “law and order” looks like, then it’s time to ask whose order it serves and whose laws are being enforced. America can’t say it is the land of the free if it allows its agents to act above the law.

Accountability, empathy, and justice-true democracy calls for these things, not fear, violence, and denial.