DHS Just Pepper-Sprayed a Baby
Gregory Bovino‘s Operation Midway Blitz in Chicago has hit a new low.
Photo: Getty Images Politics
For months, border agents have been brutalizing civilians and making absurd excuses for their barbarity. After ICE detained a clarinet player performing with her band outside an ICE facility, they alleged she “attacked” an officer; when agents shot a priest in the head with a pepper ball, the Department of Homeland Security claimed he once flipped Secretary Kristi Noem “the bird”; and the 79-year-old man who was dogpiled by a gaggle of agents—as assault that left him with broken ribs and a concussion—was said to have “impeded” officers. How will they spin pepper-spraying a baby?
On Saturday, Evelin Herrera and Rafael Veraza were heading to a Sam’s Club in Cicero, Illinois, with their one-year-old daughter, Arinna, when they heard commotion in Chicago’s Little Village. After pulling into the store’s parking lot, they saw a “convoy of federal vehicles,” and decided it was best to leave. Herrera began recording, and as they passed the vehicles, a masked agent pointed a pepper-spray gun through his window and fired into their car.
CICERO, IL — Trump’s ICE goons pepper spray into a family’s car and hits a 1 year old baby girl. pic.twitter.com/NtlMtMbopn
— The Tennessee Holler (@TheTNHoller) November 10, 2025
“She couldn’t open her eyes and struggled to breathe,” Veraza told CBS Chicago of their one-year-old. “Us, as adults, we can handle it, but as kids? Shouldn’t be targeting kids.”
Arinna couldn’t open her eyes or breathe properly, and bystanders rushed to help. Herrera and Veraza were taken to the hospital, where doctors called poison control for Arinna and rinsed Veraza’s face with saline solution, since he’d been hit directly. He told the Chicago Tribune that while he remembers feeling his face go numb, his “first thought” was his daughter. “I didn’t even care if it got to me,” he said. “My heartbeat was at 263 per minute.”
When Jezebel reached out to DHS for comment, we were referred to a tweet by DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin, who reply-posted a video of teary-eyed Arinna and wrote: “No. There was no crowd control or pepper spray deployed in a Sam’s Club parking lot,” the post says. “Though, over the weekend in Chicago, law enforcement was shot at, bricks thrown at them, they were rammed with vehicles and other attacks.” Mhm.
The agency further claimed that someone fired at agents from inside a car, which was why they shot the tear gas in the first place—but according to the Chicago Tribune, local police said there was no report of such an incident.
Over the weekend, DHS agents also faced backlash after a video went viral showing a man seizing during an arrest while clutching to his toddler in a car in Fitchburg, Massachusetts. And last week, after a man was detained during a raid in Los Angeles, immigration agents took his car—where his nearly two-year-old daughter sat in the back—and drove away. (The child was eventually reunited with her grandmother, but what the actual fuck? No hell hot enough.)
Chicago has been under siege since September, when DHS first launched Operation Midway Blitz—one of Trump’s deliberate and vindictive assaults on Democrat-led sanctuary cities—and the crackdown has been violent, brutal, and unmistakably terroristic.
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