Federal Agents Tear-Gas Jackson Family Vehicle in North Minneapolis; Six-Month-Old Loses Consciousness, Hospitalized

On approximately January 14, 2026, during an Operation Metro Surge enforcement action near Lyndale Avenue and 24th Avenue North in north Minneapolis, federal agents deployed tear gas at a family vehicle carrying Shawn and Destiny Jackson, both 26, and their six children. The Jacksons were driving home from their 11-year-old son’s basketball game when they were caught between protesters and federal agents. A tear-gas canister detonated beneath their GMC Denali — “It lifted up my car,” Shawn Jackson said — and the blast set off the vehicle’s airbags, trapping the family inside as gas flooded the cabin. Their six-month-old son lost consciousness and stopped breathing. Destiny Jackson, a certified EMT, performed mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and revived him roughly two minutes later: “I had to give my baby like mouth-to-mouth… he was not breathing.”

Three of the family’s six children, including the infant, were hospitalized; the children had pre-existing asthma and required decontamination, breathing treatments, and additional testing at North Memorial Hospital. A week after exposure the infant still had a lingering cough. Jackson recounted that hospital doctors told the family the agents’ chemical agent was “made for war.” The same incident was subsequently cited by Minnesota physicians at their January 20 Capitol press conference on the surge’s health toll, and Destiny Jackson described being afraid to move the car — “don’t move that car, you’ve seen what happened to Renee” — referencing the January 7 ICE killing of Renée Good days earlier.

Structurally, this event documents the conversion of crowd-control munitions into indiscriminate harm against uninvolved civilians, including infants, as a routine byproduct of mass immigration enforcement in a dense urban setting. The detail that responding clinicians characterized the agent as a weapon of war underscores a militarization of domestic operations in which the distinction between combatant and bystander — and between enforcement and assault — has effectively dissolved. The Jackson case became a load-bearing public exhibit precisely because the victims were a U.S. family returning from a child’s basketball game, stripping the operation of any pretextual targeting rationale.