A Minnesota family feels lucky to be alive after a terrifying encounter with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. Destiny Jackson, 26, found herself giving CPR to her 6-month-old baby after her family’s car was filled with tear gas. Jackson, her husband, and their six children, ages 11 and younger, were driving in Minneapolis on January 14, 2026, when they found themselves at the wrong place at the wrong time. While traveling home from their son’s baseball game, the family drove into the path of an ICE protest. Luckily, they survived, but Jackson will never forget the terror she felt.
Jackson told CNN that she and her husband knew nothing about the protest and had driven into the area by accident. As soon as they realized what was happening, her husband tried to turn the car around.
“An ICE agent, one of them, yells in my window like ‘get the F out of here.’ And my husband’s like ‘we’re trying,’” Jackson told the outlet.
She and her husband didn’t want to cause trouble. Jackson advised him not to move the car until the ICE agents were out of her way. After the death of Renee Good, they didn’t want to take any chances.
But her husband apparently didn’t move quickly enough. The next thing the family knew, their car was filling with tear gas and the doors automatically locked after the vehicle’s airbags went off. Jackson said everything was “blurry,” but she hurried to get her children out of the vehicle.
“I was feeling around, like I was hitting my son’s window, and I worked my way to his lock, and then I reached over all my other two younger kids, and I unlocked that lock,” she told CNN.
Several people came to the family’s aid to help them out of the car. They rescued Jackson’s 6-month-old last. The terrified mother began CPR to save his life.
“In the midst of like doing mouth-to-mouth, I stopped, and I looked at my baby, and I was just like ‘wake up, you have to,’” she told the outlet. “I just felt like I’m gonna give you every breath I have.”
Thankfully, the family all survived, and those who needed treatment were able to get to a nearby hospital. It is a day Jackson will never forget.
According to People, Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin defended ICE’s actions in a statement to the news outlet. She claimed agents “followed their training and reasonably deployed crowd control measures.”
Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey wants to make his city safe. “We’re suing the Trump admin for their unconstitutional attacks on our neighbors. They’re not pro-business or pro-safety. Their actions are purely political — and Minneapolis and our partners are done with it,” he shared on X.
We are living in such tumultuous and terrifying times. When a family can’t even drive down the street without fear of tear gas filling their car, is everything really “great” in America?
