Cesar was on his way home when he got caught in a giant cloud of tear gas, the same substance banned in warfare, outside of City Hall in Downtown Los Angeles on Saturday, after the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department (LASD) deployed the chemical agent to disperse a large crowd of hundreds of people protesting the recent ICE immigration raids in Los Angeles.
Cesar wasn’t there to protest, though.
He was trying to get out of DTLA before a curfew went into effect at 8 PM.
“I was just trying to get home from work,” he told L.A. TACO during an interview. For safety reasons, he requested that his last name be omitted from this story.
As the toxic tear gas drifted downwind towards 1st Street, hundreds of people scattered. “That little field on 1st and Spring, people were running across it to get away and the cops were throwing flash bangs and lighting that shit up,” Cesar said.
After some of the tear gas had settled, Los Angeles police officers set up skirmish lines around 1st Street and Spring Street to prevent the remaining protesters and Cesar from escaping the area.
Some protesters scaled a tall fence and ran through a vacant lot across from City Hall to evade arrest.
However, not everyone was able to escape.
A Black woman in a wheelchair who did not appear to be involved in the protests found herself trapped among dozens of protesters. When a line of police advanced towards her and the remaining protesters, two people struggled to move her wheelchair away from the police.
“I was trying to get out from getting kettled,” Cesar explained. “That shit was no joke, as soon as I seen an opening to get off that corner I was gone.”
“I didn’t have my mask or anything [and] I had my chef knives in my bag,” he continued. “If I were detained, they would’ve tried to charge me.”
Being exposed to tear gas has left Cesar with headaches, lightheadedness, and an irritated nose, he said.
“I feel like I went on a binger,” he said. “We all witnessed how we don’t matter at all to law enforcement or politicians. Our government sees us as criminals, legal or not.”
Since anti-ICE protests began on June 6, a number of people, some of them from vulnerable communities, have unintentionally found themselves caught in dangerous situations during anti-ICE demonstrations in the Downtown area.
Earlier on Saturday, when police mounted on horses began pushing hundreds of protesters outside of the eastern side of City Hall down Main Street, a Black woman that people described as being “homeless” sat calmly on a bench at a bus stop.
The woman didn’t react to police moving towards her while striking people with batons until baton-wielding police officers wearing gas masks got within a few feet of her, and she quickly rose to her feet.
An officer grabbed her by the arm and aggressively shoved her towards the crowd of protesters before pushing her again with his baton.
“She’s homeless!” a protester yelled at the officers in the woman’s defense. “What the fuck are you doing?”
A day earlier, on Friday afternoon, a woman who was also described as being “unhoused,” stood directly in front of an LAPD patrol SUV heading south on Vignes Street near Cesar Chavez Avenue, bringing the vehicle to a halt.
Two officers exited the SUV, approached the woman, then one of them immediately pushed the woman so hard in her chest that she fell straight on her back.
The woman remained motionless for several seconds before raising her head slightly. Then two officers grabbed her by her arms and dragged her over to the sidewalk before they got back in their car and drove off.
An anonymous source who video recorded the confrontation on their phone said that afterwards they “checked for any bleeding and a good samaritan stopped and offered to give her a ride.”
They noted that they couldn’t tell if her head was bleeding because “she had thick hair.” They saw blood on her hands, but it wasn’t clear if the blood was related to the incident with the police or something else.
They believed that the woman just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and was not involved in the protests.
“I believe this was an unhoused person,” they said.
It’s unclear if any of the officers involved in this incident have faced consequences for their actions.
LAPD Chief Jim McDonnell and spokespeople for Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass did not respond to requests for comment.
