Minneapolis Family, Including 6 Children, Tear-Gassed After They Were Caught in Clash Between ICE and Protesters By Toria Sheffield

A woman says her family was tear-gassed after getting caught between protesters and federal ICE agents — and she had to give her baby CPR during the terrifying incident.

Destiny Jackson, 26, told CNN that she, her husband and their six children were attempting to drive home from her son’s basketball game when they encountered an ICE protest in Minneapolis on the evening of Wednesday, Jan. 14.

She said she and her husband had not been aware that a protest would be taking place on their route home, and their car soon became stuck amid protesters and parked vehicles.

Jackson told CNN that she heard someone outside the car yell, “It’s about to go down!” at which point she saw federal agents arrive on the scene.

She said her husband attempted to back up, but soon realized there were ICE agents on either side of the vehicle, and so he opted to keep the car in place so that they didn’t accidentally hit anyone.

“We’ve seen what happened to Renee [Good],” Jackson said of the decision, referring to the mother of three who was shot and killed by an ICE agent in Minneapolis on Jan. 7.

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“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 added.

Jackson told CNN that the next few moments happened quickly. She recalled that she saw and heard tear gas canisters being hurled in her family’s direction, noting that one of them rolled under their vehicle. 

She said she then felt the explosion of the can under their car, which caused the airbags to deploy and the safety locks to automatically activate — locking her, her husband and her children — ages 11 to 6 months — inside the car.

She said the car began to fill with black smoke, effectively blinding them and obstructing their breathing. 

“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 my other two younger kids and I unlocked that lock,” she recalled to CNN.

She said her husband was ultimately able to get out of the driver’s side door, at which point they worked on getting their children out of the tear-gas-filled vehicle with the help of a bystander.

“I couldn’t breathe. And I’m pointing at the car and I’m saying, ‘I have more kids, I have more kids,’ “ Jackson told CNN.

She said that once all of the children were out of the car, a kind neighborhood resident led her family to safety inside their home — but it was then that she realized her 6-month-old baby son was not breathing.

Jackson said she began giving the infant mouth-to-mouth while her other children used milk to try to wash the tear gas out of their eyes.

“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 said. “I just felt like I’m gonna give you every breath I have.”

She said her baby began breathing, and she ultimately accompanied all of her children to the hospital, where they received care.

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In a statement to CNN, the City of Minneapolis confirmed that tear gas used on the crowd that evening caused a 6-month-old child inside a vehicle “to experience breathing difficulties.” 

They added that police and emergency responders reached the affected family and found “the infant was breathing and stable, but [in] serious condition.”

The City of Minneapolis and the Minneapolis Police Department did not immediately respond to PEOPLE’s request for comment.

In a statement to PEOPLE, Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said the federal agents present during the Jan. 14 protest “followed their training and reasonably deployed crowd control measures.”

She added that the agents were not targeting the family.