An Arizona congressperson, Adelita Grijalva, said she was sprayed in the face by federal agents during a protest against an Immigration and Customs Enforcement raid outside Taco Giro in Tucson on Friday. In video footage of the incident, agents in tactical gear confronted protesters carrying anti-ICE signs. As Grijalva approached, an agent sprayed an orange chemical in the protesters’ direction. She can be heard coughing and urging the officers to “calm down” and “get out”. In another clip, a projectile landed at her feet as she stepped forward. Grijalva said she had joined a group of demonstrators outside the “small mom-and-pop” restaurant, which she visits weekly, after they had “stopped” a squadron of mostly masked ICE agents. . “The protesters were afraid that they were taking people without due process,” she said. “When I presented myself as a Member of Congress asking for more information, I was pushed aside and pepper sprayed,” she wrote. The Department of Homeland Security denied that the agents targeted her. “If her claims were true, this would be a medical marvel,” the DHS spokesperson, Tricia McLaughlin, said. “But they’re not true. She wasn’t pepper sprayed. She was in the vicinity of someone who was pepper sprayed as they were obstructing and assaulting law enforcement.” McLaughlin added that two officers were “seriously injured” and that “presenting one’s self as a ‘Member of Congress’ doesn’t give you the right to obstruct law enforcement”. An ICE spokesperson, Fernando Burgos, said special agents and officers from the agency’s Homeland Security Investigations were “executing 16 search warrants” across southern Arizona as part of a “years-long investigation into immigration and tax violations”. Multiple individuals were taken into custody during the operation. In video footage of the incident, agents in tactical gear confronted protesters carrying anti-ICE signs. Local officials praised the Tucson police department for helping to calm the situation. In a joint statement, Regina Romero, the Tucson mayor, and Lane Santa Cruz, the vice-mayor, both Democrats, said the enforcement operation had “rapidly escalated into violence against the public”. “Their disproportionate use of force, smoke grenades and pepper balls against the public, including our own Representative Adelita Grijalva, is not justified and cannot be tolerated,” they wrote, urging bystanders to share video and photographs for “potential investigation and follow-up”. Arizona Democrats rallied around Grijalva. Representative Greg Stanton called the incident “outrageous” while Representative Yassamin Ansari described it as “absolutely unacceptable”. Senator Ruben Gallego wrote: “Pepper-spraying a sitting member of Congress is disgraceful, unacceptable, and absolutely not what we voted for. Period.” At a town hall in Tucson later that day, Senator Mark Kelly referred to the event as “horrific”. Grijalva was elected to Congress in September in a special election to fill the seat left vacant by the death of her father, the late representative Raúl Grijalva. She was sworn in last month after the House reconvened from a recess during the federal govt shutdown. “If federal agents are brazen enough to fire pellets directly at a Member of Congress,” she wrote on Friday, “imagine how they behave when encountering defenseless members of our community.”
