By Taylor Galgano, CNN
(CNN) — A family trying to get home from their son’s basketball game in Minneapolis on Wednesday found themselves between protesters and federal agents, before they were tear gassed in their car and the mother had to administer CPR to her infant.
Destiny Jackson, 26, tells CNN her family of eight pulled over because protesters and parked cars were making it difficult to drive past. The family said they did not know about the protest, which erupted the same evening an immigration agent shot a man in the leg.
But Jackson and her family suddenly found themselves face-to-face with the charged political climate in Minneapolis, where tensions have continued to mount after an ICE agent fatally shot a mother of three earlier this month.
Since then, thousands of immigration agents have been sent to the Twin Cities, and they’ve been met with demonstrators, most peacefully protesting, in the street. Still, state and local officials in St. Paul and Minneapolis have been bracing for more protests.
Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison later told CNN the family was “caught in the middle of” the situation.
Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said, agents responding to protests had “followed their training and reasonably deployed crowd control measures.”
They were not, she said in a statement to CNN, targeting the family.
A federal judge placed new restrictions on immigration agents, ruling agents carrying out a sweeping operation in Minnesota can’t deploy certain crowd-control measures against peaceful protesters or arrest them.
But in the car, Jackson said she heard somebody say “it’s about to go down.”
“Oh, what’s about to go down?” she said.
She started to see federal agents and knew it wasn’t safe for the family, which included her husband and six children ranging from a 6-month-old to an 11-year-old, to be there anymore.
Her husband attempted to back the car up, but realized there were federal agents on either side of the car. They were trapped.
“An ICE agent, one of them like yells in my window like ‘get the F out of here.’ And my husband’s like ‘we’re trying,’” Jackson said.
She told her husband not to move their vehicle until the federal agents were gone, so they didn’t accidentally hit one of them.
“We’ve seen what happened to Renee (Good),” she said, referring to the woman who was killed when an ICE agent shot into her vehicle during an encounter earlier this month.
The next few moments played out quickly, Jackson said. She started to see flash bangs out her window and then watched as a tear gas canister flew through the air and dropped to the ground, before rolling under her car.
Within three seconds, she felt her car go up in the air and slam back down. All the air bags in her car went off and everything went “blurry.” Tear gas quickly started filling the car while the doors auto locked, trapping them inside.
Jackson and her husband tried to break open their windows, but couldn’t get them to budge. She couldn’t see anything through the black smoke, so she flung her body to the backseat to try to unlock the doors for her children.
“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 said.
Her husband’s door in the driver’s seat opened, so he went out that way and Jackson followed. She grabbed her two-year-old and passed him to a bystander, as others helped get the remaining children out of the vehicle.
“I couldn’t breathe. And I’m pointing at the car and I’m saying