On a crowded downtown street, four masked, plainclothes agents push Luis Hipolito to the pavement, piling on top of him against a curb. One hinges his arm around the 23-year-old’s neck. Hipolito seems to struggle to breathe on his stomach as the agents attempt for more than two minutes to cuff him.
“You gonna let him die?” one bystander screams as other agents pushed back the crowds.
Moments later they pull him up. Hipolito’s legs shudder and buckle. His head swings back and his body shakes violently. The sudden convulsions look like the beginning of a seizure.
The moment, captured on multiple videos on Tuesday morning and shared on social media, enraged immigrant advocates, family members and residents who witnessed it. It has raised questions about the risks of the Trump administration’s crackdown in Los Angeles, where agents are carrying out immigration sweeps on busy streets without clear targets.
“This points to the inherit danger of at-large arrests,” said Deborah Fleischaker, a former acting chief of staff for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement who reviewed some of the video. “They should be avoided as much as possible. You can’t control for everything. The risk of violence, someone being hurt or having a medical incident is high. And that goes for officers and the target.”
But she said the tumult appears to be part of the government’s plan. “The level of chaos and fear it engenders appears to be a feature here, not a bug.”
The U.S. attorney in Los Angeles, Bill Essayli, charged Hipolito, a U.S. citizen, with assault on a federal officer for allegedly punching an agent before he was tackled. And Department of Homeland Security officials have repeatedly said they will arrest anyone interfering with their operations.
The fracas started when the unidentified agents began detaining street vendors near the intersection of Main and 9th streets downtown. Hipolito and other bystanders rushed to film the actions and shout down the agents.
Videos appears to show an agent taking out a red bottle and spraying it at Hipolito within inches of his eyes, and Hipolito swiping back. Footage reviewed by The Times does not show whether Hipolito’s hand connected, but the officer tried to dodge the blow and lost his baseball cap. Hipolito’s family say it was pepper spray and that Hipolito did not intentionally touch the agent because he was blinded.
At a hearing on Thursday, Hipolito walked into court, limping and shackled in the same clothes he had been arrested in. A federal judge ordered him released on $10,000 bond.
Another woman, 32-year-old Andrea Guadalupe Velez, also a U.S. citizen, was also charged with assault during the same sweep. A judge ordered her released on $5,000 bond, as her mother and sister watched tearfully in the courtroom.
DHS said their agents have seen assaults against them rise dramatically, and that people interfering in their operations places them in danger.
“Secretary Noem has been clear: if you lay a hand on a law enforcement officer, you will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law,” said DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin. “These U.S. citizens’ actions kept ICE law enforcement from arresting the target illegal alien of their operation.”
Both defendants are the children of immigrants and were downtown when a convoy of agents pulled over on 9th Street. Most wore masks and it was not apparent what agency many were with. According to a criminal complaint filed by the U.S. attorney, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents were seeking “to question two individuals about whether they were legally present.”
The court documents didn’t name those individuals, but agents stopped in front of a stand where a family sold tamales, coffee, champurrado and pan dulce near the California Mart.
Velez, a Cal Poly Pomona graduate, had just been dropped off by her mother and her 17-year-old sister, Estrella Rosas, as the operations was unfolding.
Velez, according to the criminal complaint, “abruptly” stepped into the path of an agent in “an apparent effort to prevent him from apprehending the male subject he was chasing.” Velez, who is 4 feet 11, allegedly stood in the path of the agent with her arms extended. The agent couldn’t stop in time and was struck in his head and chest, it stated.
Velez’s mother, Margarita Flores was watching from the rearview mirror. She said she saw a man running toward her daughter and then her daughter falling to the ground. Flores said the men didn’t have identification or license plates on their car.
Fearing she was kidnapped, she told Rosas to call the police.
“I called 911 saying that they were kidnapping my sister, because we didn’t know who these people were,” Rosas said.
Velez ran toward LAPD officers that had been deployed.
A crowd was gathering. Horns were blaring. People were shouting obscenities. They filmed on cellphones pointing at the agents as one lifted Velez off the ground and carried her toward an SUV. Her knees were tucked to her chest.
“They didn’t identify themselves,” Velez said on Thursday after she was released. “I was just going to work and everything happened so fast.”
Her lawyer, Gregory Russell, said that in the chaos, all she saw was an officer charging straight at her and she is thinking, “He thinks I’m illegal because of the color of my skin.”
He said she instinctively held up her work bag to shield herself from the much larger man as he pushed her to the ground.
“I was scared I didn’t know what was gonna happen to me or where I was gonna end up,” she said.
Hipolito had been part of a gathering crowd that were shouting at agents.
As agents tried to leave, he stood near one of the cars arguing with an agent wearing a “police” vest.
An agent identified as “C.C.” ordered Hipolito and two others to leave the scene, but they refused to move so he pepper sprayed them, according to the complaint. Then, “Hipolito punched C.C. in the face.”
A shaky video taken from inside a nearby car shows Hipolito arguing face-to-face with a masked agent wearing a police vest.
The man tries to brush him off, motioning his hand for Hipolito to leave, but he persists, holding his cellphone up at the masked agent. Then the agent turns away momentarily and backs up toward him, seemingly caught off guard by Hipolito’s cellphone so close to his face. A separate close-up video shows him spraying from a bottle directly at Hipolito’s face. It looks as if Hipolito swipes or swings back, but it happens out of the camera’s shot. All that is captured is the agent reappearing in the frame with his hat missing.
“They’re making it seem like he was the one doing wrong, he was the one violating laws, when on the contrary, a lot of these agents were violating my cousin’s rights,” said Hipolito’s cousin Angela Martinez.
She said her cousin told her agents sprayed him and he was blinded.
“You know when someone is blind and can’t see, they move their hands in front of them to get stability, that’s what he was doing. In doing so, while he was walking, he kind of got in contact with the agent,” Martinez said.
There’s no further mention in court documents of what happened next, but the videos taken by bystanders show that in the following seconds, agents tackle Hipolito and hold him as he struggles to breathe.
One agent grabs each of his arms, another is atop him with his arm around his neck and the last agent, in an orange shirt, is trying to hold his legs, at one point punching them.
After about 30 seconds, the agent with arm wrapped around his necks pulls away. The one wearing orange lets go of Hipolito’s legs and positions himself near the man’s head and points a Taser at his shoulder. He doesn’t appear to fire it, but the other agents continue to push the man downward as they try to get his arms in handcuffs. Other agents mill around. In the fracas, Hipolito’s shoe flies off.
After about a minute, as sirens are screaming and people are shouting, the agent wearing oranges stands up and tries to push the crowd back. He points the Taser at a woman recording and when she doesn’t back off, he swipes to grab her phone but misses and turns away.
After around two and a half minutes, they finally get him cuffed and sitting up.
Hipolito is breathing fast and deep. He is hunched over. An agent with a baseball hat and FBI vest pats his heart and appears to be talking to him and trying to calm him down. He wipes Hipolito’s eyes with his shirt and holds his back. Hipolito catches his breath. Then the man pulls him up from behind with his arms under his shoulder.
Hipolito stands, an agent on each side. He’s wobbly and then his head rocks back and his legs began to shake violently.
The agents sit him on the ground and splash water on his face. Eventually, he is picked up and put in a car.
Ruben Lopez, a use-of-force expert and retired LAPD SWAT lieutenant, said federal agents working on L.A. streets have raised the tension level, with some local agencies’ normal field operations being mistaken for immigration enforcement.
“The anger from the bystanders is a direct result of what people perceive as aggressive tactics, when people come out and grab someone without any identification and face coverings in unmarked vehicles,” he said.
“The relationship with the community and law enforcement and the community is a delicate balance,” he said. “A single incident can erode years of public trust and confidence in law enforcement.”
Lopez said he especially worried that incidents could potentially result in “blue on blue,” a term that refers to one agency unknowingly harming another.
Glen Sitwell, a building manager who watched all of this play out from his corner office, said the aggressive posture of the agents took him aback.
“If this sh— is going on every day, count the days to people start getting killed,” he said.
The post ‘You gonna let him die?’ Agents pile on protester, who convulses and struggles to breathe appeared first on Los Angeles Times.
