Police fire teargas into the street outside the Metropolitan detention center in Los Angeles during the No Kings protest in March. Photograph: MediaNews Group/Pasadena Star-News/GettyView image in fullscreenPolice fire teargas into the street outside the Metropolitan detention center in Los Angeles during the No Kings protest in March. Photograph: MediaNews Group/Pasadena Star-News/GettyLA teen loses eye after being shot by US agent at No Kings march, lawyer saysUSC student Tucker Collins’s attorney accuses homeland security of ‘overt act of repression’ at Los Angeles protest
A freshman at the University of Southern California has lost an eye after he was shot last month with a “less-lethal” projectile by a Department of Homeland Security agent at a No Kings march, according to his attorney.
On 28 March, Tucker Collins, 18, took to the streets of downtown Los Angeles to photograph throngs of protesters, who held signs and chanted slogans denouncing the Trump administration’s policies, his lawyer V James DeSimone said in a statement on Wednesday.
Collins followed behind a group that was headed toward the Metropolitan detention center, the downtown LA facility that has been a focal point for demonstrators in the past months.
In a video from that day shared by DeSimone on social media, Collins is seen holding a camera pointed toward demonstrators outside the federal facility, when suddenly he falls to his knees.
A projectile, typically used as a crowd control device, had struck Collins in his right eye, fracturing the bones in his eye socket, according to DeSimone. That eye has since been surgically removed.
“He was not threatening anyone. He wasn’t attacking anyone. DHS officers took out his eye and they did it despite a federal injunction that plainly forbids firing these weapons at people’s heads,” DeSimone said.
In September, a California judge issued a court order limiting the DHS’s use of force against journalists and legal observers exercising their first amendment rights, who posed “no threat of imminent harm”.
“They didn’t shoot him for their own protection – Tucker was shot in another overt act of repression,” DeSimone said.
DeSimone will be filing a federal tort claim against DHS on Collins’s behalf, an avenue of legal recourse for injury caused by the “wrongful or negligent act” of a federal employee.
A spokesperson for DHS said in a statement to the Guardian: “The first amendment protects speech and peaceful assembly – not rioting.
“Our law enforcement has followed their training and used the minimum amount of force necessary to protect themselves, the public, and federal property,” they wrote, adding that seven warnings were given prior to crowd-control measures being deployed.
DeSimone said that video showed Collins “at the rear of the crowd obviously documenting the scene, even stepping out of the way of passersby”.
Photographs from 28 March show that police deployed teargas into a crowd of roughly 150 people near the Metropolitan detention center. Authorities said the move was precipitated by demonstrators throwing concrete blocks, among other objects.
Dozens of protesters were arrested that day for failure to comply with dispersal orders, according to the Los Angeles police department.
Earlier this year, a 23-year-old Los Angeles man sued the LAPD for excessive force, assault and battery, among other allegations, after he was shot and blinded in an eye from a projectile at an immigration protest.
At another round of No Kings protests in downtown Los Angeles in the fall, an LAPD officer fired a “crowd-control projectile” at an investigative reporter for the news outlet LA Taco, according to the US Press Freedom Tracker. The projectile did not strike the reporter, but they were injured dodging it, according to the database.
