Two members of a Puerto Rican feminist collective say U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents pointed pepper spray and a taser at their faces on Saturday afternoon, October 24, as they documented an ICE operation in Río Piedras, San Juan, El Nuevo Día reported. The claims are the group's allegations; ICE had not publicly responded at publication.
Source: El Nuevo Día via 787 Daily
Shariana Ferrer Núñez, co-founder and spokesperson of the Colectiva Feminista en Construcción, said she and a colleague went to Calle Arzuaga to document the scene after learning through community messages of an ICE operation there, while they were taking part in a climate activity with a youth group called Hormigas Bravas. By the time they arrived, she said, agents appeared to have finished the operation and taken people away, though the group does not know who was detained or how many.
As the two began documenting vehicle models and license plates, an agent pointed an industrial canister of pepper spray at Ferrer Núñez's face without any verbal exchange, and another agent pointed a taser at her colleague's face, she said. A short video posted on the group's social media shows an agent pointing the pepper spray at the person filming and telling her in English, “You're not going to like this.” Ferrer Núñez also said agents threw to the ground the electric scooters the activists had arrived on.
Ferrer Núñez said filming police and ICE agents in public areas is protected by the First Amendment and Puerto Rico's Right to Record Act, and she denounced the operations' impact on the migrant community. El Nuevo Día said ICE's press office had not responded to its requests for comment at publication. The incident was also reported by Telemundo Puerto Rico, NotiUno and WAPA TV, according to 787 Daily's summary of the El Nuevo Día reporting.
Wider enforcement push in Puerto Rico
The Río Piedras confrontation came during a visibly stepped-up run of ICE operations in San Juan. The Washington Post reported last week that border czar Tom Homan visited Puerto Rico amid reports of fresh ICE raids, and community-alert social media video documented an ICE surge in San Juan on October 24–25, including agents in residential streets and outside businesses. Puerto Rico is a U.S. territory whose residents are U.S. citizens, while many of its roughly 90,000 immigrants come from the Dominican Republic and other Caribbean countries. For immigrant families watching enforcement expand from the mainland to the island, the activists' allegation — still unanswered by ICE — goes to a basic question: whether people who film an operation in public can be confronted with weapons for doing so.