By Nick Valencia and Jerrod Zisser | January 3, 2026
COLUMBUS, OHIO— It was the kind of stretch of road most of us don’t remember. Just another intersection on just another day, until her daughter spotted the white Dodge Durango behind them.
“Mom, that’s immigration,” the 18-year-old said.
The woman, a 39-year-old classroom aide for children with special needs, glanced in her mirror and saw what her daughter saw: what they believed to be an immigration vehicle, in a city where federal raids had already put entire neighborhoods on edge. And so they did what “everybody knows” to do.
“Everybody knows, if you see immigration at all, you start your video,” she said.
Her daughter rolled down her window of the truck they were in and began filming. The mother rolled hers down too, both of them trying to warn - family in another car with “a wife and kids” inside, she said.
In Spanish, the teenager leaned out and shouted: “La migra. La migra.”
According to the mother, that’s when a man she believes to be a federal agent rolled past and fired pepper spray directly into their vehicle.
We reviewed the video and can confirm the details she describes.
“He drove by and sprayed me right into the car, at both of us,” she said. “I turn and look in the back because I have three kids back there, and they start bawling.”
The pepper spray filled the cabin. The children began coughing and screaming. Her daughter’s lips and lower face turned bright red. The mother’s eyes burned as she tried to keep control of the truck.
Inside the truck, she remembers yelling the only words that made sense: “Call the police. Call the police.”
Nick Valencia News and The Take With Jerrod Zisser reached out to DHS Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs Tricia McLaughlin for comment about the claims and to ask if the man is in fact a federal agent. As of this publication we have not heard back.
Meanwhile, the woman has published the suspected agents photo on social media and is asking for the public’s help to identify him.
A Drive Through Chemical Spray
The woman, who asked to be identified only as a Columbus resident, says her daughter dialed 911 as the Durango the agent was in suddenly flipped on its emergency lights and sped away through traffic.
“Y’all just committed a crime,” she remembers thinking. “I have kids in my car screaming and crying.”
Nick Valencia News and The Take With Jerrod Zisser reviewed a card given to the woman by the investigating officer with the Columbus Police Department. We have also requested a copy of the police report and 911 call.
The woman says she followed the suspected agent for as long as she could, but could barely see the road. Her husband’s work truck has dark tint; the pepper spray clung to the seats and air. She was trying to drive, trying to hold her face, trying to calm three terrified kids.
“I have no idea how I managed to do it,” she told us. “I guess it’s just instinct. You’re a mom.”
Dispatchers told them it would be hard for police to reach them where they were on the highway and directed her instead to a nearby fire station. She somehow managed to get there.
At the station, she said, firefighters washed their faces and tried to clear their eyes.
“My daughter’s bottom part of her mouth is all red,” she recalled. “You could see where they got it, like right in her face.”
Her nieces, one 11, the other a high-school freshman, were also coughing and crying. The mother didn’t take many photos; she says she was in “survival mode,” not thinking about evidence. There is one picture of her daughter’s face from that night. Weeks later, she told us, pepper spray residue still lingered in the truck.
“We scrubbed it, and you’ll still get pepper spray on you just touching something,” she said. “If you touch your eye, it’s like, oh, there’s pepper spray, and your eye will burn for a minute.”
The incident happened on December 21, she says. “And just yesterday,” she told us on January 1, “I got some on me.”
The Police Response—and a Vanishing License Plate
When police arrived at the fire station, the mother says she immediately tried to file an assault report. She had three children who had just been hit with chemical spray. She had a 911 call. She had video. And she had a license plate number from the Durango her daughter captured as it fled.
The answer she says she received left her stunned.
“They asked me if I knew the guy’s name,” she told us. “Well, no, how am I going to know his name?”
According to her, the officer then told her that the plate came back invalid.
“So if we don’t have his name, it’s going to be hard,” she recalls the officer saying.
Her response was immediate.
“So if I go around pepper spraying somebody, you guys don’t know who I am?” she remembers asking. “If it was me that did it, or anybody else, you’d find a way to find out who they are and hold them accountable. Why with these people do they not do that?”
She says she left the encounter with the sense that if the man really was a federal agent, the system was designed to protect him, not her.
“They change their plates out on their cars,” she said, citing what she says the officer told her. “You’re a federal agent, and that’s allowed? They have it set up where you can’t catch these people.”
A White Mother, a Latino Family, and a Line That Was Crossed
The woman’s story carries an extra layer of irony that she is the first to point out.
“I am blonde hair, blue eyes, white as can be,” she said. Her husband is Latino, a roofer. Her daughter is half Latina but, she notes, “looks white.”
And if she can be sprayed, she wonders, what is happening to those with fewer protections? Those without citizenship, without video, without social media, without a reporter on the other end of a phone?
“If that’s what they do just because they can,” she said, “what are they doing to these people that they do detain?”
She believes she was targeted for one reason: speaking up.
Her daughter was shouting “La migra” out the window, warning another family. The windows were down. The camera was rolling. And in her view, the spray was a message.
“I know it’s a scare tactic,” she said. “So next time, you just stay quiet. But I’m not going to stay quiet, because I’m allowed to speak. I shouldn’t be scared to.”
This was not her first brush with the fear that federal enforcement has brought to Columbus.
She told us about her eldest son, 21, born and raised in the United States, who called her from work when ICE showed up outside his job. He had forgotten his wallet and had no ID on him. He was terrified.
“My son… born and raised here… should not be scared when ICE is around because of what he looks like,” she said. “We’re in 2026 now, and this is a thing.”
She describes racing across town, calling his long-term girlfriend to have his birth certificate ready, circling the parking lot at the end of his shift to make sure ICE was gone, and offering to walk coworkers to their cars.
“If he’s scared, I can only imagine how scared everyone else is,” she told us.
A Still Image and a Resolve
After the incident, her son took the video and pulled out a still frame: a clear screengrab of the face of the man who sprayed them, she says.
She posted the image online. Someone responded that they had seen the same two men in a Dollar Tree near Easton, Ohio, around the same time, also in a white Durango.
For her, it was confirmation that she is not imagining things. The man exists, that he moves through her community, that he shops in the same stores as her kids.
It also sharpened her resolve.
“I will find out who you are and hold you accountable,” she said. “I’m not scared.”
Still, she knows why others are. She has friends who have decided not to push, not to file complaints, not to hire lawyers, fearing retaliation against undocumented spouses.
“That’s why these people are getting away with everything,” she said. “Because people are scared to push.”
She isn’t.
For now, she is focused on her kids and on one simple demand: that the man who sprayed chemical agent into a car full of children be treated like anyone else who did the same.
“If a police officer went and did that, they’d be suspended from their job,” she said. “Anybody else, you’d find a way to find out who they are and hold them accountable.”
She paused, before adding: “Anybody could have been in this car.”
