Here’s the thing, when it comes to releasing swarms of minimally trained psychos and sociopaths in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) vests onto the streets of American cities: These guys, by and large, have an uncanny knack for making every single situation they enter that much more heated, violent and ultimately publicized. Members of the new crop of federal Sturmtruppen sought by the second Trump administration seem to universally possess the ability to assess a situation, and determine exactly how they could turn it into their agency’s latest PR disaster, even in those rare situations where they’re validly enforcing the law. Leave it to these guys to enter a situation where they want to arrest a protester for seemingly slashing their tires (petty but unsurprising), and exit that situation by deciding to pepper spray and body slam an 80-year-old bystander. That’s exactly the kind of escalation you can count on from the unrestrained thugs we’re calling federal agents these days, as you can see in the embedded incident below from this weekend in California. Daily Memo: ICE Pepper-Sprays and Throws an 80-year-old Attorney, Arrests a Community Watcher, and Takes Seven From Lompoc [image or embed] — L.A. TACO (@lataco.bsky.social) Feb 21, 2026 at 12:08 AM This incident in Santa Barbara began when a group of ICE observers noted the presence of federal immigration agents near the Santa Barbara County Probation Department, and approached a white Dodge Charger seemingly serving as an ICE vehicle. One member of the group, reportedly by the name of Jack Randmaa, approaches the car and appears to slash its tire, prompting an unsurprising response from the clearly pissed off agents. They swarm Randmaa and wrestle him to the ground as he struggles, placing him in a chokehold as they fish for restraints, and the crowd full of observers hurls insults and epithets their way. The agents respond back with profanities and threats of their own, waving cans of pepper spray, in a moment that any normal individual would be questioning their career choices. The full, 8-minute video of the incident from beginning to end can be seen in footage via The Santa Barbara Independent. It’s at this point that the old man approaches, since identified as 80-year-old, local defense attorney Doug Hayes. He stands closer than the rest of the crowd, perhaps believing that his advanced years will make the ICE agents less likely to lash out against him (he is of course wrong). As they struggle to cuff Randmaa amidst the tumult, Hayes insults them, tells them they should remove their masks, and shames them: “Why don’t you do something good? Be a citizen. Be a human being. What are your children going to think of you?” Hayes then bends down and attempts to retrieve Randmaa’s backpack from the street near his head, only for one of the agents to snatch it away. That agent pepper sprays the elderly Hayes in the face, and he unsurprisingly reacts to this with panic and confusion, holding on to the agent momentarily. That’s all the other agent needs to see to justify his next move, which is to hurl the old man to the pavement, where he continues to lay stunned until the other ICE observers help him to his unsteady feet and flush his eyes with water. As far as I can tell, Hayes has not yet given a direct account to media of the incident, although “a colleague told the Independent he is ‘doing okay.'” And frankly, the ICE agents are lucky that this is apparently the case, because this is exactly the sort of wanton use of unnecessary force that could so easily result in an unintentional death. Would either of those federal agents attempt to make the argument that they “calculated” or “measured” their response to the threat represented by Doug Hayes? That they hurled the 80-year-old man to the ground in such a way that they were attempting to not seriously injure or kill him outright? What would the claim be, that they were aiming for a soft part of the concrete? What would they have done if the man’s head had hit the ground, or he had been clearly concussed? What would they have done if he suffered a heart attack in the incident? Would they even have been present to witness what they had caused, given that they were mostly concerned with getting Randmaa into the backseat of their car and absconding with him? We should note that there is more than one way for such an encounter to ultimately prove fatal to a particularly vulnerable observer like Doug Hayes. What if we find out, for instance, that he broke a hip in the fall? Such an incident wouldn’t likely have been deadly in the moment, but it’s exactly the sort of injury that leads to greatly elevated levels of future mortality and complications. Just because ICE didn’t execute someone on the street, that doesn’t mean their their culpability to an eventual death has ended. It may have just begun. But more than anything, this incident is just a perfect illustration of the way that agents of ICE seemingly can’t stop themselves from making every situation they enter that much worse. That Randmaa was destroying federal property seems pretty likely–in the full video, you can even see that the tire of the white Charger is now flat when they haul him away a few minutes later. One can’t really expect to provoke a response like that, as a citizen living in a repressive regime, and not subsequently experience a jackboot to the neck as a warning to others. An arrest was always going to happen in this scenario, but leave it to ICE to take the situation from one that wouldn’t have garnered any particular attention, to one ripe for the evening news, as a clearly feeble, 80-year-old American citizen dares to pick up a backpack and pays for it via violence from federal agents that could easily have left him in traction. Time and time again, they take full advantage of seemingly every opportunity to make themselves the most hated “law enforcement” apparatus in American history. Keep scrolling for more great stories.