Democratic Rep. Adelita Grijalva of Arizona said Friday that she was pepper-sprayed by a law enforcement officer while seeking information about a federal immigration operation at a taco shop in Tucson, the southern Arizona city she represents.
“I was here, this is like the restaurant I come to literally once a week, and was sprayed in the face by a very aggressive agent,” Rep. Grijalva said in a video posted to her X account Friday afternoon. “Pushed around by others when I literally was not being aggressive. I was asking for clarification, which is my right as a member of Congress.”
Grijalva won a special election to succeed her late father, Rep. Raúl M. Grijalva, in September but was not sworn in to her seat for nearly two months. She told MS NOW in a statement that members of her staff were also pepper-sprayed by masked officers.
In the video on X, the congresswoman can be seen coughing, noting the “remnants of whatever they sprayed” were bothering her.
“While I am fine, if that is the way they treat me, how are they treating other community members who do not have the same privileges and protections that I do?” Grijalva said in the statement.
The incident occurred outside a popular family-owned taco restaurant, Taco Giro, in a historic west Tucson neighborhood. About 40 officers, most of them masked, were at the scene, Grijalva said.
According to the Arizona Daily Star, a newspaper based in Tucson, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency spokesman Fernando X. Burgos said in a statement that the operation was part of a larger federal immigration enforcement action across southern Arizona on Friday.
In a second video posted to X, Grijalva can be seen in the parking lot of Taco Giro with several protesters holding signs and shouting at officers dressed in camouflage uniforms with the word “police” on the back of their vests.
The video shows an officer spraying a substance on a group of people to the left of the lawmaker. Grijalva starts coughing and tells the officers to leave. One of the officers yells at her to get out of the way. She turns around and faces the officers with her back to the camera, and at least one officer is seen spraying the substance at her and others beside her.
The Tucson Police Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the incident.
A spokesperson for Immigration and Customs Enforcement did not respond to MS NOW’s requests for comment.
Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs for the Department of Homeland Security, Tricia McLaughlin, said in a statement that Grijalva”wasn’t pepper sprayed.”
“She was in the vicinity of someone who *was* pepper sprayed as they were obstructing and assaulting law enforcement,” McLaughlin said. She added that two officers were seriously injured in the incident. MS NOW could not confirm that officers or others at the scene were injured.
In a joint statement Friday night, Tucson Mayor Regina Romero and Vice Mayor Lane Santa Cruz said the federal immigration raid “rapidly escalated into violence against the public.”
“Under the Trump Administration, unidentified federal agents often intentionally wear clothing with vague words like “police” to purposefully confuse the public,” the statement said. “Their disproportionate use of force, smoke grenades and pepper balls against the public, including our own Representative Adelita Grijalva, is not justified and cannot be tolerated.”
The Trump administration is ramping up its mass deportation efforts, with the stated goal of deporting up to 1 million undocumented immigrants per year. It halted all asylum decisions following the shooting of two National Guard soldiers in Washington, D.C., last month.
Sydney Carruth is a breaking news reporter for MS NOW.