ICE Points Guns at Family, Breaks Glass Window Over Newborn Baby
Maya pressed her body over her newborn as glass rained down, pleading for the warrant ICE refused to show.
They had just left the courthouse. One more hearing in a small Colorado town. Jose Aguilera drove. The mother of his child, Maya, sat in the back with their newborn baby, watching his tiny chest rise and fall, his fingers curling in his sleep.
She had been studying his face the way new mothers do, memorizing every blink and breath, thinking about how small he looked against the car seat. For a second, it was peaceful. The hum of the tires, the sunlight through the glass, the kind of quiet that makes you believe life might settle.
Then came the sirens.
Not police. Not local deputies. Three unmarked black SUVs weaving in like a trap closing. To the agents, none of it mattered. Not that it was illegal under Colorado law to detain someone leaving a courthouse. Didn’t matter that they did not have a signed judicial warrant, and therefore no lawful grounds to take him by force.
The men inside pointed their guns before they spoke. “Open the door!” one shouted. Maya screamed back that there was a baby.
Over and over. The only answer was the sound of glass breaking as she did the only thing she could in that moment, shielding her child with her own body.
This is the United States in 2025, where ICE acts like an occupying force and family separation no longer happens at the border or in detention centers. It happens at intersections.
Warning: This video includes ICE violence and may be difficult to watch.
She had asked for a warrant. The agents told her she could “come to the office” to see it… as if justice were something you had to chase down. One of them stepped on Jose’s phone, again and again, grinding it into the pavement.
Maya asked for it, begged for it, said she needed to call his boss. They ignored her. At the very end, one of them seemed to go retrieve it, but I do not know what became of it.
After they dragged her child’s father away, Maya followed in the car ICE had just broken. The door hung crooked on its hinges, but she didn’t notice.
Her baby was still crying in the back seat, and all she could think was that she had to keep Jose in sight. She couldn’t lose him. Her son couldn’t lose his father. Not like this.
There was glass in the seat beside her, glittering under the sun like nothing terrible had happened. Cuts ran along her legs from the shattered window, but she didn’t feel them yet. Her body was in pure instinct… move, follow, don’t let them disappear him.
She trailed the SUVs through town until they stopped at a building with no sign, no windows, no answers. Just concrete walls and silence. Maya parked and got out, still clutching her child, pounding on the locked door with her free hand.
She only wanted to know where they had would take him. She wanted to see the warrant they didn’t have during the arrest. No one ever came. They never do.
That night, her phone finally rang.
It was Jose. His voice was faint, muffled by distance or walls or both. He was in the Aurora Ice Processing Center (A.K.A Aurora Detention Center) — run by GEO Group. Who not only poured millions into Trumps 2024 campaign, but is the largest private prison corporation in the U.S.
And this detention center is riddled with bad history.
It’s a place where even lawyers can’t reach detainees without a fight. Where access is a privilege, not a right.
A place that is now illegally holding immigrant rights activist Jeanette Vizguerra for six straight months, in what appears to be retribution for embarrassing Trump during his first administration.
A place where immigrants are used as slave labor, with no choice in whether they work or not.
A place where immigrants were forced to sleep beside the sick during disease outbreaks. Where staff are understaffed, untrained, and unprepared for the emergencies they create. A place where immigrants have died because of it.
Sadly, by the next evening, Jose’s name was gone from the ICE detainee locator. Vanished.
She refreshed the page again and again, thinking it had to be an error. It wasn’t.
Now she is twenty-one, alone, living in a country that swallowed the father of her child and refuses to say where he went. The system that took him left no trace. Not a record, not a phone number, not even the courtesy of pretending to care.
Jose was the sole earner for the household. She’s raising two kids, nursing one of them. A GoFundMe has been made by Maya to help support her, her children, and to cover associated costs.
Maya has the cuts on her legs to remind her what happened. The broken car door that still won’t close right. The sound of her baby crying every time a car passes with sirens.
ICE calls it enforcement. I call it a disappearance.
This Is A Pattern
What happened to Maya and Jose was not isolated. It’s happening everywhere.
A ProPublica investigation found nearly fifty of these arrests in the first six months of Trump’s second term.. more than the previous decade combined. Agents are given arrest quotas. This is what this country is allowing to happen.
In Los Angeles, a man sat in his truck as a masked officer shattered his window with a baton. In Baltimore, agents broke a window and dragged a man out by the neck as his children cried.
In Spokane, a pregnant woman sat frozen in the passenger seat while her husband begged the officers to stop smashing the windows. “She’s pregnant,” he shouted. “Please, she’s pregnant.”
They smashed through three windows anyway. They tried to snatch the phone from the person recording. They know their Nuremberg trials will come. That’s why they arrest bystanders who record, too, regardless of citizenship.
In Boston, on Mother’s Day, a family on their way to church was surrounded by agents. Their three children screamed as officers pointed guns into the car and forced their father to his knees on the pavement.
One of the children was twelve and severely disabled. The youngest a toddler.
And agents who broke glass to meet quotas weren’t punished. They were promoted.
Two of the men who championed the window-smashing tactic rose through the ranks: Matthew Elliston now runs field operations on the East Coast, and Gregory Bovino (whose Twitter is absolutely abhorrent) commands the sweeps in Los Angeles… both rewarded for the violence they helped normalize.
So, no, they aren’t going rogue. They’re doing what they were trained to do. They’re a modern day Gestapo. The cruelty is the point.
In most jobs, you impress your boss with reports and deadlines. In this one, you impress them by breaking glass. By making children scream. By turning a mother’s body into a shield.
ICE insists its officers use only “the minimum amount of force” when making arrests but the videos linked here tell another story, and anyone with eyes can judge for themselves.
What You Can Do When Power Turns on the People
At some point, the glass will stop glittering in the seats, but the silence it left behind will not. Somewhere in Colorado, a baby will learn to crawl without his father. A young mother is still driving a car that groans every time she shuts the broken door.
The state says it lost track of a man it kidnapped in broad daylight. The nation shrugs and scrolls. And the machine keeps moving, hungry for its next window, its next family, its next justification. What happened to Maya and Jose was not a mistake in the system. It was the system working exactly as designed.
It’s easy to read stories like these and feel helpless. I’m here to tell you that you aren’t.
If this story leaves you angry or helpless, that means you still have a pulse, and that’s where resistance begins.
When ICE behaves like a secret police force, the only real counterweight is ordinary people refusing to look away.
Start local. Support immigrant rights groups and rapid response networks. In Colorado, that includes the Colorado Immigrant Rights Coalition, Rocky Mountain Immigrant Advocacy Network, Casa de Paz, and the San Luis Valley Immigrant Resource Center.
Every state has its own versions. Look up yours & volunteer, donate, show up where needed. Community is the only way out of this.
If you witness an ICE operation, record safely. Document badge numbers, vehicles, locations, and times. Send the footage to trusted journalists or advocacy groups. Truth is evidence, and evidence saves lives.
Call your local officials and demand transparency about ICE cooperation. Push for sanctuary policies, public data, and legal defense funds for detained residents.
And above all, keep telling the stories. Every share, every conversation, every refusal to accept this as normal matters. Change starts with visibility, and courage is contagious.
A Brief Message from Dissent in Bloom:
When history is told by the oppressors, what you get isn’t truth. It’s a curated museum of lies. I write so we don’t have to settle for that. I write so that now, and when history looks back, we have the stories of the victims of fascism, not the PR from the fascists.
I will continue to hold ICE, DHS, and anyone else complicit in this system accountable. Subscribe for free to stay in the loop, get the real stories, and be on the right side of history with me. My articles will never cost money to read & this information is too important to lock up.
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The cruelty has always been here. But it took this one odious piece of human excrement to make it acceptable out in broad daylight. What sort of person treats others this way? A monster.
And this is the pro life party. Give me a break……They are the pro white, pro money party. They are disgusting.