01/16/2026
Did you hear about the other man that was blinded that night also? Let’s be very clear about what happened here because this keeps getting brushed off as “crowd control.” The Homeland Security officers who blinded a young protester in Santa Ana by firing a so-called less-lethal projectile at close range did not stop there. Evidence now suggests they shot a second man in the face that same night, blinding him as well. Britain Rodriguez, 31, an Orange County resident, says he was standing at the bottom of a set of stairs with other demonstrators when federal officers positioned above them opened fire downward into the crowd. One of those projectiles struck Rodriguez square in the face. Video from the scene appears to show Rodriguez being hit at the exact same moment 21-year-old Kaden Rummler was also shot in the face. As Rummler drops to the ground, Rodriguez’s screams can be heard in the background two people injured in seconds, by the same officers, using the same weapons. In a statement released this week by Rummler and read aloud by members of Dare to Struggle, the social justice group that organized one of the protests that day, the injuries described are horrifying. Doctors reportedly found pieces of plastic and glass embedded in his skull, metal fragments in his stomach lining, and removed a piece of plastic the size of a nickel from his damaged eye. One piece of metal became lodged just millimeters from his carotid artery, a location so dangerous that surgeons were forced to leave some of the shrapnel in his skull rather than risk killing him during removal.
These are not minor injuries. These are life-altering, permanent injuries the kind that don’t happen accidentally when officers are following their own use of force guidelines. Rummler also says that after he was shot, DHS officers failed to call paramedics right away, despite the severity of his injuries. Even more disturbing, he says officers pushed his face into a pool of his own blood while he was injured on the ground. Why are federal officers aiming at people’s faces?!?