On Saturday, without warning, a projectile with a corkscrew tail of smoke smashed into a third-story apartment window across the street from the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement building in Portland.

Glass rained on the sidewalk below. People nearby screamed. Some had never been to a protest, let alone stood in the radius of tear gas clouds and less lethal whizbangs.

But it was grimly familiar to the mother and daughter who live on the other side of the now-broken window, and who came to the U.S. a decade ago to escape the civil war in Yemen.

“I never thought in a million years that would happen in the U.S,” said L.H., a 29-year-old medical student.

OPB is not using her name due to her mother’s immigration status. Both declined to be photographed, but shared images of the interior view of the broken window.

L.H. and her 70-year-old mother live at Gray’s Landing, the apartment building kitty-corner from the federal facility. Its residents have found themselves playing central roles in debates over ICE’s crowd control tactics.

Those tactics are now in flux.

Besides breaking L.H.’s window, federal law enforcement deployed large amounts of tear gas and pepper balls on peaceful demonstrators over the weekend. That contributed to U.S. District Court Judge Michael Simon’s ruling Tuesday to temporarily limit their ability to use indiscriminate force.

Many of Gray’s Landing’s residents have shared their experiences in court records, as part of a separate lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

L.H. and her mother are not party to the lawsuit and have mostly tried to steer clear of the protests. Then their window broke.

“I left to go to school and literally, not even an hour later, my mom is calling me crying,” L.H. told OPB. “She was like, ‘I can’t breathe.’”

Video obtained by OPB shows the cylinder whipping upwards from the ICE building’s driveway, over protesters’ heads, and low-lying tear gas clouds.

As L.H. walked from OHSU’s south waterfront campus to her apartment, she felt the sting of tear gas. She wore a mask and further covered her face with her hijab, but it barely helped.

In her apartment, the gas was so thick she thought the entire window had broken. The munition had only broken the exterior windowpane, however, which the apartment building’s maintenance team repaired on Tuesday.

Both of them suffered coughing fits that night, L.H. said. The gas also made them so nauseous they both vomited. Her mother briefly fainted at one point.

According to L.H., her mother has several chronic conditions — including asthma — and behavioral health issues.

The incident was a reminder of their past in Yemen, she said.

The pair moved from Taiz, the country’s third-largest city, shortly after their home was hit by an airstrike in 2014. L.H. is a naturalized U.S. citizen due to her father, who passed away in 2009.

L.H. said she witnessed people being killed in her home country before they fled.

“While I was in Yemen, I was being targeted for being a U.S. citizen by Houthis, which is crazy,” she said. The window break brought back familiar anxieties. “I feel like right now we’re in danger, so nothing has really changed.”

It isn’t clear what kind of specific projectile smashed into the window.

Alexander Reid Ross, who picked up a piece of it after it fell near the sidewalk, found no identifying marks or symbols.

Officials with Homeland Security did not respond to a request for comment about the property damage at Gray’s Landing over the weekend, or the munition that struck the window.

It’s also unclear why the projectile had such an arcing trajectory, or if it bounced off another surface and into the air.

Jack Badler, a witness who filmed the incident, said he couldn’t see the person firing, but it “didn’t seem like it ricocheted off of anything.”

The sound of glass breaking, Badler said, shocked him and other nearby protesters on the sidewalk who were already trying to compose themselves from the clouds of tear gas.

“We didn’t even realize they were firing rounds like that,” Badler said. “I think some people did think, ‘Is it a live round?’ There was definitely a moment of panic. And people were already panicked.”

Gray’s Landing lawsuit

While L.H. and her mother are not part of their neighbors’ lawsuit against the Trump administration, the force used at the ICE facility over the weekend has reinvigorated the group’s legal claims.

About one-third of the people living at the affordable housing complex receive rental subsidies, court records show.

Many of the tenants are over 63 years old.

The tenants’ lawsuit is led in part by REACH Community Development, the nonprofit that manages the apartment building. The lawsuit includes several named and unnamed tenants as plaintiffs.

They claim that repeated use of crowd-control agents at the ICE facility since last summer has violated their rights. They asked the courts to block their use by federal law enforcement.

Tenants said in court filings that they’ve had to sleep with gas masks on. The gas has been so prevalent, they said, that people living there have missed work and children have missed school.

U.S. Department of Justice attorneys wrote in a court filing on Jan. 22 opposing the claim.

They said the claims “rested on a handful of discrete incidents occurring months ago – during parts of the summer 2025 and October 2025.”

While protest crowds outside the ICE facility had dwindled in November and December, they surged again after federal law enforcement officers killed two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis on Jan. 7 and Jan. 24.

Subsequent protests outside the Portland ICE facility saw large deployments of crowd control munitions, including tear gas.

In the Jan. 22 filing, Justice Department attorneys downplayed the possibility that tear gas clouds would return to the neighborhood.

“Plaintiffs cannot establish an immediate and certainly impending threat of future injury based on isolated, past incidents occurring months ago,” the attorneys wrote.

Plaintiffs updated their filings on Jan. 30, calling recent protest tactics “truly shocking.”

“Federal officers have deployed massive amounts of tear gas, smoke grenades and pepper balls directly toward and around Gray’s Landing,” attorney Dan Jacobson wrote. “The repeated, sustained infiltration of gas and smoke into Gray’s Landing has made it all but impossible for plaintiffs to use and enjoy their property.”

Reached by phone on Tuesday, Jacobson said the ruling by Judge Simon will at least give tenants a reprieve for two weeks.

It’s possible their judge rules differently at their next hearing on Feb. 13.

News Source : https://www.opb.org/article/2026/02/05/mother-daughter-shaken-after-apartment-window-broken-near-ice-building/