Video Shows ICE Agent Pointing Gun at Dog Walker in North Hollywood

The neighbor had just thrown aside a spray canister an agent dropped during an arrest, and Mayor Karen Bass called it unacceptable.

On Friday morning in North Hollywood, a man walking two dogs picked up a canister an immigration agent had dropped on the grass and threw it toward the street.

Moments later, a masked agent shoved him into a hedge and held a handgun inches from his face, according to video obtained by the Los Angeles Times. Local photographer Damari "Disko" Butler posted the clip to Instagram, where it had drawn tens of thousands of views, KTLA reported. By Friday night, Mayor Karen Bass wanted prosecutors involved.

The canister was there because of an arrest. Just before 8:30 a.m., near Vineland Place and Otsego Street, two masked men who appeared to be ICE agents tackled a pedestrian on the sidewalk, Butler told the Times. He said there was no warning, and that's why he started filming from his balcony. The man's family identified him to ABC7 as Angel Luis Gonzalez Lobo, 27, from Venezuela.

The dog walker was standing a few feet away. A second masked agent ran up with what witnesses called pepper spray and ordered him back, the Times reported, and he backed off while the two agents handcuffed the man. As they carried the detainee away, one agent dropped the canister.

The neighbor went for it. When an officer rushed him, he threw it toward the street and shouted, "I thought it was his!" ABC7 reported. Then the agent who'd been holding the detainee drew a handgun, walked at him, pushed him into the bushes with his other hand and leaned over him with the gun close to his face, the Times reported.

The agent then holstered the weapon and walked back toward the SUV. The bystander wasn't detained. Seth Stoughton, an ex-police officer who now teaches law at the University of South Carolina, told the Times the agent's reaction was inappropriate, because by the time the gun came out the man had already thrown the canister "quite a distance."

It didn't end there. ABC7 reported that three agents hoisted the detainee off the ground by his limbs while he could be heard crying out, and the Times said he lay in the street yelling for help in Spanish. After more agents loaded him into an SUV, an agent sprayed the dog walker, the Times reported. In KTLA's account, the video ends with him running away with his dogs.

"I thought that man was going to die," Butler told the Times.

"This is unacceptable and will not be tolerated in L.A.," Bass said in a statement. She said she was bringing in the Attorney General's Office, asking it to look into the agents' conduct and prosecute if it turns up wrongdoing. She also sent the case to the office of U.S. Rep. Robert Garcia, calling him the top Democrat watching for abuses in federal immigration enforcement. Councilmember Nithya Raman, who's running against Bass for mayor, called the arrests kidnappings in a social media post.

The arrest came about six weeks after U.S. District Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong limited warrantless immigration arrests across seven Southern California counties, including Los Angeles County. Her preliminary injunction says that before agents arrest someone without a warrant, they must write down the specific facts showing the person was likely to escape before a warrant could be obtained. It also says being in the country illegally isn't enough on its own. The Times also reported a separate ruling, handed down one day before the North Hollywood arrest: a federal judge ordered immigration agents in the region not to stop people over racial stereotypes.

DHS didn't respond to KTLA, ABC7 or the Times. ICE and DHS didn't answer the Times' questions about the detained man or why he was taken, and his brother told ABC7 he doesn't know why either.

Source: yahoo.com, retrieved October 31, 2026. Other sources: abc7.com, yahoo.com (2).