A USC student lost his eye at a protest. A federal judge cited him by name.

On March 28, Tucker Collins was filming a protest outside the Metropolitan Detention Center in downtown Los Angeles when a less-lethal projectile struck him in the eye. The 18-year-old USC freshman lost his right eye.

Collins says the round was fired by a Department of Homeland Security agent. One of Collins’s attorneys, V. James DeSimone, told CNN the round destroyed the eyeball and fractured the bones in the socket, and that doctors could not save it. Collins had followed the protesters to the detention center to document them, DeSimone said, and was standing back from the front lines. A tall black metal barrier separated the crowd from the agents. He was hit anyway.

“One moment I was recording, and then the next thing I know, I can’t see. I’m on the floor screaming in agony,” he said at an April 15 news conference, wearing a black eye patch. There was no warning, he said, and no one near him was throwing anything.

The government tells it differently. DHS has said seven warnings were issued before crowd-control measures were deployed, and that “rioters threw rocks, bottles, and cement blocks at officers.” When CNN asked about Collins’s allegations, the department pointed back to that statement.

At that news conference, DeSimone announced he had filed a claim against DHS — a precursor to a potential civil rights lawsuit. The claim seeks $100 million, according to the claim document obtained by the Daily Trojan, which reported the figure on April 29. It alleges conduct amounting to assault and battery, and violations of the Tom Bane Civil Rights Act. The Daily Trojan reported that DHS has six months to respond, and that if the department rejects the claim or does not respond within that time, Collins’s legal team would have six months to sue — and intends to, according to Emma Gary, another of Collins’s attorneys.

Someone else’s case

On April 9, twelve days after he was shot, a sworn declaration from Collins was filed in a federal case in which he is not a named plaintiff.

The case is Los Angeles Press Club v. Noem, filed in June 2025 by the press club, a media workers’ union and six individuals, over what the court called federal agents’ violent response to demonstrations against immigration enforcement across Southern California, and what happened to the people who recorded it. A seventh individual plaintiff joined that October. The lawyers who filed his statement signed the reply as attorneys for the plaintiffs; Collins’s attorneys include DeSimone and Gary.

The plaintiffs’ lawyers had filed their motion to certify the case as a class action on March 5, three weeks before Collins was shot. His account came in with their reply. It was how they closed. In the last argument before their conclusion they wrote that DHS continues to attack class members, and that on March 28 the agency “shot the eye out of a peaceful 18-year-old student photographing a protest.” The footnote cites Collins’s declaration.

His declaration turns up again on June 25, in the order certifying the class — three times, in the sections on standing, numerosity and commonality.

On July 10, U.S. District Judge Hernán D. Vera issued a revised injunction against DHS. Citing what he called fairly extensive and persuasive evidence that the agency’s attacks on the plaintiffs continue, he pointed to Collins’s declaration: shot in the eye with a less-lethal round, losing the eye, outside the Metropolitan Detention Center on March 28.

What the order does

The order bars federal agents from firing projectiles at a covered person’s head, neck, groin, back or other sensitive areas unless that person poses an immediate threat of death or serious bodily injury. It bars them from clearing covered people off public sidewalks to stop them filming immigration operations — unless those people are impeding operations, vandalizing property, or in a crowd posing an immediate threat. And it bars using crowd-control weapons in retaliation without a warning, unless the threat is too immediate for one.

It runs across seven counties, including Los Angeles, Orange and Ventura. DHS had 72 hours to get it to every officer working in the field on immigration enforcement or security in those counties. DHS filed proof three days later — separately for Customs and Border Protection, the Federal Protective Service, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

These rules are the second version. Vera first issued them in September 2025, and they were broader: they protected “any person,” along with members of the press, legal observers and protesters. DHS appealed. On April 1 the Ninth Circuit, the federal appeals court, held Vera had been right to issue an injunction, but that this one covered too many people who weren’t part of the case. The order was thrown out and sent back to be written narrower.

Who it covers

It probably does not cover you, and the reason is in the definitions.

The order protects exactly one group: seven named plaintiffs — three journalists, a legal observer and three protesters — plus any member of the Los Angeles Press Club or the NewsGuild. Every rule in it applies to them, and only them.

On June 25, the judge granted the motion and certified a class: all people who do or will, without using force or threat of force, record or photograph DHS immigration enforcement and removal operations, or protests of them, in the district since June 6, 2025. By its terms, that can include a student filming one of those protests. But the July 10 order does not cover the class. The plaintiffs, the order notes, “do not currently seek such an injunction.”

What the plaintiffs fought for, and won, stops at their own side of the case: the seven of them by name, plus whoever is on the membership lists of the Los Angeles Press Club and the NewsGuild. DHS argued even that went too far. Vera disagreed.

The order requires nothing to show an officer — no badge, no vest, no card. DHS said its agents would have no way to tell who was covered. The plaintiffs said members shouldn’t have to wear a lanyard to be protected, and Vera sided with them, for now. Whether the order covers you was settled beforehand, on paper.

Collins is not one of the seven. Nothing I reviewed says whether he belongs to either organization. So whether the order that cites his declaration also covers him, I can’t tell you.

The $30 question

That paper is a membership list. The order names two: one at the NewsGuild, one at the Los Angeles Press Club.

The NewsGuild is a national union. Its constitution lets college students preparing for journalism careers join in a non-voting category, sets dues at no less than $10 a year, and leaves the rest to each local branch.

In Los Angeles that branch is Media Guild of the West. Its “How To Join” page is about unionizing your newsroom. It advertises raises it won at the Los Angeles Times, averaging more than $11,000. The page ends in a form asking your name, your email, where you work, and a message to an organizer.

Whether a student gets in is left to that branch. Its bylaws describe one way to apply: through the union members at your job. They never mention students. What a student would pay, and what the branch would need to see, appear nowhere in any of it. Its join page and its bylaws both assume you already have a newsroom job.

The Los Angeles Press Club is more concrete: it posts an application, a price, and its own list of who qualifies. The student tier, its cheapest, costs $30. The trouble is the qualifying list exists twice. The public signup form offers the tier to any full-time high school, college or graduate student. The bylaws describe it more narrowly: students at an accredited college or university majoring in journalism, PR, advertising or broadcast media. The bylaws also say no membership takes effect until the board accepts it.

The union’s documents never say what a student would have to do. The club’s documents answer that twice, and the two answers don’t match. Only the club can say which one it follows. So I asked.

Can a USC student outside those majors get the $30 membership, and does the club consider its student members covered by the July 10 order? Executive director Diana Ljungaeus answered both the same day: yes, and yes. She wrote that proof of enrollment or examples of produced work is all it takes. Adam Rose, the club’s press rights chair, added that the club had included examples of mistreated student journalists in the court’s evidence and “absolutely intend these protections to cover student journalists.” Neither addressed the board-approval requirement.

What the club intends and what a court will enforce are different things. Whether a $30 student membership brings a USC undergraduate under a federal injunction has not been tested. And membership has to come first: if you ever tried to enforce the order in court, you’d have to prove you were already a member when the agent acted.

What happens next

Collins’s own claim comes due around October. If DHS refuses it or says nothing, his lawyers have said they intend to sue. That would put his name on a case of his own — instead of in a footnote to someone else’s.

— Anthony