Federal Immigration Agents Misused Crowd-Control Weapons Against Protesters, Blinding and Injuring Hundreds

Details

The immigration crackdown of the second Trump administration provoked mass protests across the country, and federal agents met those protests with force. Officers of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP), joined in several cities by state and local police, repeatedly fired tear gas, pepper spray, pepper balls, and rubber bullets at demonstrators, journalists, clergy, medics, and bystanders. In July 2026, Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) and the Human Rights Center at the University of California, Berkeley, released the first comprehensive accounting of that force—a report and interactive map, "Charting the Crackdown," that verified 412 incidents of the "misuse" of crowd-control weapons between June 2025 and May 2026 and documented at least 203 resulting injuries, including blindings, traumatic brain injuries, an amputation, fractures, and lacerations. The report attributed 86 percent of the incidents to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and other federal agencies, found that more than 90 percent occurred in just five cities where the administration concentrated its operations—Chicago, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Newark, and Portland—and tied the sharpest escalations to the arrival of Border Patrol commander-at-large Gregory Bovino. Federal judges in four of those cities ordered agents to stop firing the weapons at peaceful crowds; the administration appealed, and in two cities won temporary stays that let the tactics resume. The two operations that generated much of the documented force, Operation Midway Blitz in Chicago and Operation Metro Surge in Minnesota, are treated in full in their own dedicated entries; the separate category of fatal shootings by agents is tracked in the fatal-shootings tracker, and deaths in ICE custody in the mass-deportation entry.

The report: "Charting the Crackdown"

On July 13, 2026, Physicians for Human Rights and the Human Rights Center at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law released a joint report and interactive map titled "Charting the Crackdown." Led by Dr. Rohini Haar, a PHR medical expert who has studied crowd-control weapons for years, and co-authored by the HRC's Alexa Koenig, the study catalogued the use of these weapons at immigration-enforcement protests across the country.

The headline findings, drawn from PHR's press release and Q&A:

• 412 verified incidents of misuse of crowd-control weapons, across 16 cities in 13 states, from June 1, 2025 through May 31, 2026.
• 203 documented injuries, arising from 119 of those incidents. The injuries included traumatic brain injuries, eye injuries and blindings, permanent disabilities, an amputation, hearing loss, lacerations, fractures, and contusions. Investigators cautioned that this is a floor, not a ceiling—"visual investigative techniques cannot adequately assess invisible injuries, such as chemical injury or chronic pain or hearing loss," so "the true number of injuries is likely far greater."
• 86% of incidents were attributable to DHS and other federal agencies. Los Angeles was the singular exception: there, local law enforcement (LAPD, the Sheriff's Department, and the California Highway Patrol) was involved in more than half the documented cases. Counting only incidents where the responsible agency could be positively identified, DHS specifically accounted for 64%.
• More than 90% of all documented incidents occurred in five metro areas—Chicago, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Newark, and Portland—the sites of the administration's most intensive enforcement surges.
• Journalists were the second-largest group targeted, after demonstrators—177 journalists were subjected to misuse, roughly 43% of the individuals affected.

How "misuse" was defined. The researchers did not treat every use of a crowd-control weapon as misuse. They flagged an incident when force fell into one of three categories: use against vulnerable groups (children, the elderly, pregnant or disabled people); use against protected professionals (journalists, health workers, legal observers); or procedurally improper deployment—firing at heads or groins, firing at close range, using the weapons in enclosed spaces or where people had no way to escape, or otherwise violating manufacturer guidance, agency policy, or international use-of-force standards. Close-range fire was the most common form of improper force; projectiles aimed at people's heads were the second-most common, appearing in 97 incidents. Each incident was independently reviewed twice, approved by a supervisor, and confirmed by geolocation and chronolocation of the underlying video and imagery.

The weapons. The report grouped the arsenal into chemical irritants (tear gas, pepper spray, Mace), kinetic-impact projectiles (rubber bullets, bean-bag rounds), and hybrid munitions (pepper balls). Pepper balls alone accounted for more than a quarter of all incidents. Weapon choice varied by city: pepper balls predominated in Chicago, kinetic-impact projectiles in Los Angeles, and MK-9 pepper spray in the Minneapolis area.

DHS did not respond to inquiries about the report's findings before the Guardian's publication.

Notable serious injuries

The following are among the more severe documented injuries. In Los Angeles the responsible agency was frequently local police operating alongside the federal surge; elsewhere the injuries were overwhelmingly inflicted by federal agents.

By city

More than nine in ten documented incidents occurred in five metro areas. What follows is a city-by-city account.

Los Angeles

Los Angeles was the first flashpoint and the most heavily militarized. After Bovino's Border Patrol units led mass workplace raids in June 2025, protests erupted, and on June 7, 2025 Trump federalized roughly 2,000 California National Guard troops under 10 U.S.C. § 12406—framing the protests as "a form of rebellion"—then doubled the Guard and added 700 active-duty Marines two days later. (A federal judge later ruled the deployment violated the Posse Comitatus Act.) Over the following week, LAPD, the Sheriff's Department, the CHP, and federal agents fired rubber bullets, tear gas, pepper spray, pepper balls, and flash-bangs at crowds. Human Rights Watch documented 65 injury cases; the ACLU said it received more than 280 injury reports in about three weeks. Australian television reporter Lauren Tomasi was struck by a rubber bullet on live television; British photojournalist Nick Stern needed surgery after a munition fragment lodged in his thigh; a street medic and ICU nurse, Christopher Fernandez, was hit by a 40mm round. The eye injuries mounted over the following months—Jesus Javier Gomez Islas (January 2026) and USC freshman Tucker Collins (March 2026) each lost an eye. The report singled out Los Angeles as the one city where local police, rather than federal agents, drove most of the misuse—and as a place where post-2020 reforms had failed to take hold.

Chicago (and Broadview)

During "Operation Midway Blitz," which began in September 2025, federal agents repeatedly used tear gas, pepper balls, rubber bullets, and flash-bangs against protesters, journalists, and clergy—especially outside the ICE processing facility in suburban Broadview. Rev. David Black, a Presbyterian pastor, was shot at least seven times with pepper balls, twice in the head, while praying. Journalists including Raven Geary and the Chicago Reader's Shawn Mulcahy were hit. The force triggered the sharpest judicial rebuke of the campaign: U.S. District Judge Sara Ellis issued a temporary restraining order on October 9, 2025 and, after a two-day hearing, a preliminary injunction (announced November 6, 2025; a 233-page opinion followed November 20) restricting the weapons and requiring audible warnings. Ellis found the agents' use of force "shocks the conscience" and the government's evidence "not credible," and found that Bovino himself had lied under oath—admitting he had falsely claimed a rock struck him before he threw a tear-gas canister in Little Village. This operation is covered in the separate entry, ICE Launches Operation Midway Blitz in Chicago.

Minneapolis and St. Cloud

During "Operation Metro Surge" (launched December 2025, escalated in January 2026), agents deployed chemical irritants and flash-bangs "on dozens of occasions ... without warning," according to Human Rights Watch. On January 12, 2026, more than 50 agents descended on a Somali-owned strip mall in St. Cloud and pepper-sprayed a crowd of residents; those hit included Minnesota state senator Aric Putnam, who was trying to de-escalate, and a visiting professor, Adam Whitten, temporarily blinded. In a Minneapolis neighborhood that same month, agents deployed tear gas or a flash-bang under a family SUV carrying six children; a six-month-old briefly stopped breathing and was revived with CPR—the closest thing in the record to a fatality from less-lethal force. On January 16, 2026, U.S. District Judge Katherine Menendez barred federal agents from using pepper spray or nonlethal munitions to disperse peaceful protesters, though the Eighth Circuit stayed her order days later. The operation is covered in Trump Administration Launches "Largest DHS Operation in History" Against Minnesota, Targeting Somali Community.

Newark (Delaney Hall)

In late May 2026, after nearly 300 detainees at the Delaney Hall immigration detention center launched a hunger strike over conditions, protesters gathered in solidarity and ICE responded with pepper spray and pepper balls. In the incident that drew national attention, ICE officials pepper-sprayed U.S. Senator Andy Kim (D-NJ) as he tried to position himself between agents and the crowd during an oversight visit—"my eyes were hurting, my throat was burning," he said. His state director was sprayed as well, and Governor Mikie Sherrill was denied entry to the facility. Over the following days, officers in riot gear deployed flash-bangs, tear gas, and smoke, and more than 80 people were arrested across the protest series; New Jersey State Police eventually negotiated an ICE stand-down from the facility's front. The Delaney Hall standoff had earlier produced the May 2025 arrest of Newark Mayor Ras Baraka (charge dismissed) and a federal indictment of Rep. LaMonica McIver.

Portland

Protests outside Portland's ICE facility drew a sustained federal response from mid-2025 into 2026: tear gas, pepper balls, HC smoke, and 40mm rounds fired at crowds, including a roughly 2,000-person union march in late January 2026 that swept up children and seniors (an 84-year-old woman, Laurie Eckman, was gassed). Portland generated three separate federal court orders. On February 3, 2026, U.S. District Judge Michael Simon restricted federal agents' use of chemical and kinetic munitions at the facility except against imminent physical threats, and made the restrictions permanent on March 9; on March 6, Judge Amy Baggio separately barred chemical munitions likely to drift into a nearby affordable-housing complex, finding "deliberate indifference." The Ninth Circuit stayed both injunctions in late March and was still weighing the government's appeal—hearing argument again on July 13, 2026—as this report was released. (Trump's parallel attempt to deploy the National Guard to Portland was permanently blocked by Judge Karin Immergut in November 2025, and the administration dropped its appeal in February 2026.)

Other cities

The report counted misuse in 16 cities. Beyond the big five, documented incidents included Santa Ana, California (the point-blank blinding of Kaden Rummler in January 2026); Oakland (Border Patrol firing a pepper round into the face of Rev. Jorge Bautista as he said "we come in peace"); Spokane, Broadview, Hartford, Albuquerque, and others where agents used pepper spray, pepper balls, or tear gas against demonstrators.

Children caught in the gas

The harm extended well beyond adult protesters. A ProPublica investigation published May 7, 2026 identified at least 79 children harmed by tear gas or pepper spray during the crackdown—not only at protests but during enforcement operations and in their own homes and vehicles, as chemical agents drifted through neighborhoods. The cases ran from a six-month-old to teenagers across Illinois, Minnesota, Oregon, Ohio, and Vermont: gas seeped into homes in Portland and Broadview, pepper spray was fired into a family car carrying a one-year-old near Chicago, and tear gas was thrown near a Chicago elementary school. DHS said it "does not target children" and later blamed parents for bringing them near operations; Dr. Haar countered that "harms caused by the misuse of crowd-control weapons are almost always foreseeable, particularly when these weapons are deployed against vulnerable populations like children."

The command context: Bovino and the surge model

The report tied the escalation directly to the administration's surge strategy and to one commander in particular. Gregory Bovino, named Border Patrol "commander-at-large" by DHS Secretary Kristi Noem in October 2025 and reporting directly to senior DHS leadership, oversaw the operations in Los Angeles, Chicago, Minneapolis, and elsewhere. "In each city where there were federal directions to escalate enforcement, incident counts rose sharply within days," PHR found, and "much of this was coincident with the arrival of Greg Bovino." Many of the operations that coincided with spikes in documented misuse were promoted on public social-media accounts, including Bovino's own. After the January 2026 shooting deaths of two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis—Renee Good and Alex Pretti—Bovino was pulled from his command-at-large role on January 26, 2026 and reassigned; he then announced in March 2026 that he would retire, reportedly around the time Noem departed DHS.

Courts push back

The pattern generated an unusual volume of judicial intervention. In addition to the Chicago, Minneapolis, and Portland orders above, U.S. District Judge Hernán Vera in Los Angeles granted a preliminary injunction in September 2025 barring federal agents from firing rubber projectiles and chemical irritants at journalists—"the First Amendment demands better"—which the Ninth Circuit largely affirmed in April 2026, with a revised order issued July 10, 2026; and a separate order (Judge Consuelo Marshall, January 2026) triggered an LAPD moratorium on 40mm launchers in crowd-control settings. Across these cases the government's typical response was to appeal and, in Portland and Minneapolis, to win temporary stays—so that even as courts found the tactics unconstitutional, agents in some cities were free to resume them while appeals proceeded. In Congress, Rep. Delia Ramirez moved in December 2025 to subpoena Bovino, documenting riot-control weapons used "at least 49 times across 18 incidents" in Chicago since October 1; and 37 members led by Senator Elizabeth Warren pressed the DHS Inspector General, who opened reviews of ICE and CBP use-of-force practices in February 2026.

The administration's posture

Throughout, the administration defended the force in general terms while declining to address the specific weapons. DHS spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin characterized protesters as "lawless rioters," asserted a 413% increase in assaults on ICE officers, and said agents were "trained to use the minimum amount of force necessary"; no DHS official is on record defending tear gas or chemical munitions by name. The president escalated rhetorically—threatening on January 15, 2026 to invoke the Insurrection Act over the Minneapolis protests before walking it back the next day—and, in Los Angeles and (attempted) Portland, moved to put the National Guard and Marines on American streets, deployments that courts found unlawful. Human Rights Watch (in its June 2026 report "A Manufactured Crisis"), Amnesty International, and the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights all condemned the use of force against peaceful demonstrators over the same period.

A note on scope and sources

This tracker covers non-lethal / crowd-control force—chemical irritants and kinetic-impact projectiles—and the injuries it caused. It does not cover fatal shootings by ICE and CBP agents, which are a distinct category tracked in the companion entry; nor deaths in ICE custody, tracked in the mass-deportation entry. The central figures come from the PHR/UC Berkeley report and its supporting materials; individual injury cases are drawn from Human Rights Watch, ProPublica, PBS Frontline, the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker, court filings, and contemporaneous local reporting. A handful of dates remain contested across outlets (for example, whether Senator Kim was sprayed on May 25 or 26); where sources conflict, this entry uses the most conservative framing. It will be updated as investigations, litigation, and any further reporting develop.

Related entries

• Fatal Shootings by ICE and Border Patrol Agents Under the Second Trump Administration (2026-07-13) — the lethal-force companion to this tracker.
• ICE Launches Operation Midway Blitz in Chicago (2025-09-08) — the Chicago operation and Judge Ellis's injunction.
• Trump Administration Launches "Largest DHS Operation in History" Against Minnesota, Targeting Somali Community (2025-12-01) — Operation Metro Surge, St. Cloud, and the Menendez order.
• ICE Agent Fatally Shoots U.S. Citizen Renee Good in Minneapolis (2026-01-07) — one of the two Minneapolis killings that ended Bovino's command role.
• Border Patrol Agents Killed Alex Pretti, an American Citizen and ICU Nurse, in Minneapolis (2026-01-24) — the second.
• Trump Administration's Mass Deportation Campaign Reshapes Labor Markets and Communities (2026-05-04) — includes the separate tally of deaths in ICE custody.