Immigration officials misused weapons hundreds of times during protests, report finds

Department of Homeland Security employees and local law enforcement both committed violations of standards of use for crowd-control weapons, injuring protesters, according to a report from Physicians for Human Rights and the University of California, Berkeley’s Human Rights Center. The authors of the report called for manufacturers to stop making certain weapons that are particularly harmful and likely to be misused and urged law enforcement agencies to change their use-of-force policies.

“There’s a lack of standards across the board in the United States when it comes to the use of crowd-control weapons, and there’s a lack of standards around training, testing, figuring out what these weapons are, how they should work and how we should use them,” said Sasha Schell, supervising reporter at the Berkeley Human Rights Center, who led the open source investigative team.

The team used open source investigative techniques, including cataloguing incidents through the review of publicly available video, to determine which agencies misused which weapons. The researchers labeled an incident as a misuse of the weapon if it went against international human rights standards, manufacturer instructions or the agency’s own use-of-force policy, or if the law enforcement agency attacked a protected group such as journalists, legal observers or medics.

Because of limitations in the video that the team could find, Schell said, the report’s statistics are likely an undercount.

Immigration officials and other law enforcement have used a mix of tear gas, rubber bullets, pepper spray, pepper balls, flashbangs, batons and shields on crowds gathered to protest during large-scale immigration enforcement operations in cities including Los Angeles, Chicago and Minneapolis.

Under international law, in order to use force on protesters, law enforcement agencies must ensure that the force is necessary and must have exhausted other options, and officials should take precautions to minimize harm caused, the authors of the report said. Force should be proportional to the threat and not excessive.

But the U.S. government does not have specific federal standards for crowd control weapons in its laws, according to the report.

Schell said that at most of the protests where the team documented misuse, multiple law enforcement agencies and subagencies were present. Each had its own use-of-force policy that didn’t necessarily align with those of other agencies.

“It becomes a real mess for holding anybody accountable when misuse does occur,” Schell said.

He gave an example of one protest where Chicago police gave protesters one set of instructions and federal officials gave protesters a different set of instructions.

“That led to a bunch of people getting shot with pepper balls,” Schell said.

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Department of Homeland Security employees, including officials from Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection, committed the majority of the violations.

Those included spraying people directly in the face with powerful chemical irritants after they were already detained, handcuffed or pinned to the ground or even beating them over the head with the canisters, Schell said.

The most common misuse, according to the report, involved deploying crowd-control weapons at too close a range. Researchers also noted many cases in which law enforcement deployed these weapons in enclosed spaces or other situations that the protesters could not escape.

Schell said that most of the violence occurred at unplanned protests, such as responses to a particular immigration enforcement operation, rather than at planned protests like the No Kings rallies.

“In the vast majority of incidents, protests were peaceful before crowd-control weapons were deployed, and in all cases, basic standards of proportionality, precaution, and necessity were not met,” the report says.

When asked about the report’s findings, the Department of Homeland Security blamed protesters.

“The pattern is NOT of law enforcement using force,” an unnamed department spokesperson said via email. “It’s a pattern of violent agitators attacking our law enforcement.”

The department encouraged protesters and journalists to “exercise caution.”

“Being near unlawful activities in the field does come with risks — though our officers take every reasonable precaution to mitigate dangers to those exercising their protected First Amendment rights,” the spokesperson said. “However, when faced with violence or attempts to obstruct law enforcement operations, our officers will take legal and necessary steps to ensure their own safety and the public’s safety.”

The report includes 175 cases of misuse of force against journalists.

Schell said he didn’t want to discourage journalists from doing their jobs, but he encouraged them to be alert when they move through the crowd in quieter moments to conduct interviews.

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“You’d have a little bit of a standoff between the protesters and law enforcement where maybe not much is happening, and then out of nowhere these guys will decide, ‘All right, we’ve got to clear this crowd,’ with very little warning,” Schell said. You’ll see a barrage of tear gas, pepper spray, these muzzle-blast weapons come in and launch. Those were the times we saw journalists being hit the most.”

Researchers found a significant number of deployments of crowd-control weapons targeted people’s heads, causing contusions, traumatic brain injuries, hearing loss and ocular injuries. Crowd-control weapons are not supposed to be deployed on someone’s head, Schell said.

The authors of the report called the number of head injuries concerning because it suggests “that law enforcement agents either intentionally or recklessly deployed force towards the head in dangerous and improper ways.”

The rate of violations worsened when Border Patrol leader Gregory Bovino was present, according to the report. Bovino was demoted and later retired shortly after the fatal shootings of Alex Pretti and Renee Good in Minneapolis.

Researchers also noted that in Los Angeles, the police and Sheriff’s departments also committed a significant number of violations.

The Los Angeles Police Department did not respond to a request for comment.

The L.A. County Sheriff’s Department said via email that its staff had not yet reviewed the report’s findings and couldn’t comment on them.

“During the period referenced in the report, Los Angeles experienced unprecedented federal immigration enforcement activity that prompted some of the largest and most sustained demonstrations in the country,” the department wrote in the email without naming a speaker. “As emotions ran high, local law enforcement officers, who live and work in these same communities, often became the focus of that frustration, despite not being responsible for federal immigration enforcement actions.”

The department said its training emphasizes de-escalation.

“Each city had its tone, and each protest would have its own tone,” Schell said.

In Los Angeles, that meant Sheriff’s deputies firing flashbangs that are supposed to detonate above a crowd, Schell said. The noise and flash are supposed to scare crowds into backing up.

But, instead of firing the weapons well overhead, deputies aimed them so that they detonated on individuals’ heads, causing injuries.

“Those were pretty shocking to see,” Schell said.

The report notes that police agencies that had previously enacted use-of-force reforms related to crowd control since 2020 had far fewer incidents of misuse than agencies that have reversed or abandoned those policy changes in recent years. It noted that while the Los Angeles Police Department enacted some reforms, the Sheriff’s Department did not.

“There is limited but clear evidence that when police reforms, weapons bans, and crowd management policies are enacted and followed, use of force incidents, misuse events, and resulting injuries, go down,” the report says. “The opposite is also true: when reform is not implemented, or is reversed, incidents, misuse, and injuries go up.”

The authors of the report said piecemeal reform at individual agencies is not enough to respond to the nationwide trend of misuse of force as documented by the researchers.

They called for the U.S. government to enact broad reform to protect people exercising their First Amendment rights.

Schell, as a journalist himself, said he hopes the report and accompanying database will inspire more journalism digging deep into the questions raised in the report.

“Who is setting standards? Who is doing the training?” Schell said. “It’s quite an opaque thing.”

He said he wants more information about how weapons receive a “less lethal” designation to begin with.

“A lot of times the injuries that we see [are] not consistent with what they’ve said about how these things function,” Schell said. “Some of the injuries we saw were really gruesome.”

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