New York, N.Y. / Berkeley, California — Law enforcement agents misused crowd-control weapons during protests against the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement operations in 412 verified incidents across 16 U.S. cities from when immigration enforcement protests escalated in Los Angeles in June 2025 until May 2026, according to Charting the Crackdown, a digital mapping report released today by Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) and the Human Rights Center at the University of California, Berkeley (HRC).
The incidents involved federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies, with chemical irritants and kinetic impact projectiles accounting for most of the documented misuse incidents nationwide, while hybrid weapons such as pepper balls made up over one-quarter.
“We documented over 100 cases of injuries caused when law enforcement agencies deployed crowd-control weapons in ways that violated manufacturer guidance, agency policies, widely accepted policing norms, or international use-of-force standards, raising serious concerns under constitutional and international human rights law,” said Charting the Crackdown lead author and PHR medical advisor Rohini Haar, MD, MPH.
Using open-source analysis — including verified video, photography, and news footage — student and professional researchers at PHR and HRC’s Investigations Lab documented and analyzed improper practices including: firing kinetic impact projectiles directly at people’s heads; firing from unsafe, close-range distances; deploying chemical irritants in enclosed spaces; firing tear gas canisters directly at individuals; using crowd-control weapons against people with no safe avenue of escape; and using force against journalists, legal observers, and other protected groups.
Of the 412 documented incidents, 119 involved people with visible or self-reported injuries, including head injuries and blindness. Those individuals sustained 203 injuries in total since some were injured more than once. Because many harms cannot be assessed from visual evidence alone, such as chemical exposure or hearing loss, these numbers are almost certainly an undercount.
“Harms caused by the misuse of crowd-control weapons are almost always foreseeable, particularly when these weapons are deployed against vulnerable populations like children or in ways that are contrary to manufacturers’ guidance or international use-of-force standards. Yet meaningful public oversight of incidents during the recent surge in U.S. immigration enforcement protests is nearly impossible because of the very limited reliable official reporting,” Haar added.
More than 90 percent of documented incidents occurred in just five metro areas — Chicago, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Newark, and Portland — also the sites of the most extensive and prolonged federal immigration enforcement operations, met by widespread, robust protest movements. Eighty-six percent of incidents were directly attributable to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and other federal agencies, with the exception of Los Angeles, where local law enforcement was involved in more than half of the documented cases.
In each city where there were federal directions to escalate enforcement, incident counts rose sharply within days. Much of this was coincident with the arrival of Greg Bovino, who took on the task of serving as Border Patrol’s self-described “commander-at-large,” reporting directly to senior DHS leadership. Many of the enforcement operations that coincided with spikes in documented misuse were also promoted through public social media accounts, including Bovino’s.
“Law enforcement’s repeated use of dangerous crowd-control tactics against protesters, journalists, and other protected groups raises serious concerns under both the U.S. Constitution and international human rights law,” said Alexa Koenig, PhD, JD, Faculty Director of HRC and Director of the Investigations Lab. “Using open-source investigative methods, we can document these violations with a level of detail that strengthens accountability, supports efforts to pursue justice, and provides evidence to inform reforms, including phasing out weapons that pose an unacceptably high risk of serious injury.”
“We built our own dataset documenting severe injuries and permanent disabilities caused by the misuse of these weapons. We then created a virtual map to make the data publicly accessible for researchers, policymakers, and advocates. We invite the Department of Homeland Security, Congress, and state authorities to examine these findings and act immediately to prevent further suffering resulting from the misuse of force by law enforcement,” Haar said.
Data and analysis on these incidents are available through an interactive website, searchable by city, agency, weapon type, and outcome. Charting the Crackdown contains what is believed to be the largest publicly available dataset of its kind covering this period.
NOTES TO THE EDITORS:
- For further information on the misuse of crowd-control weapons, read PHR’s publications:
- Reports and visual investigations: Tools of Repression: How U.S. Law Enforcement Escalated the Use of Three Weapons to Crack Down on Immigration Protests, Lethal in Disguise, Lethal in Disguise 2, How Crowd-Control Weapons Impact Health and Human Rights, and Shot in the Head
- Weapon fact-sheets: Scattershot Munitions, Powder-blast dispersion rounds (commonly referred to as Muzzle Blasts), and Chemical Obscurants
- For more on international standards for digital investigations and for the use of crowd-control weapons, see:
- Berkeley Protocol on Digital Open Source Investigations: A Practical Guide on the Use of Digital Open-Source Information in Investigating Violations of International Criminal, Human Rights and Humanitarian Law (UN Human Rights Office and UC Berkeley Human Rights Center)
- United Nations Human Rights Guidance on Less-Lethal Weapons in Law Enforcement
- Previous investigations to which the Human Rights Center contributed open-source research on protest-related harms include:
- A Q&A about the Charting the Crackdown report
- A video of an HRC student researcher deconstructing one incident from an open-source investigation perspective.
- To set up interviews with PHR contact: Dietlind Lerner, media@phr.org +1-(310) 699-8775
- To set up interviews with HRC contact: Maggie Andresen, hrc@berkeley.edu + mandresen@berkeley.edu
The UC Berkeley Human Rights Center pursues justice through science, technology, and law. Based at the world’s top public university, we investigate human rights violations and international crimes; set standards for practitioners; and train the next generation of human rights defenders. HRC’s Investigations Lab trains dozens of UC Berkeley students each year to conduct hands-on digital investigations related to human rights violations around the world.
Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) is a New York-based advocacy organization that uses science and medicine to prevent mass atrocities and severe human rights violations. Learn more here.