From the roof of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) building in Portland, Oregon, federal agents late last month watched as thousands of people marched past the processing center in protest. Families and children were among the daytime crowd, which had gathered for an event advertised as family friendly.
When some protesters reportedly crossed the facility’s property line and approached the security gate, agents began deploying tear gas and flash-bang grenades. Smoke quickly filled the air.
Video of the ensuing chaos showed a young girl — wearing a pink sweater with butterflies — in visible distress as a volunteer medic sprays water on her face. At one point the ponytailed girl said, “Owie, it burns.”
“She was confused, stunned, upset, crying,” a witness said. “It shattered me.”
Weeks earlier in Minneapolis — where federal agents have injured and killed civilians as part of a massive immigration enforcement operation — an agent threw a flash-bang that rolled under an SUV stopped in traffic. It set off smoke inside the vehicle, forcing a family with children in the passenger seats to run into a nearby home. A 6-month-old in the car stopped breathing briefly.
“I stopped and I looked at my baby and I was just like, ‘Wake up, you have to,’” the mother told CNN. She administered CPR before taking her infant to the hospital.
As the Trump administration expands militarized operations ensnaring U.S. citizens, legal immigrants and undocumented immigrants with no criminal record, agents’ use of tear gas and other chemical irritants as crowd control measures is worrying medical professionals and public health experts, who say such exposure could disproportionately impact children and other vulnerable populations.
“People have to realize these chemicals are not safe,” said Dr. Afif El-Hasan, a pediatrician and member of the American Lung Association’s board of directors. “We don’t know the long-term effects. We don’t understand their effects on children. Assume that children should have zero exposure to these chemicals.”
Tear gas — a catch-all term to describe chemical compounds that cause irritation to people’s eyes, lungs, mouth, nose and skin within seconds of exposure — has been deployed around residential streets and public spaces in at least four major American cities since last fall.
(Adam Gray/AP)
While at least one entity is tracking immigration-related demonstrations in the United States, there is no substantive monitoring on the exact number of times tear gas is deployed, who is deploying it and why, and what chemicals are being released into the air. Critical details like proximity of impact, length of exposure and whether an incident involved a vulnerable group is also unknown.
“This gap makes it difficult for the public, for researchers and for policymakers to quantify the impact or identity of these toxic air pollutants across states,” said Julie A. González, a demographer and environmental justice scholar.
Several types of chemical irritants are often lumped into a broad definition of tear gas, including those found in devices that disperse smoke when launched and pepper spray. Exposure to these “riot control agents” can cause chest tightness, coughing and shortness of breath. For people with diseases that impact their heart or lungs, the side effects can be more serious, said El-Hasan. They can be worse for children.
“Children’s bodies are different than adult bodies,” he said. “They’re growing. They take more breaths per minute than adults.”
Dr. Sarita Chung, a pediatrician at Boston Children’s Hospital, noted how children’s height can add potency to exposure.
“Children are usually closer to the ground, where there is greater gas vapors,” she said. “Or it’s more dense, and so they’re going to breathe in more.”
The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE and Customs and Border Protection (CBP), has repeatedly defended its use of tear gas and other chemical irritants during its recent immigration operations. Law enforcement — not just federal but state and local — have used these chemicals legally for decades to disperse crowds. But citizens are challenging in court whether the federal government’s recent use of force, including tear gas deployment, has been excessive and unconstitutional.
Representatives for DHS, ICE and CBP did not immediately respond to requests for comment about its use of riot control agents. But an agency spokesperson specifically claimed the incident in Portland last month involved an unruly crowd. The same spokesperson also said the Minneapolis family was not targeted — though she initially blamed the family in a since-deleted post on X.
“It is horrific to see radical agitators bring children to their violent riots,” the post read. “PLEASE STOP ENDANGERING YOUR CHILDREN.”
But some of these incidents involving children occurred outside of organized protest. The family in Minneapolis told news outlets that they were headed home after a child’s basketball game at the time that their vehicle was damaged. In early November, a masked federal agent pepper sprayed into a vehicle near a Sam’s Club in Chicago. The car was being driven by a man who had been attempting to go grocery shopping with his 1-year-old daughter. The chemicals spread into the child’s eyes.
“My daughter was trying to open her eyes,” the man told reporters. “She was struggling to breathe.”
The Oregonian reported on a 3-year-old who lives across the street from the ICE facility in Portland whose mom routinely rushes her inside from an apartment balcony when chemicals are deployed. Tear gas has been released on busy commercial streets in Minneapolis, with video showing a parent holding a toddler and running away from the smoke.
“You can’t just say, oh, avoid the tear gas,” El-Hasan said. “You’re basically talking about random incidents or incidents where very innocent people are just being exposed to these toxic substances.”
El-Hasan said if an adult or child has asthma and is exposed to tear gas, it should be assumed that the irritant will get into the body. He recommended anyone who is asthmatic to have an inhaler and take preventative medication if possible. He also suggested they see a medical profession within 24 hours.
“We have no great understanding, at least none that has been published, on what the long term effects of these chemicals are on children,” El-Hasan said. “The only thing that we can do is just have people understand what to do if their children or they themselves have been exposed to tear gas, and to do that very quickly afterwards.”
But the public’s perception of tear gas use could get reshaped by the emerging imagery and videos of children being exposed to these chemicals.
In Chicago last fall, the repeated deployment of tear gas on residential streets during a weekslong immigration enforcement operation led a federal judge to admonish federal government officials as a temporary restraining order restricting tear gas use was in place.
“Kids dressed in Halloween costumes walking to a parade do not pose an immediate threat to the safety of a law enforcement officer,” U.S. District Judge Sara Ellis told then-Border Patrol chief Gregory Bovino during an October court hearing, according to Reuters. “They just don’t. And you can’t use riot control weapons against them.”
Weeks later, Ellis ordered federal agents to give at least two separate warnings before using tear gas and other chemicals on crowds, and to only use them if there was an immediate threat of physical harm.
The use of tear gas dates back a century, when soldiers deployed it during World War I. Its use is now prohibited in international warfare.
The Army and police used it in 1932 in Washington, D.C., in response to a gathered group of World War I veterans and their families who for weeks protested in support of wartime payments from the federal government amid the Great Depression.
That protest, known as the Forgotten March, was linked within weeks to the death of a 3-month-old baby, Bernard Myers. Bernard’s parents claimed exposure to tear gas — the family said they were in a private home that was filled with smoke — contributed to their child’s death. Newspapers at the time reported that while hospital officials said the child died from an intestinal disorder, doctors also reportedly said: “the gas certainly didn’t do any good.” There was public distrust after military personnel visited the hospital to view the boy’s body.
Anna Feigenbaum is a professor at the University of Glasgow and author of the 2017 book “Tear Gas: From the Battlefields of World War I to the Streets of Today.” She highlights Bernard’s case in her book as well as the use of tear gas in residential areas that often results in children being in close range and exposed to the chemicals.
“There’s a long history of children being tear gassed, once tear gas started being used domestically,” she said.
The disproportionate impact of tear gas extends beyond children. In 2023, scientist Asha Hassan was part of a team that published a survey-based study on the adverse health effects of tear gas on reproductive health following the 2020 protests against police brutality that followed the death of George Floyd. They found people reporting uterine cramping, early menstrual bleeding, breast tenderness and delayed menstrual bleeding.
Hassan, a professor at the University of Minnesota and an expert on reproductive health, police violence and disability-related research noted that the public’s baseline for understanding the safety of tear gas is limited because it has mostly involved studying the impact of tear gas on young healthy men in a training environment in the 1960s.
“Applying or understanding what we know from that long ago, about some of these gasses to populations that all have different bodies — including people who have uteri, people who have chronic conditions, and children — we actually don’t know,” Hassan said. “We actually don’t have the data to say how this might impact their bodies disproportionately or differently than what this original research shows.”
People who have been impacted by tear gas exposure have sought legal justice in recent years. In December, residents of an affordable housing complex just 300 feet from the ICE building in Portland filed a lawsuit claiming that the federal government’s repeated use of tear gas, smoke grenades and other chemical munitions has seeped into their homes and poses environmental and health risks.
“You have a government that regulates everything from serving sizes to what can go into your soda to what can be in your water,” said Jennifer Brown, who was part of a team that published research in 2021 on the use of tear gas and its unknown long-term health impacts. “How is it, then, that it’s OK to use unregulated chemicals on a broad range of civilian populations, especially when these chemicals are banned in war?”
Brown’s research concluded that tear gas has been poorly studied, and guidelines on its use do not properly account for variables like duration of exposure. Under the federal government’s own definition of tear gas, “long lasting exposure or exposure to a large dose” may cause blindness, glaucoma and respiratory failure.
Separately, the decontamination process after tear gas exposure is already challenging for adults: The federal government recommends that people not only throw away their clothing after exposure, they’re told to cut it off instead of pulling it over their heads. Anything that touches the clothing should be sealed into a bag that’s then placed into another bag.
(Nathan Howard/Getty Images)
And yet, there is no universal protocol for how law enforcement should discard tear gas canisters and other related residue. In Minneapolis, the chemicals have been left on piles of snow, which can then melt into sewer drains. It’s all hazardous waste, Brown said.
“They shouldn’t get anywhere near your skin, your clothes, your house — but both the physical detritus of the canisters themselves and anything that the gas itself touches — it gets into your house, it’s now on your floors. It’s on your linens. It’s on your clothes. Are you washing your clothes in your washer? You really shouldn’t. You should dispose of them as hazardous waste,” she said.
This month, congressional Democrats asked for an investigation of ICE agents’ use of force, including their deployment of tear gas and flash-bang grenades at close range. A federal judge has extended a temporary order restricting immigration agents outside the Portland ICE facility from releasing tear gas and other munitions at people unless someone poses an imminent threat. In Illinois, a state lawmaker has filed a bill that would ban tear gas.
It’s unclear for now if there will be more accountability over the use of tear gas near children. In Portland, the city’s mayor highlighted the January 31 incident in demanding that ICE agents resign.
“To those who continue to make these sickening decisions, go home, look in a mirror, and ask yourselves why you have gassed children,” he wrote in a statement.
Chung helps oversee a council on the health effects on children after disasters for the American Academy of Pediatrics. She said the council is monitoring additional instances of tear gas deployment around children, in case it shapes future communication with health care professionals about treatment guidelines.
“Tear gas is harmful for the health of children,” she said. “The decontamination process can be challenging, and especially if it’s done in a crowd, and if children are separated from their families, then we need to be diligent about reunification processes to make sure that the children get quickly reunited with their families.”
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