US immigration officials misused crowd-control weapons at protests, report finds

Human‑rights investigators from Physicians for Human Rights and the University of California, Berkeley’s Human Rights Center documented hundreds of instances in which Department of Homeland Security personnel and local police misused crowd‑control weapons during immigration‑enforcement protests. The report cites violations of international human‑rights standards, manufacturer instructions and agency policies, noting injuries to protesters, journalists, legal observers and medics.

Weapons used included tear gas, rubber bullets, pepper spray, pepper balls, flash‑bangs, batons and shields in cities such as Los Angeles, Chicago and Minneapolis. The investigators said the lack of federal standards for such weapons contributes to excessive force. Sasha Schell, supervising reporter at the Berkeley Human Rights Center, said, “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.” The report calls on manufacturers to stop producing especially harmful weapons and urges law‑enforcement agencies to revise use‑of‑force policies.