07.14.26
'Less-than-lethal'
After posting yesterday about the two immigrant men fatally shot by ICE within a week’s time — Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, 52, a Mexican, in Houston, TX; and 26-year-old Colombian Joan Sebastian Guerrero, in Biddeford, ME — I read Charting the Crackdown, a report of the serious injuries inflicted by federal agents on protesters outside immigration detention facilities.
The report, released this week by Physicians for Human Rights and the Human Rights Center at the University of California, Berkeley, documents ICE’s “misuse” of “less-lethal weapons” such as teargas, rubber bullets and pepper spray for crowd control by almost entirely peaceful demonstrators.
It cites 412 verified incidents of excessive force from June 2025 through May 2026 — most of them during ICE “surges” in Los Angeles, Chicago, and Minneapolis — resulting in 203 injuries, including blindings, traumatic brain injuries, lacerations, fractures, and contusions. Its authors believe that this is an undercount.
Some interesting data emerge. For instance, while ICE is most often blamed, two other Homeland Security agencies — the Border Patrol and Federal Protective Service, which guards federal buildings — together account for an equal number of incidents of misuse of weapons as ICE.
Local cops helped too. In Los Angeles County, 55 percent of the incidents were at the hands of local law enforcement, while about a third could be traced to DHS.
The report points out that it is likely that ICE and other DHS agents are responsible for many or most of the attacks on protesters, but it is hard to know because so many are in plainclothes or wearing confusing identifiers.
The report also found that 43 percent of the targets were journalists. This has become a common tactic of repressive and genocidal regimes. As of early April, 2026, the Committee to Protect Journalists had documented 259 media workers killed by Israeli forces since the Hamas terror attack on October 7, 2023, 210 of them Palestinian journalists inside Gaza. Hamas had killed two Israeli journalists, and an unnamed armed group in Gaza killed one Palestinian media worker.
In a report on the targeting of journalists during the Gaza war, the Global Investigative Journalism Network stresses that without reporters’ documentation, analysis cannot be done and justice cannot be served.
The same is true in the U.S., especially since federal agents are not required to wear bodycams and — as we saw in these last two ICE murders — often choose not to, and federal prosecutors have refused to include local prosecutors in investigating murders committed by their own agents. Only this week did the FBI finally turn over to the Hennepin, Minnesota, county attorney’s office critical evidence for the prosecution of the killers of Alex Pretti and Renee Good six months ago.
This is where activist witness-bearers and citizen journalists come in. The murder conviction of Minneapolis cop Derek Chauvin might not have been secured were it not for 17-year-old Darnella Frasier, who trained her cellphone for 9 minutes on the officer while he knelt on George Floyd’s neck until Floyd died. And were it not for the bystanders who videotaped Pretti being held down, beaten, and fatally shot by federal agents, we would not have documentary proof of the tactics of immigration enforcement that Charting the Crackdown charts.
The state can act with impunity only so long.
"Less-lethal weapons" Does that mean they will kill you less dead?