Open-source investigation documents 412 incidents of misuse and 203 injuries across 16 U.S. cities from June 2025 through May 2026, with sharp increases in the cities where Border Patrol Commander Greg Bovino oversaw operations.
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.
