“Every tool is a weapon, if you hold it right,” as that oft-quoted lyric by Ani DiFranco goes. But the irony may be even more apparent when it comes to so-called nonlethal weapons, which law enforcement officers in the U.S. have repeatedly used in ways that can cause serious injuries and, in some cases, death. The problem has gotten pretty bad in the past year, as you can imagine, thanks to the Trump administration’s brutal (and yet perversely haphazard) execution of its immigration enforcement agenda. Now that damage has been quantified. Doctors with the nonprofit Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) working with the University of California, Berkeley, have determined that law enforcement misused crowd-control weapons at least 412 times during immigration enforcement protests between June 2025 and May 2026. By PHR’s count, 119 people have been maimed by government agents unsafely firing nonlethal projectiles at close range, launching tear gas canisters directly at protestors, and/or other breaches of established protocol for these tools. “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,” emergency physician Rohini Haar, a medical advisor to PHR and lead author of the new report, said in a statement.