Following a second fatal shooting by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in Minneapolis, public health experts are sounding a stark warning about the immediate and long-term effects of the agency’s use of even non-lethal crowd control weapons like tear gas, pepper bombs and flash-bang grenades.
On Saturday, video evidence showed ICE agents pepper spraying Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old veterans intensive care unit nurse, before wrestling him to the ground, where he was shot. Pretti was declared dead at the scene. Forensic audio analysis revealed at least 10 shots fired in less than five seconds.
“The justification for the use of [crowd control weapons] is that they reduce these kind of violent clashes, escalations, and so should really only be used as kind of a last-ditch measure to prevent violence and death and injuries,” Ryan Marino, an emergency room physician and medical toxicologist in Cleveland told Raw Story.
“The inappropriate use leading up to escalating violence, I'm not surprised to see that is where it has gone, but I think that is the fault of ICE, using these agents inappropriately.”
Earlier this month, ICE fatally shot a 37-year-old mother of three, Renee Nicole Good, in her car. Later, a Venezuelan immigrant, Julio Cesar Sosa-Celia, was shot in the leg while allegedly fleeing a traffic stop by federal agents, according to a press release from the Department of Homeland Security.
Particularly at demonstrations in Minneapolis but also in other U.S. cities, protesters, journalists and bystanders have reported serious injuries resulting from ICE actions involving crowd control weapons.
“I'm very concerned,” Rohini J. Haar, an emergency room physician in Oakland, Calif., and faculty member in the University of California, Berkeley’s School of Public Health, told Raw Story, speaking before Pretti was killed on Saturday morning.
“I think this is reaching public health crisis levels when you [see] so many people injured.”
While commonly used chemical agents and projectiles are referred to as “less-lethal” weapons, “any one of them, if used improperly, could be very lethal, could be very harmful, could cause permanent disability,” Marino said.
Recent high-profile cases of serious injury include a Minneapolis area family whose six-month-old son had to be revived with CPR after an agent rolled a tear gas canister under their car, when they inadvertently got stuck amid a protest.
In cities including Portland, Ore. and Los Angeles, protesters hit with ICE projectiles and canisters have reported blindness and facial injuries.
“Calling [crowd control weapons] ‘less lethal’ is kind of a misnomer,” Haar said.
“The danger and the health risks are really related to how they are used and on whom, and when they're overused or misused, when they target individuals, or when they're used without a need, those harms rapidly escalate.”
ICE did not respond to a request for comment.
‘People can die’
Haar, who is also a medical adviser with Physicians for Human Rights, has long researched crowd control weapons and their impact on health and human rights. She co-authored a seminal report, Lethal in Disguise, published in 2016, then updated in 2023.
After much debate, a global group of medical professionals, lawyers and advocates concluded “there is no role for projectiles in crowd control — that they're just not safe,” Haar said.
Crowd control weapons containing any sort of metal, such as beanbag rounds, are considered among the most dangerous, as are weapons that fire multiple projectiles at once, Haar said.
“They're dense, and you can't aim them, so they can hit children, bystanders, the elderly,” Haar said.
Fired at close range, rubber bullets can “hit as hard as live ammunition and cause serious damage,” and the abnormal shape of the bullets makes them “very unpredictable in their pattern, leading to potential injury to bystanders,” Haar said.
Crowd control weapons are intended to “make a space undesirable to be in,” rather than be used as “physical weapons or ballistics, hitting people in their body, and particularly in the head,” Marino said.
Ryan Marino (provided photo)
ICE has been seen to shoot directly at individuals, particularly in front of its facility in Broadview, Illinois, outside Chicago.
“Even though these are called non-lethal ammunitions … people can die from the effects,” said Marino, who is also an assistant professor in the Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine.
‘Almost militaristic’
Health harms of exposure to crowd control weapons are not just physical. Research into the use of tear gas during 2020 Black Lives Matter protests in Portland, Oregon, revealed concerns about mental health issues following exposure to such chemical agents.
According to research published in the journal Spring Nature, 72 percent of respondents exposed to tear gas in Portland reported new mental health issues, such as anxiety, depression and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.
“There is a lot of evidence that many people who are exposed to these will have significant psychologic, psychiatric, emotional, mental effects,” Marino said.
“If we're causing trauma and inflicting trauma on people, what are the downstream effects of that? Who's gonna pay for that treatment? Who's gonna help those people?”
Combined use of weapons such as flash-bangs and tear gas can cause “chaos and stress”, Haar said.
“The experience of being … exposed to a lot of these weapons, can feel almost militaristic and really dangerous and scary,” Haar said.
Even watching the news and being aware of the use of these weapons at protests can have a “chilling effect," she said.
“You're afraid of going to a protest now or demonstration, really afraid of exercising your free speech and free assembly rights, and that's its own mental health impact, where you don't feel like going,” Haar said.
Haar is particularly concerned about ICE’s presence at hospitals in Minnesota.
“If there's federal agents in those facilities who are identifying folks … the willingness or the safety and seeking care is going to be limited, and I think that's going to be really dangerous if I see that continue,” Haar said.
“That kind of thing is both a violation of basic medical ethics and neutrality, as well as a concerning safety and public health trend.”
‘Scariest thing’
Marino said the use of crowd control agents brings up “a million concerns,” noting uncertainty around long-term health effects.
Lack of regulation around the concentration and age of substances in canisters, as well the challenge of tracking how many are fired at any given event is also a concern.
“Why are we using these on people when we don't know what the effects are?” Marino said.
“They aren't actually non-lethal, and we don't even really know what is being used on people, which is probably, I guess, the scariest thing to me.”
In an amicus brief in the case L.A. Press Club v. Kristi Noem, challenging use of force by Department of Homeland Security agents in Los Angeles, Physicians for Human Rights argued that ICE has misused crowd control agents.
“These weapons all have serious health risks,” Haar said, “and so they have to be used judiciously, which is not what we're seeing in the news right now.”
