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BySRSam Reyes·CMCal Morrow·EQEliza Quinn·DPDana Park
BREAKINGMay 28, 2026

U.S. Lawmakers Demand Reforms to Immigration Officers’ Use of Tear Gas and Pepper Spray

A ProPublica investigation documented at least 79 children harmed by tear gas and pepper spray deployed by federal immigration officers during Trump's immigration crackdown. Three U.S. senators—Cory Booker, Tammy Duckworth, and Tina Smith—have called for federal legislation to restrict these weapons, with Senator Andy Kim pepper-sprayed outside an immigration detention center in Newark while supporting detainees.

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Should immigration officers have the same restraints on chemical weapons that police do—or does securing the border require different rules? Lawmakers are divided on whether tear gas and pepper spray against migrants represent necessary enforcement or indefensible excess.

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Whether existing DHS policy is functionally enforceable
Conservative
DHS already requires 'minimum necessary force' and CBP already discourages pepper spray against small children — the problem isn't absent rules, it's absent enforcement of rules that exist. You're treating this as a legislative gap when it's actually a compliance and accountability gap.
Liberal
But the CNN reporting settles this: agents are already breaking the existing rules with apparent impunity. If non-binding guidance gets violated in real time and nobody faces consequences, then the gap isn't between policy and practice — it's that the policy has no teeth. A 'should not' backed by nothing is cover, not a safeguard.
Conservative
That's exactly why the answer is binding internal discipline, not a congressional statute. The issue is that supervisors aren't holding subordinates accountable when they violate current standards — which is a command structure problem, not a legislative one.
Liberal
Except you're asking us to trust the same institution that allowed agents to break rules repeatedly to suddenly enforce stricter internal standards. Why would they treat a new DHS memo differently than they've treated the old ones?
Operational difference between immigration detention and municipal policing
Conservative
Border enforcement happens in confined spaces with large groups, translation barriers, and no neighborhood familiarity — it's categorically different from a traffic stop. You can't just transplant 2020 protest-era police restrictions into detention facilities without accounting for that operational environment.
Liberal
Hundreds of police departments including Portland, Denver, and Minneapolis — cities that saw the most intense protest activity in American history — implemented binding chemical weapons restrictions and didn't lose operational capacity. If those departments can manage crowds under enforceable limits, the claim that federal agents uniquely cannot is an accountability argument dressed up as an operational one.
Conservative
Those departments were managing outdoor protests, not confined detention spaces where officers can't create distance and have no exit strategy if a crowd turns. That's a real difference you're glossing over.
Liberal
But Senator Andy Kim wasn't in a detention facility crowd — he was a senator trying to de-escalate outside a facility and got pepper-sprayed anyway. That incident suggests the problem isn't tactical necessity in crowds, it's a culture where there's no real downside to using these weapons.
Risk of escalation to worse force if chemicals are banned
Conservative
Remove less-lethal tools from officers' hands and you don't eliminate the threat they're responding to — you just force them toward physical restraint or faster escalation toward lethal options. Use-of-force research is clear: compress the ladder and you get worse outcomes.
Liberal
That's a real concern, but it assumes officers will still need to use force at the same rate. The actual question is whether they should be authorized to use chemical weapons on children at all. A 1-year-old in a car isn't a crowd management scenario where you need an intermediate tool.
Conservative
But the proposal isn't limited to 1-year-olds in cars — it bans chemicals in the presence of any children, which includes chaotic detention facility situations where you genuinely don't know who's 17 and who's 18, and where crowds can move unpredictably.
Liberal
Then the bill should be precise about those scenarios instead of blanket. But you're using the hard case — actual detention chaos — to justify the easy one, where agents were spraying a car with a baby in it.
Congressional authority versus agency operational discretion
Conservative
Congress doesn't see what a detention facility looks like at 2 a.m. Officers on the ground do. The question is whether those officers are accountable — and that should happen through their chain of command and administrative law, not legislation so blunt it forbids tools before any officer understands the specific threat.
Liberal
Congress has the constitutional authority to set baseline standards for force used by federal agents. Deferring to agency discretion that has 'demonstrably and repeatedly produced harm' — 79 children — isn't operational pragmatism. It's a choice to let children be test cases for enforcement priorities.
Conservative
But legislative prohibitions on specific tools create the same gap between text and practice you're criticizing in current policy. A statute banning chemicals will just become another rule agents work around if the underlying culture doesn't change.
Liberal
Which is why the statute needs to include enforcement teeth: mandatory reporting, supervisor liability, civil penalties. You're treating law as ineffective because we've written weak laws, not because law itself can't work.
Whether 79 injured children justifies legislative intervention
Conservative
The number demands a serious institutional response, but that response should be binding internal regulations with genuine supervisory enforcement, incident reporting for every chemical deployment involving minors, and personal accountability for supervisors. That's ordered liberty — not a legislative ban that substitutes congressional judgment for operational command.
Liberal
You're proposing more internal accountability when the internal mechanisms already failed to prevent those 79 injuries in the first place. At what point does repeated internal failure create a legal obligation to act legislatively? A 1-year-old left unable to breathe should meet that threshold.
Conservative
It should trigger accountability — I agree. But the mechanism for that accountability shouldn't be a categorical chemical ban that removes tools from situations where they might be the least harmful option available.
Liberal
Then propose the supervisory reforms alongside the ban. But don't use the promise of better internal enforcement to block binding external restrictions we know haven't worked for decades.
Senator Andy Kim incident as evidence of impunity culture
Conservative
An individual incident where a senator was pepper-sprayed is a command discipline problem, not proof that the entire framework is broken. The right response is investigating that specific officer and holding supervisors accountable for the breach.
Liberal
Kim wasn't a protester or a detainee — he was a sitting senator attempting to de-escalate, and agents sprayed him anyway with enough force that his throat burned hours later. That's not a training failure or an isolated breach. It's what impunity looks like when agents know there's no binding consequence for deploying chemicals.
Conservative
One senator getting sprayed is actually clearer grounds for administrative discipline than a child in a crowd where visibility and intent are ambiguous. That incident should produce a firing or suspension, not new law.
Liberal
But if a senator with resources and credibility can't get traction on accountability, what chance do immigrant families have? The law exists precisely for situations where individual administrative remedy has failed.
Conservative's hardest question
The CNN reporting that agents were already breaking existing rules to deploy less-lethal weapons is extremely difficult to dismiss — it directly undercuts the claim that internal accountability is sufficient, because it shows the accountability mechanisms already in place failed in real time. If agents violate non-binding guidance with apparent impunity, the argument that binding internal regulations would be meaningfully different requires an explanation of what enforcement mechanism would actually change the culture, and that explanation is genuinely hard to make.
Liberal's hardest question
The strongest challenge to this argument is that binding restrictions on chemical weapons in the presence of children could create perverse incentives — agents may escalate faster to physical force or firearm deployment when chemical options are categorically off the table, potentially producing worse outcomes than the status quo. This is not a hypothetical: use-of-force research consistently shows that removing intermediate tools can compress the ladder of escalation in ways that harm the very people the restrictions are meant to protect.
The Verdict
Both sides agree
Both sides accept that at least 79 children were harmed by tear gas or pepper spray during Trump immigration enforcement, and that this number demands a serious institutional response rather than dismissal.
The real conflict
Factual disagreement about precedent: Liberals cite hundreds of police departments successfully operating under binding chemical weapons restrictions; conservatives argue those restrictions were designed for outdoor protest contexts and have not been tested in confined detention facility crowd management, making the analogy inapplicable.
What nobody has answered
If internal DHS accountability mechanisms have already failed to prevent agents from breaking the existing non-binding rules (as CNN documented), what specific structural change would make binding internal regulations actually enforceable in ways that statutory prohibition would not — and why should Congress defer to an agency whose command structure has already demonstrated it cannot police its own officers?
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