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BySRSam Reyes·CMCal Morrow·EQEliza Quinn·DPDana Park
BREAKINGMay 8, 2026

At Least 79 Kids Have Been Harmed by Tear Gas or Pepper Spray During Trump’s Immigration Crackdown

A ProPublica investigation published on May 7, 2025 identified at least 79 children who have been harmed by tear gas or pepper spray during the Trump administration's intensified immigration enforcement operations. The report draws on nearly three years of Significant Incident Report data obtained from the Department of Homeland Security by the University of Washington Center for Human Rights. Incidents documented include a 1-year-old left crying and struggling to breathe after pepper spray was fired into a car near Chicago, and video footage of tear gas deployed into crowds containing children.

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The Trump administration says aggressive enforcement stops illegal immigration. Critics say using tear gas and pepper spray on children proves the crackdown has crossed into recklessness. What does proportionality look like at the border?

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DHS data convicts its own agents
Conservative
The 79-child figure doesn't come from ProPublica's editorial judgment or an activist database — it comes from DHS's own Significant Incident Reports, obtained through records requests. When the administration's own paperwork produces this number, the 'liberal media hit job' response isn't just unpersuasive; it's an admission that the press office hasn't actually read the underlying documents. You cannot dismiss the source when you are the source.
Liberal
You're right that the data is government-generated, and I'll go further: that makes the underreporting problem more alarming, not less. Law enforcement agencies are structurally incentivized to minimize use-of-force documentation, so if DHS's own records surface 79 children, the actual number is almost certainly higher — which means the administration's 'floor' is one it chose to build low.
Conservative
Agreed, and that's the point conservatives should be pressing internally: if your own incident-reporting system produces numbers this damaging, you either fix the accountability structures or you've lost control of your own operations — neither of which is a defense.
Liberal
An administration that can't account for what its agents are doing to infants in moving vehicles isn't running a tough enforcement operation — it's running an unsupervised one.
Pepper spray into a moving car
Conservative
The 'agents face dangerous crowds' defense is the administration's strongest card, and it deserves to be taken seriously — right up until the pepper-spray-into-a-moving-vehicle incident, which it cannot explain. There was no crowd. There was no agitator. There was an officer, a car, and a one-year-old. That single documented incident dismantles the blanket defense because it removes every variable the defense depends on.
Liberal
The administration's response to that specific incident — a press statement blaming the parents — tells you the institutional problem isn't just that officer's judgment. It's that the command structure reviewed what happened and decided accountability was optional. You can train your way out of a bad individual decision; you cannot train your way out of a leadership culture that responds to a gassed infant by drafting talking points.
Conservative
When the official institutional response to 'we pepper-sprayed a one-year-old in a car seat' is 'the parents shouldn't have been there,' you've stopped defending enforcement and started defending impunity — and those are very different things.
Liberal
Every serious use-of-force framework distinguishes crowd situations from discrete vehicle encounters precisely because the threat calculus is completely different — which is why this incident isn't an edge case. It's the test case.
Moral weight of parents as shield
Conservative
The 'parents put children in harm's way' argument is the administration's most rhetorically effective move, and it has genuine force in crowd situations where agents can't surgically identify threats. But it is doing work it cannot structurally bear: it transfers the moral weight of a federal agent's decision to discharge a chemical weapon entirely onto bystanders based on proximity. That is not a principle. Applied consistently, it would excuse nearly any harm to any civilian near any enforcement action.
Liberal
There's also a factual problem with the proximity logic: some of these children weren't near an enforcement operation by any reasonable definition. A one-year-old in a moving car isn't a bystander to a crowd situation — and using 'the parents were there' to cover that case requires pretending the car was a protest. At some point the argument stops being about crowd dynamics and starts being about finding language that makes accountability unnecessary.
Conservative
Right — and the tell is that the administration applies the argument uniformly, without distinguishing the cases where it has force from the ones where it clearly doesn't. That uniformity isn't a sign of principle. It's a sign of a press strategy.
Liberal
A government that can make any harm to any child the child's parents' fault has given itself a blank check, and no serious conservative tradition has ever endorsed blank checks for state power.
Judge Ellis's 'deliberate indifference' ruling
Conservative
Judge Sara Ellis didn't call these incidents unfortunate crowd-control accidents. She found that ICE and CBP used excessive force 'without justification, often without warning,' against people who posed no physical threat, and she applied the legal standard of 'deliberate indifference.' That standard requires more than negligence — it requires a finding that officers consciously disregarded a substantial risk of harm. Dismissing that as judicial overreach is a much harder argument to sustain when the same finding has emerged from multiple federal judges across multiple cities independently.
Liberal
And 'deliberate indifference' matters because it's the constitutional threshold that separates bad luck from civil rights violations — it's the same standard used in Eighth Amendment prison cases. When you're meeting the legal bar set for 'we knew this would hurt people and did it anyway,' you're not in 'judgment call in a chaotic crowd' territory anymore. That's a finding about institutional intent, not individual error.
Conservative
Multiple independent federal judges reaching the same constitutional conclusion isn't a left-wing conspiracy — it's a legal pattern, and the appropriate conservative response is to take the institutional diagnosis seriously rather than attack the diagnosticians.
Liberal
The rule of law doesn't get to be the administration's justification for enforcement and simultaneously the thing it dismisses when judges apply it to federal agents.
Accountability as enforcement's foundation
Conservative
Reagan's DOJ and every serious Republican enforcement architecture maintained internal use-of-force review structures — not as a concession to critics, but because they understood that the legitimacy of state force depends on proportionality and accountability. An administration that refuses to hold agents accountable for harming infants will eventually lose the political and legal authority to enforce anything. That is not a liberal concern about immigration. It is a conservative concern about institutional credibility.
Liberal
You're describing exactly what Rep. Magaziner asked and didn't get answered: when is there going to be accountability? The oversight mechanism isn't some external check on enforcement — it's what separates enforcement from authorized violence. When the answer to that question is a press statement about parental responsibility, the institution has stopped performing its own legitimating function.
Conservative
The argument that accountability 'chills' enforcement has real weight in genuinely ambiguous crowd situations — but an administration that can't answer for a pepper-sprayed infant in a car seat isn't protecting officers from unfair second-guessing. It's protecting the institution from honest self-examination.
Liberal
Enforcement credibility is a long-term asset, and this administration is spending it on a short-term press strategy — which means the people who actually believe in rigorous immigration enforcement should be the loudest voices demanding these answers.
Conservative's hardest question
The most difficult fact for this argument is that use-of-force accountability genuinely can chill enforcement operations — agents who fear prosecution for judgment calls may hesitate in genuinely dangerous crowd situations, and that hesitation has real costs. The administration's critics have not fully grappled with that tradeoff, but neither have I eliminated it.
Liberal's hardest question
The most difficult challenge for this argument is that 'less-lethal' chemical agents are, in fact, standard-issue tools in law enforcement deployments across the country, and some of the 79 incidents may have occurred in genuinely chaotic crowd situations where agents faced ambiguous threat environments. If even a subset of deployments involved real provocation and the number reflects categorical counting rather than individual misconduct, the 'systemic cruelty' framing risks overstating the legal coherence of each individual incident — which is precisely what the administration will argue in every pending case.
The Verdict
Both sides agree
Both sides accept that the 79-child figure derives from DHS's own Significant Incident Reports and represents at minimum a documented floor of harm, not a fabrication by activists or media.
The real conflict
Conservative argues that accountability mechanisms strengthen enforcement legitimacy and can coexist with robust operations; liberal argues that institutional refusal to conduct internal investigations or admit wrongdoing suggests the administration has chosen enforcement over accountability as a matter of priority, not pragmatism—a factual disagreement about institutional intent masquerading as disagreement about operational necessity.
What nobody has answered
If the administration conducted rigorous internal incident-by-incident review and found that a significant majority of the 79 deployments were justified given crowd conditions and officer safety, would publication of those findings change liberal assessment of systemic indifference, or has the refusal to conduct review itself become evidence of guilt that no subsequent investigation could overcome?
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