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BySRSam Reyes·CMCal Morrow·EQEliza Quinn·DPDana Park
BREAKINGMay 10, 2026

Kids Are Being Harmed by Tear Gas, Pepper Spray Under Trump. There Could Be Long-Term Consequences.

A ProPublica investigation published in May 2026 identified at least 79 children across the United States who have been harmed by tear gas or pepper spray as federal immigration agents dramatically escalated chemical agent use during President Trump's immigration enforcement crackdown. The children were exposed in a variety of settings — walking to school, sitting in strollers, riding in family cars, and at home — when ICE agents deployed these agents nearby. The count is nearly four times higher than a figure cited in a recent congressional report and is described as likely still a significant undercount.

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⚡The conservative argument represents the dominant position. A significant conservative faction disagrees — see The Divide below.

Do tear gas and pepper spray cause lasting harm to children exposed during protests and police actions — and if so, should law enforcement be restricted from using them in situations where kids are present?

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Infant harm crosses enforcement limits
Conservative
A six-month-old stopped breathing. Before any debate about sovereignty or enforcement policy, that sentence should produce a single reaction from anyone who believes in limited, disciplined government: that is too far. Conservative first principles have always included proportionality — Edmund Burke wasn't describing a state that gasses infants, and the common law tradition that undergirds American conservatism treats children as a protected class precisely because they cannot exercise the personal autonomy that responsibility arguments require.
Liberal
You're framing this as a matter of degree — enforcement that went slightly too far — but the 'blame the parents' response from DHS tells you this isn't an aberration they're trying to correct. When the department's own former Inspector General, who has no reason to perform for progressive audiences, calls this a 'bright red flag' requiring a 'serious review' of use-of-force training, and the agency's response is to keep deploying and keep blaming, that's not a failure of proportion. That's a failure of institutional conscience.
Conservative
Agreed on Roth — he's the strongest voice here precisely because he's not an activist. But 'failure of institutional conscience' and 'failure of training and accountability infrastructure' are different diagnoses with different fixes, and conflating them lets the agency off the hook for the structural reforms that would actually prevent the next incident.
Liberal
The distinction matters less than you think when the agency is actively blocking the data collection that would make either diagnosis provable — you can't reform training you refuse to document.
Parent responsibility vs. state duty of care
Conservative
The 'parents put their children in harm's way' argument requires you to accept that a six-month-old in an infant carrier bears some meaningful responsibility for her own near-suffocation. That is not a conservative argument — it is not any coherent argument. Personal responsibility requires the capacity for autonomous choice, and a one-year-old in a car seat near Chicago had exactly as much choice in that situation as she had in selecting her parents' immigration status.
Liberal
You're right that the infant bears no responsibility, but you're letting the parents entirely off the hook by framing it that way. Nobody is arguing the baby chose this — they're arguing that parents who place children in the path of an active enforcement operation have created the risk, and that matters for how we assign blame between the state and the individual. That's not victim-blaming; it's the same logic we apply when adults make dangerous decisions that affect the children in their care.
Conservative
Except 'the path of an active enforcement operation' in these cases is a car on a public street, a sidewalk, a walk to school — not a protest cordon. You're describing children being exposed to chemical agents in spaces no reasonable parent has any reason to evacuate.
Liberal
Right — and that's exactly why the framing collapses. The moment 'keep your child away from enforcement zones' means 'keep your child out of American neighborhoods,' the argument has stopped being about parental responsibility and started being about something else entirely.
Transparency refusal undermines accountability
Conservative
The administration's refusal to publish use-of-force data is not a posture of strength — it is the behavior of an institution that cannot withstand scrutiny. No conservative who genuinely believes in accountable government should be comfortable with it. James Madison's accountability mechanisms don't come with an immigration exception, and you don't get to invoke the Constitution to justify the crackdown and then refuse its oversight requirements.
Liberal
The opacity here isn't just philosophically inconsistent — it's operationally self-defeating. Congressional investigators found roughly 20 cases. ProPublica found 79 by manually compiling reports. The real number is almost certainly higher, because immigrant families reporting incidents risk further enforcement contact. The government is governing a public-health crisis by willful blindness, and the absence of mandatory disclosure means every number in this debate is a floor, not a count.
Conservative
That's exactly right, and it's worth naming what that means concretely: Rep. Ramirez's transparency bill may be a Democratic initiative, but mandatory use-of-force disclosure for federal agencies is a conservative principle. Madison wrote about it. The fact that the party of accountable government is resisting it here is the tell.
Liberal
And the tell cuts both ways — if the data would vindicate current practice, publishing it would be the strongest possible defense. The refusal is its own evidence.
Long-term pediatric health consequences
Conservative
The CDC is explicit: prolonged exposure to these agents can cause asthma, glaucoma, and permanent respiratory damage in developing children. We are not talking about temporary discomfort. Children breathe faster than adults, they're lower to the ground where vapor concentrates, and their airways are still developing — there is no responsible use-of-force framework in the world that treats a six-month-old and a forty-year-old as equivalent exposure risks, and yet DHS has apparently built none.
Liberal
You're right on the physiology, but 'DHS has built no pediatric exposure standard' is doing significant work in that sentence. Do we actually know that, or do we know that DHS won't release its standards? Those are different problems. If the standard exists and is being violated, the fix is enforcement. If the standard doesn't exist, the fix is legislation. The transparency failure makes it impossible to know which intervention we actually need.
Conservative
Former DHS leaders said something is 'seriously broken' — that language suggests the problem isn't a hidden standard being violated, it's the absence of one. You don't describe a functioning system with hidden safeguards as 'seriously broken.'
Liberal
And American citizens are in that cohort — some of these 79 children were born here, which means we're potentially talking about lifelong respiratory and ophthalmological costs imposed on U.S. citizens by federal agents operating under standards nobody can review.
Systemic failure vs. isolated incidents
Conservative
Seventy-nine children, identified by journalists working from scattered reports, nearly four times the congressional count, in an enforcement surge that spanned Chicago suburbs and Minneapolis and cities across the country — that pattern does not describe isolated chaos created by agitators. It describes a systemic training and deployment failure. Every police department in America has protocols about minimizing bystander exposure to chemical agents. ICE apparently deployed those agents near strollers and families walking to school.
Liberal
The honest challenge to the 79 number is that it comes from journalism, not a verified government dataset — and without mandatory disclosure, critics will keep contesting methodology on individual cases. That evidentiary gap is itself the scandal, but it also means the argument is partially dependent on a foundation that the agency can chip away at case by case rather than being forced to rebut the whole.
Conservative
The counter-evidence here is actually the undercount dynamic working in reverse: if immigrant families are staying silent out of fear of further enforcement contact, and the real number is higher than 79, then the agency's strategy of blocking disclosure isn't protecting a defensible record — it's hiding a worse one.
Liberal
Which is why the transparency bill isn't just a progressive wish-list item — it's the only mechanism that forces the agency to either defend its record on the merits or produce the data that ends the argument. Blocking it is a concession.
Conservative's hardest question
The strongest challenge to this argument is that many of the 79 incidents may genuinely have involved crowd resistance or active obstruction where chemical agents were directed at adults and children were incidentally exposed — meaning the failure is tactical proximity, not intent, and the corrective is procedural rather than damning. If the majority of cases fit that description, the 'serious training failure' framing is harder to sustain than a more targeted critique of specific incidents.
Liberal's hardest question
The ProPublica count of 79 is compiled from disparate reported incidents rather than a systematic government dataset, which means critics can contest methodology and individual cases — and without mandatory DHS disclosure, it is genuinely difficult to produce the kind of comprehensive verified record that would be unimpeachable in a legal or legislative setting. The absence of that official data is itself the scandal, but it also leaves the evidentiary foundation of the argument partially dependent on journalism rather than government-certified fact.
The Divide
*Even as Trump's DHS dismisses harm to children as parents' fault, a former inspector general within the administration's own ranks calls for a use-of-force reckoning.*
MAGA / TRUMP-ADMIN
Fully defends ICE conduct and blames parents and agitators for putting children in harm's way.
“The fault lies with 'agitators' in the crowds and parents who put their children in harm's way.” — DHS Spokesperson
FORMER DHS / INSTITUTIONAL
Accepts documented harm as a genuine policy failure requiring serious internal review of use-of-force training.
“This should trigger a serious review of how it is that we train people on use of force.” — John Roth, former DHS Inspector General
The Verdict
Both sides agree
Both sides accept that a 6-month-old who stopped breathing after pepper spray exposure represents a genuine failure that demands explanation, not dismissal—the disagreement is about whether it reflects isolated tactical error or systemic training collapse.
The real conflict
Conservative argues the scale of incidents (79 identified, likely undercounted) indicates systemic training failure requiring immediate internal reform; liberal argues it indicates deliberate dehumanization of immigrant children embedded in enforcement policy itself—the disagreement is whether the problem is fixable through procedure or requires fundamental policy reversal.
What nobody has answered
If DHS implements transparent use-of-force reporting and tightened deployment protocols around children but continues aggressive interior enforcement, will either side accept that as sufficient accountability, or does the liberal position require abandoning enforcement scale itself as the actual remedy?
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