Editor’s note: This story discusses police violence, including the use of chemical weapons and incidents that resulted in serious injuries.
Tear gas has returned to the streets of Portland.
Federal agents most recently deployed the chemical irritant in October, outside the Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Portland’s South Waterfront neighborhood. Their use, against demonstrators opposing the agency’s heavy-handed immigration crackdown, came after multiple incidents over the summer when agents fired tear gas and other so-called “less-lethal” weapons against protesters.
The use of tear gas by local law enforcement is restricted under state law. But federal officers are not bound by those limits. They have continued to use tear gas during demonstrations.
That’s revived concerns that federal law enforcement under the Trump administration are using crowd-control weapons to quash dissent and with little regard for the safety of protests. Those concerns come five years after Portland saw streets flooded with tear gas amid the racial justice protests of 2020 as the city became a target of the Trump administration.
Portland’s protests also attracted the attention of researchers who looked into the effects of tear gas, finding that health hazards lingered even after the gas dissipated.
‘Almost no regulation’
Dr. Rohini Haar, an emergency physician and medical advisor for Physicians for Human Rights, said during a media call that calling crowd-control weapons “less lethal” is a misnomer. She said they can be more dangerous than the term implies.
Haar, who teaches public health at the University of California, Berkeley, has researched chemical irritants and said they can injure people’s eyes, skin and lungs. That’s on top of the serious harm from the canisters containing the gas that law enforcement launches into crowds, she said.
She said tear gas is actually a powder that dissolves when it comes into contact with someone’s skin or mucous membranes, activating pain receptors.
“The issue with all of this is that there’s almost no regulation of these riot-control agents in civilian policing,” she said, adding. “Nobody’s really required to say, this is what we’re using. This is how much is in a canister.”
Rubber bullets, beanbag rounds and other “kinetic impact projectiles” can hit as hard as live ammunition when fired in close range, she said. When fired at long-range they are unpredictable and can injure bystanders, including children or elderly people, she said. Beanbag rounds in the U.S. contain steel pellets that can be dangerous, she added.
Donavan LaBella was shot in the face with a less-lethal munition while he was protesting in 2020 outside the federal courthouse in Portland. LaBella, then 26, suffered serious brain injuries that left him unable to work, according to the lawsuit filed on his behalf that was later settled.
Haar co-authored “Lethal in Disguise,” a report updated in 2023 based on medical literature and other data on less-lethal weapons, finding that their repeated and disproportionate use injures protesters.
“We felt that at the end of the day, there is no role for projectiles in crowd control, that they’re just not safe,” she said. “And that was after a lot of debate that we came to that conclusion because of these two issues.”
The report documented how thousands of people have been injured by crowd-control weapons as they’ve been used in authoritarian countries including Turkey, Egypt, Bahrain and occupied Palestinian territories.
It also called out the hazards of these weapons in more-democratic countries, including the U.S., amid what it called “growing authoritarianism, the militarization of law enforcement, unregulated and precipitous use of weapons against peaceful, unarmed people, politically biased decisions to use force.”
Less-lethal weapons also have a chilling effect of making people afraid of exercising their free speech rights by attending a protest, she said.
The report also noted that since 2020, mass protests have become more common across the world and in the U.S. Its findings join those of other researchers showing the danger of “less lethal” weapons.
More than 800 times the safe level
Portland saw more than 100 nights of protests during the summer of 2020 in response to the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police.
Police frequently flooded streets with tear gas during demonstrations and fired rubber bullets, flash bangs and pepper balls at protesters. A 2021 study published in BMC Public Health surveyed 2,257 adults about the health effects of being exposed to tear gas during Portland’s demonstrations. It found that almost all reported physical or psychological health issues either immediately or days after.
Many reported experiencing gastrointestinal tract issues, as well as ongoing anxiety or other psychological problems. Some reported menstrual changes. But the study noted that “endocrine effects of tear gas remain unstudied to date.” A different study published two years later found “a clear association” linking exposure to tear gas to uterine cramping, breast tenderness and disrupted menstrual cycles.
An analysis by Forensic Architecture, a research agency based at Goldsmiths, University of London, found that Portland police “very likely significantly exceeded” the federally recognized safe levels of tear gas, which are 2 milligrams per cubic meter. Researchers took samples from locations where police deployed tear gas, estimating they were “more than 800 times the federally-recognised maximum safe value.”
Advocacy group Don’t Shoot Portland and five protesters sued the city in June 2020 over police aggression toward demonstrators. The suit focused on police use of tear gas, pepper-spray and less-lethal projectiles, as well as long-range acoustic devices to disperse crowds.
As part of the litigation, federal Judge Marco Hernández found the city in contempt after police breached his order by firing less-lethal rounds against protesters who didn’t pose a threat. Hernández also mandated officers receive more training before they could use devices that fire less-lethal projectiles.
The city settled the lawsuit in November 2022, agreeing to halt its use of “rubber ball distraction devices.” They are similar to “flash-bang grenades” that create a loud boom and a bright flash to disperse crowds, but the devices also shoot out rubber projectiles. The city also agreed that police would follow their own policy on tear gas.
That policy requires an incident commander to sign off on its use and for police to consider their proximity to residential areas, hospitals, schools and high-traffic areas. Police must also warn crowds before deploying the gas and minimize the exposure of bystanders.
The settlement also directed police to follow state law on the use of tear gas. Oregon lawmakers passed a bill in 2022 allowing police to only use tear gas in response to a “threat to life or serious bodily injury to any individual” or an “objectively dangerous and unlawful situation” after deescalation attempts failed.
The city settled, agreeing to pay $50,000 to each of the five protesters who sued on top of more than $780,000 in attorney fees and costs. That’s part of the more than $9.1 million the city has paid since 2020 to settle protest-related legal claims, Street Roots reported in July.
‘Unconstitutional poisoning’
After President Donald Trump returned to power a year ago, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Portland’s South Waterfront again became the focus of protests over the administration’s hardline approach to immigration.
Federal agents have repeatedly responded to demonstrations by deploying tear gas, which has entered nearby apartments and other buildings. The situation got so bad that The Cottonwood School of Civics and Science, located in South Waterfront, was forced to move. Many buildings in Portland do not have air conditioning, and residents leave windows open during the hotter months — which can allow tear gas to drift into residents’ homes.
Nine people living in the nearby Gray’s Landing affordable housing complex sued ICE and other federal agencies in December for what the lawsuit described as “unconstitutional poisoning” from tear gas. The suit alleges that “federal officers indiscriminately deploy tear gas, smoke grenades, pepper balls, and other chemical agents in mass volume” without regard to crowd size or the absence of violence.
“The tear gas and other chemical agents that Defendants have used countless times near Gray’s Landing are designed to be used sparingly, in outdoor environments only, and for the purposes of dispersing persons,” the suit states. “They are not designed for sustained human exposure over a months-long period, and they are certainly not meant for use in an indoor residential location where residents live, sleep, and breathe.”
Many residents of Gray’s Landing, owned by Reach Community Development, are veterans or domestic violence survivors with post-traumatic stress disorder and the explosion that accompanies each gassing is further traumatizing, according to the suit. Two girls under the age of 10 sometimes sleep in their father’s closet to feel safe, the suit states.
Haar said tear gas is particularly dangerous for children, who have more fragile lungs and pliable skin.
“Firing when children are present is probably one of the more dangerous things you could do with tear gas,” she said.
The suit seeks an injunction prohibiting federal agents from deploying chemical munitions that could affect the apartment building unless there is an imminent threat to the lives of officers or others.
Attorneys for ICE and other named federal agencies downplayed agents’ use of tear gas in their response, writing that it was deployed sporadically over the summer and in October. They also argued that it was necessary to disperse what they called violent and obstructive crowds.
Oregon Attorney General Dan Rayfield wrote a cease-and-desist letter to U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi in November regarding what he called repeated reports of excessive force by federal agents.
Rayfield cited excessive force by federal agents in response to protests near the ICE facility in Portland. He cited other incidents where a van of federal agents stopped a group of teenagers at gunpoint at a Dutch Bros Coffee drive-thru in Hillsboro, and the arrest of a 17-year-old U.S. citizen in McMinnville, where an agent smashed the window of his car.
“The Oregon Attorney General intends to investigate any case where it appears a federal officer is engaging in conduct beyond the reasonable scope of their duties in executing and enforcing federal law,” wrote Rayfield. “Any such investigations revealing criminal conduct by individual federal officers will be referred to the district attorney to evaluate for prosecution.”
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This article appears in January 28, 2026.