Leigh Kunkel never saw the federal agent pointing a pepper ball gun at her face from about twenty feet away.

Kunkel, a freelance journalist at a protest outside an immigration detention center in Chicago on September 26, was crouched behind a van when an agent took aim from a safe perch behind a chain link fence.

He fired multiple rounds at Kunkel, video shows. Her nose exploded in blood and pain.

“I was lucky that I’d been wearing the respirator. It very likely could have broken my nose if I hadn’t been,” Kunkel said. “Insanely lucky that he didn’t hit me, you know, two inches higher and I could have lost an eye.”

Firing a pepper ball gun at someone’s face violates numerous federal and local police rules – yet the incident is far from an aberration for the federal officers who have confronted protesters demonstrating against President Donald Trump’s mass deportation effort in cities like Minneapolis and Chicago.

A CNN analysis of more than two dozen videos of federal agents using less-lethal weapons such as chemical sprays, pepper ball guns and rubber bullets found officers routinely violated both federal and local law enforcement use-of-force policies.

Those include cases where officers deployed chemical weapons near children and numerous incidents where officers fired less-lethal weapons at protesters’ heads and faces from close range. In most of these cases, agents had no obvious reason to fear for their safety, a key requirement for this type of use-of-force.

“They have violated every protocol on less-lethal (weapons) and crowd control,” former Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Gil Kerlikowske said about these federal agents. “Not making an announcement to disperse, body-slamming people to the ground…they’re supposed to de-escalate, and they don’t.”

The agents’ actions have had severe consequences for some protesters, who have lost eyesight, broken bones and suffered serious breathing complications and other injuries.

Experts said federal agencies’ lack of specific policies and training for urban policing, combined with encouragement from Trump administration officials for agents to aggressively confront protesters, has created a perfect situation for widespread misuse of less-lethal weapons.

Immigration agents’ actions have led to numerous legal challenges, most recently in Minneapolis, where Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty on March 2 announced a criminal investigation into 17 instances of “potentially unlawful behavior” by federal agents, including a Jan. 21 case in which CBP’s then-commander-at-large Gregory Bovino tossed a gas cannister toward protesters.

“This is not a one-off or a two-off,” said Michael Smith, a former police officer and professor of criminology and criminal justice at University of Texas San Antonio. The numerous incidents on video show federal agents “are poorly trained, that they are poorly supervised, and that their agency and leadership have sent a message to them that these kinds of actions are acceptable.”

DHS said in a statement that its agents are “highly trained in de-escalation tactics and regularly receive ongoing use of force training,” and said the less-lethal weapons were deployed amid a rise in assaults against immigration agents and a “campaign of violence against our law enforcement.”

“The First Amendment protects speech and peaceful assembly – not rioting. DHS is taking appropriate and constitutional measures to uphold the rule of law and protect our officers and the public from dangerous rioters,” the agency said. “Anybody who lays a hand on our officers or tries to obstruct them is committing a felony and a federal crime.”

https://www.cnn.com/2026/03/10/us/ice-federal-agents-less-lethal-weapons