What are the health risks associated with tear gas exposure during ICE encounters?

1. Acute physical harms: what people feel and why they seek emergency care

Exposure produces immediate mucosal irritation — intense eye pain and tearing, burning of the nose and throat, coughing and difficulty breathing — symptoms that typically resolve within minutes to an hour after removal from the area but that frequently require medical attention when concentrations are high or victims are vulnerable, as in recent ICE incidents that sent children and infants to hospitals ^{[2] [1] [7] [3]}.

2. Children and the medically vulnerable: disproportionate risk in ICE contexts

Children, infants and people with asthma or other respiratory conditions face greater danger: reports from Minneapolis and other locations describe infants who stopped breathing or were hospitalized after exposure, and public-health reporting warns that those with preexisting conditions can experience exacerbated breathing difficulty and more severe outcomes ^{[7] [3] [2]}.

3. Severe injuries and uncommon but serious outcomes

Beyond transient irritation, prolonged or high-concentration exposure — or use in enclosed spaces — has been associated with irreversible or long-lasting effects including eye trauma (blindness or glaucoma reported in some cases), lung injury and, in extreme circumstances, death; these risks are amplified when munitions physically strike people or are deployed in confined environments ^{[4] [6] [8]}.

4. Mental-health and community-level impacts from repeated deployments

Repeated or unpredictable use of tear gas in neighborhoods and schools generates psychological harm: studies of populations repeatedly exposed in policing or military settings document acute stress responses, sleep disruption and elevated risk of post-traumatic stress, and reporting from communities near ICE facilities describes school relocations and ongoing distress ^{[9] [2] [10]}.

5. Limits of the science: what is uncertain and why policy debates persist

Researchers and medical schools caution that long-term health effects are poorly characterized because most modern studies are limited, dated, or based on controlled exposures that don’t reflect real-world variables such as mixed chemical agents, repeated exposures, vulnerable populations and different deployment methods — gaps that complicate assessments of chronic respiratory, ocular or systemic harm ^{[5] [11]}.

6. The politics of deployment and how it shapes perception of risk

Coverage and testimony — from local reporters documenting children hospitalized to lawmakers calling for accountability — highlight both the human toll and political stakes when federal agents use chemical irritants during immigration operations; civil-rights and public-health advocates frame these uses as harmful and indiscriminate, while agencies historically describe such tools as “less lethal,” creating a tension between operational claims and community accounts of injury ^{[12] [8] [13]}.

7. Practical implications: when exposure becomes an emergency and what reporting shows

Contemporary reporting shows that acute emergencies follow both direct canister impacts and environmental dispersal — examples include families trapped inside vehicles by acrid smoke and children receiving emergency treatment — underscoring that deployment tactics (rolling canisters under vans, firing in dense crowds or near schools) materially affect harm and drive calls for policy change ^{[3] [7] [14]}.

Conclusion

Evidence from recent ICE-related incidents and public-health summaries converges on a clear picture: tear gas reliably produces intense, sometimes medically serious acute effects and creates disproportionate risks for infants, children and people with respiratory or other vulnerabilities; the potential for lasting injury or psychological harm is real but insufficiently quantified, leaving regulatory and public-health debates focused as much on tactics and accountability as on the chemistry itself ^{[1] [5] [10]}.