Minnesota accounted for 94 of 412 documented cases nationwide in which federal, state, or local officers misused crowd-control weapons against protesters, journalists, or bystanders during anti-ICE demonstrations over the past year, according to a report from Physicians for Human Rights and the Human Rights Center at the University of California, Berkeley.
Researchers built the count by verifying incidents through news reports, legal filings, and social media posts, and they focused specifically on uses of force they classified as unsafe rather than merely disproportionate or excessive. Nearly all of Minnesota's cases clustered in the Twin Cities during what federal officials called Operation Metro Surge, a deployment of thousands of federal officers to the state between December 2025 and February 2026.
Where officers in Los Angeles relied most on rubber bullets, the report found federal agents in Minnesota primarily used chemical irritants, especially MK-9 pepper spray dispensed from fire-extinguisher-style canisters with a 15-to-20-foot range. The study found officers repeatedly deployed the weapon at closer range than its intended 6-foot minimum distance, concentrating the dose protesters and bystanders received.
Dr. Asha Hassan of the University of Minnesota Medical School, who has studied the health impacts of tear gas exposure, said symptoms worsen with repeated exposure and raised concern that use of these weapons remains largely unregulated. "The more somebody is exposed to, the more these symptoms escalate," she said.
Kimberly Saltz of Physicians for Human Rights said the pattern documented across the country, and concentrated so heavily in the Twin Cities, undercuts any claim that the incidents were isolated. "This is not a one-off," she said, calling it evidence of "a very clear pattern of misuse." Sasha Schell of the Human Rights Center said researchers were "shocked by the sheer amount of chemical agents being used."
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security said officers use the "minimum amount of force necessary" and that safety is the priority in enforcement operations. St. Paul police said one incident involving their officers and federal agents remains under investigation.
The Minnesota findings sit inside a larger national picture: the report's authors said the 412 total cases spanned roughly a year of demonstrations against ICE actions across multiple cities, with researchers separately documenting blindings and traumatic brain injuries among protesters, journalists, and bystanders struck by crowd-control munitions.