George Retes was on his way to work as a security guard when he said he was dragged from his car and pepper-sprayed by federal agents. The alleged incident happened during an immigration raid at Glass House Farms in Camarillo, Southern California in July.
“I was trapped in my car with tear gas even before they sprayed me,” he told Newsweek. “And after they sprayed me with pepper spray they immediately threw me on the ground, then proceeded to kneel on my neck and back.”
The 25-year-old U.S. Army veteran and U.S. citizen was arrested then released without charge, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) told Newsweek at the time.
But the incident rattled Retes, who served in the army for four years. “No one deserves to be treated the way they treat people,” he told Newsweek.
Reverend David Black, a Chicago pastor was taking part in a prayer vigil outside a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility in September when he said ICE agents hit his “arms, face and torso with exploding pellets that contained some kind of chemical agent.” He is now one of the plaintiffs in a lawsuit accusing the Trump administration of using force to intimidate peaceful demonstrators in violation of their first amendment rights.
Retes and Black are among a growing number of Americans who say federal agents have used weapons like pepper spray on them amid U.S. President Donald Trump’s war on illegal immigration and crime. The Trump administration has said it is making America safer by ending illegal immigration and cracking down on protest and border security, but the deployment of Border Patrol agents in U.S. cities where there have been immigration raids and protests against these immigration raids has resulted in scrutiny over agents’ purported use of force. Meanwhile, critics also say Trump is targeting Democrat-controlled cities.
Now, Newsweek reveals that the Trump administration has ramped up its spending on certain weapons for DHS staff compared to that spent by previous administrations. According to federal procurement data, the government has spent $5,010,584 on chemical weapons since Trump secured the keys to the White House in January 2025. This is almost as much in around 11 months as the $6,821,592 former President Joe Biden spent during his whole administration, between 2021 and 2025. It is also around 11 times the $447,555 that the Trump’s first administration spent between 2017 and 2021.
The contacts, awarded to DHS agencies ICE, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), and Federal Law Enforcement Training Centers are filed in federal procurement databases under the product and service code “chemical weapons and equipment.” Some contracts specify that they pertain to weapons including pepper spray and pepper ball projectiles. Others are more vague, stating they are for less lethal munitions, without disclosing what these munitions are. Less lethal munitions can refer to rubber bullets, pepper spray, tear gas, and electric-shock weapons, among others. It is also not known where these weapons have been used and for what purposes.
Advocacy groups have raised concerns about the safety implications of using these weapons, while others said using them represented an overreach of power.
DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin told Newsweek: “ICE buying its law enforcement officers guns and non-lethal resources is a nonstory. It should come as no surprise that we purchase and acquire firearms for law enforcement—especially amid the increased onboarding of 11,000 agents thanks to President Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill.
“Do you also plan to cover the 1,150 percent increase in assaults against law enforcement including terrorist attacks, cars being used as weapons, and officers having rocks and Molotov cocktails thrown at them?”
In November, DHS released data showing there had been a 1,150 percent increase in assault and violence against ICE officers as compared to the same period in 2024. It said there had been 19 reported assaults against ICE enforcement from January 21, 2024 to November 21, 2024 but that in the same timeframe in 2025 there were 238 reported assaults.
Meanwhile, the “One Big Beautiful Bill” spending package, which was passed by Congress in July, expands funding for ICE and CBP including by allocating $8 billion to hire 10,000 new deportation officers.
In its analysis, Newsweek calculated the total obligated spending for every chemical weapons contract under each administration, i.e. the amount that was contractually promised, to reflect that some of the contracts in Trump’s second administration are still ongoing and to ensure consistency when comparing the three administrations it analyzed. This means outlayed spending—when money is actually paid out—might turn out to be slightly less than what has been promised and that the outlayed spending during Trump’s first and Biden’s administrations may have also been slightly less than what was obligated.
The bulk of the Trump administration’s spending ($4,747,835) was allocated to CBP while $149,968 was awarded to ICE and $87,205 was disbursed to Federal Law Enforcement Training Centers.
Meanwhile, most of this spending was on two contracts with tactical equipment company Quantico Tactical. One was for $2.6 million worth of less lethal munitions for CBP and will last between June 2025 and June 2026.
The other $1.4 million contract provides less lethal chemical munitions for CBP between September 2025 and September 2026.
Newsweek reached out to Quantico Tactical by email to comment on this story.
CBP, which has around 60,000 members of staff and is responsible in part for apprehending people attempting to enter the U.S. illegally at U.S. borders and ICE, which conducts raids throughout the country to find undocumented immigrants, have conducted several high-profile immigration enforcement actions in recent months.
At least 44 people were arrested during June protests against immigration raids conducted by ICE in Los Angeles, during which officers used pepper spray and tear gas on the hundreds of protesters outside federal buildings, Reuters reported.
CBP has also been active in Chicago Illinois, where officers arrested more than 3,000 migrant arrests through Operation Midway Blitz, which began in early September. Demonstrators protesting the arrests were met with pepper balls and tear gas and local police complained about being exposed to tear gas deployed by federal agents.
This operation resulted in a legal challenge and in November Sara L. Ellis, a federal judge in Illinois, banned the use of tear gas and other crowd-control weapons “unless necessary to stop the immediate threat of physical harm.” She ruled that Border Patrol had lied about their tactics and the actions of protesters. DHS is appealing the ruling.
Most recently, in what was dubbed Operation Charlotte’s Web, border force staff were dispatched to Charlotte, North Carolina in November to tackle crime and arrest undocumented migrants.
To Joe Hyman, a scholar of border and immigration enforcement, the use of chemical weapons comes as part of an overall policy choice to prioritize “number-driven mass arrests” to crack down on immigration. He said that because immigrants “are woven into communities” in the U.S., authorities can either use “careful selective planning” to target illegal immigrants “or indiscriminate forceful action” and that the Trump administration had opted for the latter.
“The ceasing of a policy of intelligent prioritization in favor of number-driven mass arrests has meant that enforcement is likely to cause confusion, fear, flight, resentment, resistance, and grievous errors,” he told Newsweek. All this has happened widely.”
“It cannot yet be proven, but must be considered, that this use of control force is deliberate and performative, meant to intimidate the U.S. population, citizens as well as immigrants.”
Meanwhile, some experts have warned that these weapons are dangerous. A 2024 University of North Carolina study found that chemical agents cause hospitalization or death in 4 percent of cases and that more research is needed on their effects within group settings. Meanwhile, a 2022 study by the International Network of Civil Liberties Organizations, Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) and Omega Research Foundation found over 100,000 people globally who have been injured by chemicals like tear gas and pepper spray from 2015 to 2022. It also identified 2,190 people globally with injuries from rubber bullets between 2016 and 2021.
“The reported increase in spending on crowd-control weapons raises the threat of health harms for protesters and other people at demonstrations including medics, journalists, bystanders, and law enforcement,” Kevin Short, communications director at PHR told Newsweek. “In less than one year we have already seen the Trump administration deploy and abuse crowd-control weapons like rubber bullets and tear gas from California to Illinois to Oregon. We know from medical documentation around the world that so-called ‘less-lethal’ weapons can kill or cause life-altering injuries. Anyone who values public safety or the right to peaceful protest should be alarmed by this apparent increase in crowd-control weapons supplies by U.S. immigration agencies.”
Other advocacy groups have raised concerns that Trump is misusing his executive power by using federal staff to carry out the administration’s agenda.
Faisal Al-Juburi, chief external affairs officer at nonprofit immigration advocacy organization Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services (RAICES) said: “Such egregious spending on weaponry that inflicts harm indiscriminately should concern all Americans, regardless of status.
“We should all be alarmed about the overreach of power by an executive branch that cares not who is hurt in its campaign to eliminate certain populations and viewpoints from our society. We are witnessing the erosion of civil liberties and constitutional protections for everyone on U.S. soil, and such a brazen transgression of this nation’s purported freedoms is far beyond the red line of what we should accept from our elected and appointed leaders.”
As for Retes, since his run-in with law enforcement, he has been trying not to “dwell on how awful the entire experience was” which “was extremely hard to recover” from.
“It was just a lot to overcome in the moment,” he said. “It was extremely difficult.”
But he was disturbed by how much the Trump administration is spending on chemical weapons and said it was “crazy” to “unleash large amounts of tear gas and pepper spray.”
“I don’t think it’s an appropriate use of funds,” he said. “It’s like gearing up for a battle. A battle against anyone who isn’t in their uniform.”
