National Guard members have been accused of firing pepper balls at migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border in Texas, according to a report published on Tuesday.
Migrants in Mexico said that they have been struck by the weapons, which shoot munitions containing irritants that aggravate the eyes, nose and throat, and can leave welts and bruises, according to The Texas Tribune.
Newsweek has reached out to the Texas National Guard via email outside of regular working hours.
A few hundred migrants said that National Guard members fired pepper balls at them while they were sleeping on the Mexican side of the border in May.
One migrant woman, who asked to remain anonymous out of fear of retaliation, told the newspaper that her daughter was hit in the head with a projectile, and shared a video with the publication which showed her coughing and a boy with red streaks on his face.
“Look how they left the boy, with tears,” a man says in the video, according to The Texas Tribune. “Look how they left the little girl too, they also got her mom.”
Another migrant, Nicolas Gonzalez from Colombia, pointed to bruises near his elbow and hand which he said were due to the pepper balls, per The Tribune.
“They have no respect for us, they don’t care that there’s pregnant women or children here,” he told the newspaper. “They treat us worse than animals, like they are hunting us down.”
The Texas Tribune shared clips of a video in which National Guard members show off the pepper ball launchers, which look similar to paintball guns. They are powered by a carbon dioxide cartridge and can hold about 180 rounds.
Migrants seeking asylum in the United States are watched by the Texas National Guard while they remain on the bank of the Rio Grande after having crossed from Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua State, Mexico, on June 4, 2024. Some migrants have accused guard members of firing at them with pepper balls.
HERIKA MARTINEZ/AFP via Getty Images
The National Guard’s Spc. Aiden Hogan said that the pepper ball launchers are used against migrants who try and cut concertina wire that has been installed by the state at the border, per The Texas Tribune.
“We use it as an area saturation, meaning we’ll deploy the launcher in the general direction, not in direct contact of them,” one of the National Guard members says in the video.
However, the migrants’ accounts contradict the claims that the projectiles are not fired at people directly.
Pepper ball launchers are described as non-lethal weapons, meaning they are designed to incapacitate but not kill. But some officials say this isn’t a fair classification.
“They’re not really non-lethal,” Gil Kerlikowske, former commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, said, per the newspaper.
“No one should just write this off as well, you know, an irritant. They can be very dangerous.”
The apparent escalation comes as part of Republican Governor Greg Abbott‘s Operation Lone Star, which has involved the rollout of a series of aggressive measures at the border to curb illegal border crossings from Mexico.
Migrants have previously said that they have been hit with pepper balls at the border and ben fired on with projectiles.
Critics of Texas’s operation, including Democratic legislators and human rights organizations, have expressed outrage at some of the measures, such as the erection of razor wire and buoy walls.
Migration has become one of the most heated political issues over the past few years, with more than 9.8 million migrant encounters recorded between October 2019 and January 2024, according to the U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.