Science Vs - What Do Tear Gas and ICE Raids Do to People?

Episode Date: January 29, 2026

Federal agents have descended on Minneapolis in the U.S., and things have gotten chaotic — and deadly. The Trump administration says the agents are there to enforce immigration law, but officers have shot three people so far, killing two, and are using tear gas and smoke on protesters. So today, we’re looking at the potential health impacts of tear gas. We’ll talk about what we do — and don’t — know about potential long-term effects of this stuff. And we’re also looking into research on the mental health effects of immigration raids. We speak to Dr. Jennifer Brown, Dr. Carlee Toddes, and Dr. William Lopez. This episode does mention mental health issues. Find resources here: spotify.com/resources  For more on William Lopez’s research on ICE raids, check out his new book, Raiding the Heartland https://www.press.jhu.edu/books/title/53706/raiding-heartland?srsltid=AfmBOoperKoqv48ZYzaHfQ87nM2xI3QiAbI7lo2wLqt5BykNo-47cHxS Find our transcript here: https://bit.ly/3MbC1Py In this episode, we cover: (00:00) What’s going on in Minneapolis? (05:40) Tear gas is banned in war  (08:34) What tear gas does to the body (16:44) The possible long-term effects of tear gas (22:44) Can you protect yourself from tear gas? (24:36) How immigration raids affect people’s health (34:10) Do ICE raids make communities safer? This episode was produced by Blythe Terrell, Meryl Horn, Michelle Dang, Ekedi Fausther-Keeys and Rose Rimler. Wendy Zukerman is our executive producer. We’re edited by Blythe Terrell. Fact checking by Michelle Dang and Ekedi Fausther-Keeys. Mix and sound design by Bobby Lord. Music written by Bobby Lord, Bumi Hidaka, So Wylie, Emma Munger and Peter Leonard.   Special thanks to all the Minnesotans who took the time to speak to us about what’s going on there, including photographer Matt Gundrum. Thanks also to the other researchers we spoke to, including Dr. Margot Moinester, Professor Joanna Dreby. Thanks to Paul Schreiber, Nimra Azmi, Whitney Potter and Jack Weinstein. Science Vs is a Spotify Studios Original. Listen for free on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Follow us and tap the bell for episode notifications. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Rose Rimler, filling in for Wendy Zuckerman, and you're listening to Science Verses. Today we're talking about tear gas, and we're talking about ice raids and what they do to people, according to science. And we're talking about this stuff because of what's going on in Minneapolis in the U.S. right now. A few weeks ago, the U.S. government sent in a bunch of immigration and customs enforcement agents to the city. They called it, quote, the largest immigration operation ever. There's border patrol agents involved too. And we're hearing about all kinds of people being detained in all kinds of ways. New video shows a grandfather walked out of his home wearing just a blanket, shorts, and slippers during our bitter cold blast.

His family says he's a U.S. citizen. A local school district who's sounding alarms, they say about four of their students take it into ICE custody. The family's attorney and school officials say ICE used a five-year-old boy to knock on the door. of his own home to lure out other family members. And for weeks, Minnesotans have been pushing back. They're organizing marches and protests, taking video of what these agents are doing, and federal agents have cracked down violently on all this. There's reports and video of them using tear gas and smoke on crowds.

Images of agents spraying people directly in the eyes with this stuff. And they've shot three people in Minneapolis so far, killing two of them. The government has said that the people, they've killed pose some kind of threat to their agents. Though the evidence and videos from the scene, don't back that up. We talked to some folks who have been there, including this guy that we're going to call T, who's lived in Minneapolis, for more than a decade. We talked to him on the 24th, the day that agents killed a protester named Alex Pready.

I woke up to a bunch of honking and helicopter noises outside of my apartment. So I looked at my, just looked at my phone and saw all, you know, updates. This man was killed just a few blocks away from where T lives. It was the day after a big general strike in Minneapolis. We just had a huge economic shutdown yesterday. Everything was shut down. A bunch of people showed up downtown. And then the next day, they murdered a man. Like, I don't know what we're supposed to do anymore. T told us about what he's witnessed in the city these past few weeks. He's joined several protests and he has seen things escalate. I hate to use the term that people always use, oh, it's a war zone, it's a war zone, but like,

it really felt like that. It's really jarring to, you know, walk around to your community and seeing people screaming, blowing their wiffles and then just clouds of fear gas. Like, it's, you know, and then, you know, they're shooting. people too. Like it does honestly feel like, it does honestly feel like a dystopian war zone. So today, we're going to talk about what's happening there. We're going to dive into some science around tear gas, which scientists are looking at because it's not just Minneapolis. The stuff is being used on people all over the world. And we're starting to find out more about what it might be doing to us, like what the long-term effects could be. Plus, we'll talk about immigration raids themselves and what they can do to people in the community. that is all coming up after the break. Welcome back. This is Rose Rimler,

and today we're talking about the stuff that people are getting exposed to amid this huge influx of ice agents in Minneapolis. And I'm here for this part of the episode with our editor, Blythe Terrell. Hi, Blithe. Hey, Rose. So I think we should probably say

out of the gate that in the U.S., you know, we've all got the right to protest. We've got the right to peacefully assemble. It's in the Constitution. And people are allowed to film stuff that's going on in public, like what police officers or ICE agents or other federal agents are doing as long as you don't interfere with what they're up to. Right. So the Department of Homeland Security has said it is protecting its agents from rioters, although reports are that things are

generally peaceful. But what we've been seeing happening in Minneapolis is a lot of force, a lot of like hardcore responses from these agents, right? There's lots of reports of ICE using tear gas against people who are protesting or who are just like observing, taking video and stuff. And we also heard that from T, who is one of the protesters we talked to, who you heard from at the beginning of the show. They definitely unloaded a lot of tear gas out there. Were you exposed to it? Oh, yeah, yeah.

No, I was puking and throwing up all over myself. You're peaking and throwing up? A lot of people were retching. There were people out there that were prepared for it. They had gas masks and stuff. Obviously, they were handling it better, but there were also people just like, yes, Straight up, we were all just coughing and puking and my whole face was covered in mucous.

So, yeah, I mean, to your guess, it turns out, can do a lot of messed up stuff, which is the first thing we're going to kind of talk about. And this has come up on this show before. Actually, we talked about it back in 2020. It was the height of COVID. And people were protesting after a police officer murdered George Floyd, who's a black man. Also in Minneapolis. Yeah, also in Minneapolis, right? That's interesting.

Yeah. Yeah. And that is actually also when this scientist we're starting with got interested in tear gas. So my name's Jennifer Brown. I have a PhD in neuroscience and a law degree from the University of Minnesota. So Jennifer was actually getting her PhD in Minneapolis at the time. Hmm. And she and her like neuroscience nerd grad friends, they were watching these protests around George Floyd's death. And, you know, they were seeing these like clouds of tear gas and developing protesters. and they decided that they wanted to do something.

And talking amongst ourselves, we said, well, we're PhD candidates. We know how to research. We know how to write. What do we know about tear gas? It started as a conversation among friends. Yeah, so Rose, like many conversations among friends, this led to them doing a bunch of research

and looking at academic papers. And, you know, what they wanted to find out was, yeah, what do we know about tear gas? and one thing that caught their attention pretty early on is just a little bit about the history of this stuff because, you know, tear gas has been around kind of in some form for more than a century. So it was first documented in World War I.

I think most people remember their high school history classes talking about mustard gas in the trenches and how terrible that was. Everyone in the global community pretty quickly realized that escalating chemical warfare was a really bad idea for everybody. And so there's a convention again. against the use of chemical weapons in war has a lot of signatories. The U.S. is one of them.

So the U.S., it is illegal to use tear gas and other chemical weapons in war. However, there is an exception for domestic policing. So we can't use it on enemies in wartime, but cool to use it against our own people in peacetime. Yeah. Yep.

That's the system that we have. No notes. Continue. No notes. Right. And I mean, look, I asked Jennifer about that too, right? I mean, what did you think when you saw that piece of it? Horrified.

And then, but then I said, why? Yeah. And Jennifer actually told me that after the U.S. and all these countries agreed not to use these types of chemicals in war, it wasn't like everyone just, like, dumped out all of their chemicals, you know, these various things that they might use as these types of weapons, right? It's not like everybody just tossed it. Mm-hmm. But these chemicals that we had started being marketed as like non-lethal or less lethal options for stuff like crowd control. And then they started getting sold to places like police departments.

You know, sometimes it's okay to waste stuff. You don't have to repurpose every little thing. Right. Just accept the sunk cost of the development of an item. Yeah. So, I mean, that's kind of where, that's sort of like the origin story of some of this stuff. And now I want to talk a little bit about what this tear gas is, you know, what we have out there in the streets today, what it can actually do to you. Tier gas is an umbrella term.

Most of these chemicals, first off, are not gases. They are chemicals that exist in solid form that are then aerosolized and made into a form that can be widely dispersed and sprayed. And to do that, you usually mix them with a lot of other chemicals or you put some kind of accelerant. You have to get it from a solid form into a gas form. somehow. Yeah. So like she said, solid stuff, sort of squishing the canisters, can then get fired out into crowds and released as is aerosol.

We talked to another protester about this in Minneapolis. We're going to call her A. And she told us what it's like to sort of see these canisters kind of all around you in the street. They're just launching tear gas out of left and right on the streets with no warning. You can just be standing there protesting silently. peacefully, however, they're just running up and throwing whatever they have. Yeah, I mean, and A actually sent me some photos where it's just like this, you can see sort of

this massive cloud just kind of hovering between buildings. And some of that could be smoke. Like, there's also reports of like just smoke and not tear gas. But there's obviously like all of this stuff in the air. And I asked her like, you know, if they can get away from it. You were in a cloud. There was no running. The wind was going everywhere. everywhere. You weren't running to get out of it. And thank God, a few of those businesses were open and helping people and, like, escorting us inside because you weren't outrunning it in a reasonable amount of time. It was several city blocks wide. Mm-hmm. Very scary. Yeah, totally. And I also ask Jennifer a little bit more just about,

like, how it feels exactly. If I get hit with tear gas, what happens? Yes. So, do you cook with hot peppers ever make chili jalapeno have you ever forgotten to wash your hands after you cut a pepper and accidentally touch your eyes or your nose and all of a sudden you feel this burning itching eye running snot dripping down your face sensation maybe maybe yeah maybe we've all done this maybe uh that is this a similar type of reaction as what it would feel like to be exposed to tear gas because the chemicals, again, the broad umbrella of tear gas

are activating the same receptors, the pain receptors in your body as that chemical that's in the jalapeno, just caps a sacin. So yeah, I mean, of course, getting exposed to tear gas feels worse than that, like, stronger. It's also not only that tea,

the other protester we talked to, the one we heard from at the top, he said that you can also kind of feel like this grittiness when it hits you. It felt sticky. I don't know. It felt like there was like dust or whatever in my eyes. A physical thing. It was scratchy. And so to go into sort of more of what's inside this grit, this powder, there are a bunch of different chemicals that can be used in tear gas, like active chemicals. So one common one is known as CS. There's one that's called CN, something called OC and pepper spray.

So these are the ingredients that make your eyes hurt? Yeah. This is like the stuff that can cause. that peppery feeling that Jennifer was talking about and the tearing up. But one thing that is tricky is that Jennifer said that it's really tough to know exactly what's getting used on people. And when I talk to tea on Saturday, here's what he told me. Whatever they're using today is really bad. Really?

So, yeah. It feels worse? Yeah. Like, how so? I mean, the blindness, like straight up couldn't see. I've been tear gas before and been able to like, you know, squint and whatever, all this stuff. I genuinely couldn't see. And I was scared that I was losing my visibility.

Yeah, I mean, I asked him for how long. He said it was like seven or eight minutes before he could see again. That's a long time. Yeah, he had to have people help him sort of pouring water in his eyes and stuff. And we don't really know if it was like worse for him that time because the chemical was stronger or the chemical was different. It's possible that he was like closer to it or was like exposed it at a different way. way, you know, we don't know. And we did reach out to ICE to ask them like what they're using on the ground and didn't hear back from them. But basically, we know this stuff can cause,

you know, the symptoms we're talking about, the tearing up, the coughing, even maybe vomiting. You know, there's reports that can affect your heart, your lungs. And T told us that where it hits his skin, it can feel like it's burning almost. And A told us that it almost feels like a rash. When it gets on your skin, right, it's almost like an allergic reaction. It stings, it burns. It's not just tear gas. It's like a light acid almost being thrown at you. And that's not even the worst part.

It's when it gets in your lungs and your eyes. And then there was a photo, several photos, of people getting tear gas directly in the eyes, like the canister is being sprayed into their face. Do we know anything about that? Yeah, I mean, not a ton. So, you know, you can sort of intuit, right, that, like, you're getting sprayed super close. There's a ton of it in your eyes. Like, you get into it that effects would be worse.

But, yeah, but I don't think we just have a ton of research, scientific research on that that we know for sure. Mm-hmm. Okay, so I'm going to talk a little bit about, like, the actual mechanism of why this causes pain in our body. Okay. Yeah. So the stuff, when it gets sprayed, these chemicals, they can bind to these proteins on our body in places like our, like our eyes and our skin. And that can then send a message to our brain that's interpreted as pain

and particularly that, you know, can be interpreted as heat and pain. I talked about some of these details with Carly Tottis. She is a neuroscientist and she's also one of Jennifer's co-authors. When we're talking physiologically, so when you're exposed to tear gas, what it is activating is your nosusceptors. Essentially your nosus receptors are the receptors, that are in your skin and they're also in your organs. And they communicate to your brain that either damage has occurred or might occur.

Hmm. So they're like a little warning, little alarm bells are going off. Yes, exactly. They're little alarm bells. And so no susceptors are really responsive to a lot of different modalities. So they can basically take in a bunch of different types of sensations. Exactly. And they communicate it to your brain so that you kind of know.

right, that I've cut myself, which is different from walking into a door frame, which is different from burning myself on a stove. And it turns out that the receptor, this particular receptor, we've got a bunch of them in our nose and in our throat and the places where we're often encountering to your gas. So it can get really bad. It can also cause a bunch of inflammation, like this big immune response in your body. Here is Jennifer talking about that. So that's causing swelling in your throat, in your nose. What happens when those things swell? They shut and you can't breathe.

And you have people coughing and coughing. There have also been reports of people being in like really tight spaces with this stuff, with this tear gas. Even babies. There was a story about a family. They said they were in their car and that agents rolled a tear gas canister under the car. And it went off and it like filled up their car. They had multiple kids in there.

including a six-month-old baby. And the baby was having trouble breathing. They had to give CPR. They had to go to the hospital. Oh, my God. So I asked Jennifer about that. These are not meant to be used in a closed faces because there will be no good air left to breathe.

So deaths have been reported. If you are left too long in an enclosed face with tear gas, you can die. But this, like, speaks to one of the other things that Jennifer pointed out about tear gas. So there's a lot of science that we just don't have. And that's partly because a lot of the studies of like tear gas's effects on people are from people in the military who are exposed as a part of training. So like that's likely to be a particular group of people, young, healthy, probably predominantly dudes. Not six-month-old babies. Right.

In fact, I mean, there's just so much we don't know about this stuff. Like we have some data on how much it takes. to kill animals in the lab with these chemicals. But there's a ton that we don't know about, like, what it does to people, which is actually the main focus of one of the papers that Jennifer and our colleagues ended up writing. It's about whether tear gas can affect you over the long term. Because there's this idea that you get tear gassed, it feels terrible, you have these awful symptoms in the moment.

But a few hours later, you know, you start to feel better. You recover from that stuff. Right. But some research is suggesting that, you know, that's not all. was true. I mean, for one thing, people get hit with these canisters leading to injuries, blindness, even death. And then from the gas, there are reports of ongoing respiratory problems, neurological problems. And then after these events, people report mental health issues, PTSD. Sure, yeah. Which makes sense, right? Like, it's not just the tear gas. If you're experiencing

tear gas, there's probably a lot of other things going on that are going to potentially contribute to mental health issues, right? But one of the things that caught my eye here is that we're actually starting to see more and more reports of health stuff that, like, you might not expect. So, for example, researchers did a big survey of people in Portland, Oregon after the 2020 protests. I don't know if you remember. There were, like, weeks and weeks of protests in Portland after George Floyd's murder. Yeah. And so a bunch of people reported symptoms that showed up hours or even days later. And one of the things that I thought was really interesting is that a lot of people reported gastrointestinal. stuff. Huh. Like diarrhea or cramping. So about like almost 30% of the people who said that they had

some delayed issues, some delayed effects, they experienced GI stuff. Okay. And so I asked Jennifer, like, what could explain this? And she said, we don't really know, but. Oh, right. You're causing a massive immune response, inflammatory response, I should say. Through all parts of your body, if you're, you know, it's in your tear gases in your mouth and you don't flush your mouth out and then spit the water out and you're swallowing it trying to get it out. I don't know.

I mean, yeah, it's diffuse, not just in the air, but in the body. So I guess it could affect all kinds of systems. Yeah. So, yeah, that was one thing that was strange, the gastro stuff that was coming up, but there was this other symptom rose that I found even more surprising. So a lot of people in this study and some other,

observational sort of survey studies like this have reported that they were menstruation was all messed up after they got to your guest. That big survey out of Oregon I was just talking about about 900 people reported menstrual problems or breast tenderness after they were exposed. Hmm. They were reporting stuff like cramping, spotting,

more bleeding, longer bleeding. And there was another paper, also a survey that asked people with uteruses if they had menstrual or breast symptoms after being exposed. And that paper found that more than 80 percent of them said they had. Wow. Yeah. I mean, and we know a lot of stuff affects menstruation, right? Like, stress can affect it. But there could be other stuff happening too. As Jennifer mentioned,

there's a bunch of other junk into your gas, which like makes the mechanism question even harder to answer. The chemicals that activate those receptors are not the only things that are into your gas, right? I mentioned, you have to add a whole bunch of other stuff to it in order to make it into a gas. There are so many other nasty chemicals in there that have been known to cause cancer that are known to be toxic. You have smoke also often being deployed in addition to tear gas at a lot of these protests. It's really hard for people to know what exactly they've been exposed to unless you can find a canister that was thrown near you and know that this is what it was in trying to do your own

research. So it's so, you know, it's hard to say, you know, this is the mechanism of action, mechanism of action of what? What chemical specifically, what part of the chemical, don't know? There's also reports of miscarriage, like from Palestinian women after Israeli forces use tear gas on or near them. Oh, yeah. So, yeah, I mean, to summarize, I would say there's obvious, like, direct effects of tear gas. We see them. Those are, like, becoming more and more known to us, right? But it is interesting. to me that there's so many clues that whatever these chemicals are, they can be affecting

like other parts of our body. And there's just so much that we don't know about it. Yeah, as we're like putting it as it's sort of like being poofed out all over the place, right? Mm-hmm. Yeah. Spraying a chemical we don't know that much about on a broad swath of the population. Mm-hmm. Pretty risky. Yeah. And again, I mean, we reached out to ICE, the Department of Homeland Security. to ask about these, like, safety concerns and questions if this stuff is safe. We didn't hear back. But what is clear is that even though people are reporting these awful experiences with tear gas, so far, for a lot of folks, it's like not stopping them from going out on the streets.

The people we talked to in Minneapolis basically all had plans to go back out. So we did look around at what you can do and, like, whether you can protect yourself from tier gas. Okay. And basically what people told us, you know, wear really good goggles, something that's like really tight over your face, right? They suggested wearing gas masks. People also suggested covering yourself, like from head to toe, making sure you're covering all parts of your exposed skin. Mm-hmm. Because of the rash stuff. Right, because it like has, when it contacts your skin, yeah, it can cause that irritation. And there's also some CDC recommendations on this, actually. And they say to throw your clothes away if you've been exposed to tear gas. And they actually say to cut them off. So you're not like pulling your shirt over your head or whatever and like getting the stuff in your eyes even more. Yeah, that's smart. So bottom line, like you can, there's things you can do to protect yourself, right? That might help. But, you know, there's no like antidote, right? There's no like one of the scientists told me there's no like Narcan for tear gas. But for you, Rose, where does this leave you on in the land of tear gas?

Yeah, it's worse than I thought it was. Yeah, you know, I actually told one of the protesters some of the science about menstruation, and she was like, great, thanks. That's like another thing for me to Google when I'm awake in the middle of the night. So I also am sorry. Yeah, but to me it's like, okay, well, figuring out what we know, what we don't know. It's important. Well, thanks, Blythe.

Next, after the break, we're going to hear from Merrill. She's been doing research into the effects of these. ice raids have on the people that are being targeted. So that's coming up after the break. It's the golden moment. Triumph on the podium, golden hand. But with Corona Serro, golden moments go beyond the Winter Olympics. They're enjoying sunsets, time outside, reconnecting with nature, and laughs shared with friends.

For every golden moment at the Winter Olympic Games, enjoy your own with Corona Serro, 0% alcohol and a source of vitamin D. Onesero, the official non-alcoholic beer of Milano Cortina 2026. Hi, welcome back. It's Rose Rimler here. And we just talked about the effects that tear gas might be having on people. But there are a lot of other things happening that are freaking people out. So next, we're going to talk about the ice raids themselves. And for that, we're going to hear from senior producer Merrill Horn. Hey, Rose. Hey, Merrill. Yeah, the ice raids, right? This is the thing that supposedly started everything, these immigration raids. the government said it was sending in ICE to deport people who were undocumented.

We heard about this from T as well, the protester, that we heard from earlier in the show. I've literally watched them abduct people over in my neighborhood. They're pulling people out of their homes. I watched about two blocks away from my apartment. I heard a bunch of whistles and honking, so I walked out and literally saw them pull up. went into somebody's home and they picked up, I don't know, I mean, I don't know his name, but they picked him up and put him in a van and drove away. And so, like, hearing about this, it made me curious to find out more about the ice raids.

Like, what effects are they having on people? How widespread are those effects? And there's actually way more science on this than I was expecting there was. So I talked about this with Bill Lopez. He's a clinical associate professor at the University of Michigan. And he studied the kind of aftermath of like what happens after one of these raids. And the way he got into this work was that several years ago, he was already doing a study on the health of a community when an ice raid happened. It was just miles away from his house in Michigan. So we happened to be doing a survey of the Latino community at the same time. And the raid happened right in the middle. 12 people were detained. And after the raid, he found that something called immigration enforcement

stress went up, which is basically the fear of being deported. Maybe not that surprising. But then also people said that after the raid, their health got worse overall. And he also did these in-depth interviews, which really showed the kind of depths of the effects on people. So he told me the story of this woman who had gone with her husband that day to pick up their car from the mechanic. They drove in one car together. They pay for the work on their car. They leave in two cars, right?

And as the husband is driving away, he's detained by immigration enforcement, by ICE, and he's later taken to detention. And she is watching him because he pulled out in front of her. So she is witnessing this, right? And being undocumented herself, she couldn't do anything about it. She couldn't approach the car or was she would be arrested as well. And then Bill interviewed her later about how this experience stuck with her. She actually described the day by saying,

It was a day just like any other, right, in which her husband was detained. And you never know when this intense climactic event is going to take place, right? So it's not only the level of violence, but it's the suddenness and unexpectedness of this violence. And at the third layer, it's the possibility that that violence can happen any day of your life. And other research has found that, you know, ice raids aren't just impacting undocumented people.

One study said that U.S. citizens were more likely to report feeling anxious or depressed if they knew someone who was detained or deported. And it's not just mental health that's affected. Studies are finding that it can affect physical health too. And then Bill told me about this study. It was about a raid that happened in Iowa in 2008 at a meat process. And it was huge. Ice deployed 900 agents and almost 300 people were deported. And what this researcher did, she looked at babies born after this raid in Iowa. And what she did is look at birth weight of infants before the raid and after the raid. And what she found is that after the

raid, the average birth weight of Latino infants went down but not of white infants. Oh my gosh. So this, what we see, and those were not just from undocumented women. Those were just regional birth rate records, right? Enforcement literally makes its way into the bodies of the next generation who aren't even born yet and who don't even have a concept of citizenship status, right? Whoa. So it was like the parents were stressed enough that I was making the babies born less healthy. And that was only affecting the Latino community.

Yeah, infants born to Latino women had a 24% higher chance of being born with a low birth weight after the raid compared to beforehand. I asked Bill about this. And do we know what the mechanism there would be? Is this from stress? Yeah, so the mechanism is twofold, right? One is certainly stress hormones in the mother's body. Another thing going on could be that people are less likely to get medical care, like prenatal care, if they're worried about being deported. So, like, there was one study that surveyed health care providers, and almost half of them said that they had seen negative effects of ICE enforcement on their immigrant patients.

One said, quote, fear of getting deported keeps all of these folks away. Also, even folks with green cards are afraid of losing their insurance now and have stopped getting necessary treatments, unquote. Plus, there's reports of ICE agents in hospitals, right? We've heard about that. So there's good reason to be afraid, actually. Yeah. And, you know, a lot of the work that we've been talking about here is just looking at, like, one individual ICE raid. But what's happening in Minnesota is on a whole other level, of course.

I talked about that with Bill, who said that even though he's been in this field for 15 years, what's happening now caught him off guard. ICE is arresting, like, literal children. And is a 17-year-old child, absolutely, I would still be angry. is a five-year-old, perhaps a different level of cruelty? I would argue, yes. I'm not trying to differentiate which age of a child is worse.

It's abhorrent. I am saying they're shocked. I'm shocked that they arrested five-year-olds. I'm shocked. Technically, that boy, Liam Conejo-Ramos, the five-year-old, was detained, not arrested. But, yeah, you probably saw, you know, his photo was making the rounds last week.

It's that kid with, like, the hat and the Spider-Man backpack. ICE said that his dad abandoned him and ran from the officers. His family says that they begged agents to let them keep the child. And there's reports that he and his father were seeking asylum in the U.S. and are now being detained at an ICE facility in Texas. What we see now does seem to be agents with no, oh goodness. We seem to see agents with like no fucking moral compass whatsoever.

I'll rephrase that. But it's just embarrassing. It's embarrassing. What we seem to see now is agents that are unaccountable to their actions and engage in a level of violence and cruelty on a scale that I've certainly not seen before. And there can be long-term mental health effects from this, which can vary based on what exactly people are exposed to. Among other things, two things matter.

That is proximity to the removal and the violence. and the violence, how violence the removal is, the mental health outcomes are most severe when you're right next to your parent and you witness it. And depending on the level of the violence, right? So as we're seeing in Minnesota right now, the use of tear gas, the threatening with weapons, will have worse outcomes, understandably,

than requesting that someone leaves without weapons drawn. And scientists have actually been able to study this. Like in one paper, a group of researchers found about 70 adults who had all been exposed to immigration enforcement in some way when they were kids. So maybe a member of their family or someone else in the community had been deported. And then they did these in-depth interviews with them, sometimes for hours as adults, and had them fill out surveys. And it found that a lot of them had anxiety as adults and that the effect was stronger if they were exposed to an events that. was more severe. And then we also have lots of studies just generally showing that being exposed to violence, like police violence, is really bad for your mental health. And while a lot of this research

focuses on the people who are, like, really affected by ice activity, we also have evidence that the ripple out effects from like a prolonged upheaval, like what's happening in Minnesota, might be huge. So like moving away from the U.S., there was a study on Hong Kong that looked at the social unrest there in 2019, all the protests and the violence and how that affected people's mental health and, like, the general population there. So not specifically protesters. And they found that someone's risk for depression went from about 2% to 11% after the protests. So just the general population got more depressed, not just like people directly involved. And then finally, I talked to Bill about like the supposed reason.

for all of this. So there's this claim that the raids are making the U.S. safer because the goal is to deport violent criminals. What does the evidence show? Like, do these raids make communities safer? So evidence is pretty clear that immigrants and undocumented immigrants are far less likely to engage in criminal activity than citizens, right? Less likely. Less likely. At a baseline, communities with more immigrants are going to have lower crime rates just kind of at a baseline. And how come? For many reasons, right? including that immigrants have more tenuous status in the U.S. and, you know, there's more legal repercussions for less serious crimes.

So there tends to be less crimes, right? Yeah, so we cover this in our old immigration episode. We talked about this in the show before. A few years ago, yeah, immigrants are less likely to commit crimes compared to other people in the general population. And there was an analysis recently from the Cato Institute, that libertarian think tank, that analyzed a bunch of deportation data that was foiled.

And it found that ICE is arresting 1,100% more non-criminals on the streets in the summer of last year compared with about like 10 years ago. So the vast majority of ICE arrests happening today are basically people with either nonviolent criminal convictions or people with no criminal record at all. And then there's also some evidence that what's happening right now will actually make people less safe. For example, when ICE starts working with local cops, undocumented people are less likely to report crimes, which the authors of that study said can undermine public safety. And we also see that domestic violence calls also drop in places with a relatively high Latinx population, which means that when that type of violence is happening, people might be less likely to call for help. I would say that when people do not trust ICE, which is obviously a lot. appropriate for any number of reasons. They will not trust the police and they will not trust any other government service in that

community. The man is a man is a man. The man in green and the man in blue are the same thing. Mm-hmm. So, yeah, it does seem like people are generally less healthy and less safe when ice rates happen. Yeah. Okay. Well, thanks, Merrill.

Thanks, Rose. That's science versus. This week we have 117 citations, and if you want to see all those citations, you can click on the link to our transcript. You'll find that in our show notes. This episode was produced by Blythe Thorel, Merrill Horne, Michelle Deng, Aketti Foster Keys, and me, Rose Rimler. Wendy Zuckerman is our executive producer. We're edited by Blythe Terrell. Fact-checking by Michelle Deng.

Nakedi Foster Keys. Mix and sound design by Bobby Lord. Music written by Bobby Lord, Bumi Hedaka, So Wiley, Emma Munger, and Peter Leonard. Special thanks to all the Minnesotans who took the time to speak to us about what's going on there, including photographer Matt Gundrum. Thanks also to the other researchers we spoke to, including Dr. Margo Moinister and Professor Joanna Drebby. Thanks to Paul Schreiber, Nimerazmi, Whitney Potter, and Jack Weinstein. Science Versus is a Spotify Studio's original. You can listen for free on Spotify or wherever you get your podcast. Follow us and tap the bell for episode notifications. And we'll fact you soon.