Chapter 1: What is happening in Minneapolis regarding ICE raids?
Hi, I'm Rose Rimler, filling in for Wendy Zuckerman, and you're listening to Science Versus. 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.
Chapter 2: Why is tear gas banned in warfare but used in protests?
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.
Chapter 3: What effects does tear gas have on the human body?
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 taken 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.
Chapter 4: What are the potential long-term health impacts of tear gas exposure?
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.
Chapter 5: How can individuals protect themselves from tear gas?
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.
Chapter 6: What are the mental health effects of immigration raids on communities?
We talked to him on the 24th, the day that agents killed a protester named Alex Preddy.
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 the 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.
Chapter 7: Do ICE raids actually make communities safer?
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 your community and seeing people screaming, blowing their whistles, and then just clouds of f***ing tear gas. Like, it's... And they're shooting people too. It does honestly feel like a dystopian war zone.
Chapter 8: What does the research say about the broader impacts of ICE enforcement?
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, Blythe. 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. Mm-hmm.
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. Mm-hmm.
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.
Mm-hmm.
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?
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