ICE buys $100k worth of ‘non-lethal’ pepper ball rounds days after blinding protester with one
Four days after a 21-year-old anti-ICE protester was permanently blinded by a pepper ball munition, the nation’s deportation agency spent nearly $100,000 on more of the “non-lethal” rounds, according to federal procurement records reviewed by The Independent.
On January 9, Kaden Rummler was struck in the left eye with a projectile fired from a few feet away by a federal agent while the college student demonstrated outside a federal building in Orange County, California. Rummler, whose skull was also fractured in the close-range shooting, will never see out of that eye again, according to a GoFundMe page set up to help with medical expenses.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security, ICE’s parent entity, has not confirmed what type of projectile it was, but witnesses said it was a pepper ball.
On January 13, ICE spent $98,666.25 on additional “less-lethal pepper ball projectiles for control crowd [sic] to support ICE – Office of Firearms and Tactical Programs at Fort Benning, GA,” contract data shows.
The Office of Firearms and Tactical Programs, according to ICE, “supports the mission of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement… by providing world class firearms and tactical training, equipment, support, and guidance to promote officer safety and effective execution of the ICE law enforcement mission.”
Each pepper ball round can cost anywhere from about $0.50 to roughly $4, depending on various factors, including order size.
Rummler, who endured a two-day hospital stay and six hours of surgery, was also hit with one count of disorderly conduct, a misdemeanor. Jeri Rees, Rummler’s aunt, claimed officers on the scene delayed calling for emergency medical assistance and sneeringly told Rummler, “You’re going to lose your eye.”
A second protester at the same demonstration told the Los Angeles Times that he, too, was blinded in one eye by a projectile fired by federal agents. Both had joined hundreds of others on a march through the streets of Santa Ana, protesting against the January 7 “public execution” of Minneapolis poet and mother-of-three Renee Nicole Good. (DHS recently laid out some $160,000 on “parka jackets” to keep immigration officers and agents warm during the ongoing “urgent enforcement mission” in Minneapolis-Saint Paul,” according to a separate set of federal purchasing records.)
ICE did not respond to a request on Tuesday for more information about where the latest batch of pepper ball rounds will be deployed, and whether they will be used for training or distributed to officers in the field.
Nick Schwellenbach, a senior investigator at the watchdog nonprofit Project on Government Oversight, told The Independent that he does not know how the pepper balls will be utilized in this case, but that ICE’s Office of Firearms and Tactical Programs “definitely does play a role in equipping agents, not simply training them.”
In October, ICE agents in Chicago shot a Presbyterian minister in the head with a pepper ball while he was praying with demonstrators at a street protest.
The Rev. David Black – wearing clerical garb at the time – was “offering prayers and urging ICE officers stationed on the roof of the Broadview ICE facility to repent from their unnecessarily brutal enforcement of the immigration laws” before the officers fired at him, unprovoked, according to a lawsuit he subsequently filed against the agency.
The agents were laughing as they launched the chemical projectiles at Black, he told CNN.
That same month, another pastor was shot in the face at close range with a pepper ball round by an ICE agent at a protest in Northern California.
