Charles Mauldin remembers that his lungs felt like they were imploding when he breathed in tear gas more than 60 years ago. It was Sunday, March 7, 1965, when Mauldin, who was 17, joined hundreds of other demonstrators in a march from Selma, Alabama, to the state Capitol in Montgomery to demand voting rights for Black Americans.

Mauldin stood near the front of the line — just two rows behind John Lewis, who would go on to become a civil rights icon and U.S. representative — when the march attempted to cross Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge. Law enforcement officers waited on the other side. They ordered the group to disperse. After about a minute and half, Mauldin said, police began to attack the demonstrators with billy clubs. They also launched tear gas into the crowd, which included teenagers like Mauldin. 

“We didn’t know what to expect,” Mauldin recalled. “I was fearful. We had to put ourselves in a place beyond fear.”

Now 78, Mauldin watches the news and sees videos and pictures of children being tear-gassed again — not by local police in 1965, but by federal immigration officers in 2026.   

“Having people like ICE treat people the way we were treated 61 years ago, it’s horrible,” Mauldin said. “It’s traumatizing for young kids, and I’m just starting to realize how traumatizing it is for me.”

We reached out to Mauldin because we recently published an investigation that found at least 79 children have been physically harmed by tear gas and pepper spray during President Donald Trump’s immigration enforcement efforts. The children include a 6-month-old baby who briefly stopped breathing, a 12-year-old boy who developed hives and a 17-year-old who suffered from a severe asthma attack. 

They were mostly going about their days when they were exposed to the tear gas or pepper spray. The 6-month-old was in his family’s car when a tear gas canister rolled underneath it, and the 12- and 17-year-olds were in their respective homes. 

There is no national standard governing the use of tear gas and pepper spray, leaving federal immigration officers with more latitude to deploy the weapons than some local police departments have. 

In many of the cases where children were harmed, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security said, the officers were justified in using tear gas or pepper spray, but they did not address how the weapons affected bystanders, including children. “DHS does NOT target children,” the agency said in a written statement.

“DHS is taking appropriate and constitutional measures to uphold the rule of law and protect our officers and the public from dangerous rioters,” a spokesperson for the agency said. “We remind the public that rioting is dangerous. Obstructing law enforcement is a federal crime and assaulting law enforcement is a federal crime and felony.”

We interviewed dozens of witnesses and people with firsthand knowledge of the harm, reviewed videos from bystanders and officer-worn cameras, and closely examined lawsuits. And we kept asking experts: Have children ever been harmed by tear gas or pepper spray on the scale we’re seeing now? Is this unprecedented? 

We quickly realized there is no single entity that tracks every instance when law enforcement officers use tear gas or pepper spray. There is no requirement to identify or follow up with the people who were harmed. We also learned that there isn’t much research on the long-term consequences of exposure to these weapons.

Some historians we spoke with suggested the Civil Rights Movement as a point of comparison. So, we turned to Mauldin to help us understand how being tear-gassed as a teenager during that time has affected him.

As police began beating people around him, Mauldin said, he remembers Lewis being struck over the head with a club. 

“I’ll never forget the sound of his head being cracked,” he recalled. 

Then, troopers turned to tear gas. 

“What tear gas does, it makes your skin burn, it forces you to run away from it — it makes your lungs seem to implode,” Mauldin continued. 

He got as low to the ground as possible. Then, he said, he and others ran to the river and  eventually made their way back to the Brown Chapel A.M.E. Church. 

There was “nothing to do unless you can escape it,” Mauldin said. “It’s a pretty harrowing experience, especially for kids.”

In the years after Mauldin was tear gassed, he was diagnosed with asthma. There’s no research that shows tear gas as the cause of an asthma diagnosis, but it’s technically possible since the chemicals can cause lung injury, Sven Jordt, a professor at Duke University School of Medicine who’s an expert on tear gas, told ProPublica. In one of the court declarations we read as part of our reporting, the mother of the 12-year-old who broke out in hives said her son also  developed “chronic respiratory issues” and now needed an inhaler after months of breathing in tear gas that seeped into their home. The family lives near an ICE facility in Portland, Oregon, where federal officers routinely shot chemical munitions at protesters. 

Another parent living near an ICE facility in Broadview, Illinois, told us she’s taken her 7-year-old daughter to urgent care about five times since last fall, when officers repeatedly used tear gas against protesters. “She’s been complaining about her throat,” the mother said of her daughter. “It gets to the point she can’t breathe.”

For Mauldin, who said he is the last living person from the front of the line on that Sunday in 1965, being tear-gassed at a young age left an emotional toll — one he said he is still coming to terms with.

Experts we spoke with emphasized how important it is for children who were recently tear-gassed or pepper-sprayed to seek help for their mental health. That includes children who were not only directly harmed by these chemicals but also those who saw other people hurt by law enforcement, said Dr. Sarita Chung of Boston Children’s Hospital, who studies pediatric disaster preparedness and response. “Without support, this could be a lifelong burden.”

At first, children may struggle to sleep or eat, or have difficulty concentrating after experiencing a traumatic event, said Dr. Andrew Racine, president of the American Academy of Pediatrics. That’s especially true for younger children who can’t grasp what’s happening, he said. These reactions may dissipate over time, but the core event may stick with a child for much longer: “Some of them will remember this for a very, very, very long time.” 

Mauldin only recently began sharing his experience about what happened at the Edmund Pettus Bridge, an event of police brutality that became known as “Bloody Sunday.” Processing that trauma began after visiting the bridge some years ago with historians, who Mauldin said helped get him to open up memories and emotions he had suppressed. 

“If you don’t realize it, and you don’t get help with it … it’ll limit your experience to grow and be the best that you can be,” Mauldin said. “You have to be able to kill a part of yourself to be able to sustain that trauma.”