Charles Mauldin remembers feeling like his lungs were going to explode when he inhaled tear gas more than 60 years ago. On Sunday, March 7, 1965, Mauldin, then 17, joined hundreds of other demonstrators in marching from Selma, Alabama to the state capitol in Montgomery to demand voting rights for black Americans.
As the march crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Mauldin stood near the front of the column, just two rows behind John Lewis, who would later become a civil rights icon and representative of the United States. Law enforcement officers were waiting on the other side. They ordered the group to disperse. After about a minute and a half, police began attacking the protesters with sticks, Mauldin said. They also fired tear gas into the crowd, which included teenagers like Mauldin.
“I didn’t know what was going to happen,” Mauldin recalled. “I was scared. We had to put ourselves in a place beyond fear.”
Now 78 years old, Mauldin watches the news and sees videos and photos of children being tear-gassed again, not by local police in 1965, but by federal immigration agents in 2026.
“It’s terrible that people like ICE treat people the same way we were treated 61 years ago,” Mauldin said. “It’s traumatic for young children, but I’m just starting to realize how traumatic it is for myself as well.”
Mauldin has a photo of protesters crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge in 1965. Mauldin is in the third row of people, in the center of the photo, staring at the camera. Civil rights icon John Lewis is in the front row to the right. Rachel from ProPublica Charities Police take preemptive action against protesters. Mauldin is second from the right. “I was scared. We had to put ourselves in a place beyond fear,” he said. Spider Martin/Spider Martin Civil Rights Collection
We reached out to Mauldin after a recent study found that at least 79 children were physically harmed by tear gas and pepper spray during President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown. The children include a 6-month-old infant who temporarily stopped breathing, a 12-year-old boy who developed hives, and a 17-year-old boy who suffered a severe asthma attack.
They spent most of their days exposed to tear gas and pepper spray. The 6-month-old child was in the family’s car, and the 12-year-old and 17-year-old were at home when the tear gas canister rolled under the car.
There are no national standards governing the use of tear gas or pepper spray, giving federal immigration officers more latitude in using their weapons than some local police departments.
A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said officers were justified in using tear gas or pepper spray in many of the incidents involving children, but did not say 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 steps to uphold the rule of law and protect our employees and the public from dangerous insurrectionists,” a department spokesperson 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 a felony.”
We interviewed dozens of witnesses and people with first-hand knowledge of the victims, reviewed video from bystander and officer-worn cameras, and thoroughly investigated the case. 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 that there was no single organization that tracked all instances in which law enforcement officers used tear gas or pepper spray. There is no need to identify or trace those affected. We also found that there hasn’t been much research into the long-term effects of exposure to these weapons.
Some historians we spoke to suggested the civil rights movement as a point of comparison. So we spoke to Mauldin to understand how being tear gassed as a teenager affected him.
On the day of Bloody Sunday, tear gas fired by police hung in the air. Spider Martin/Spider Martin Civil Rights Collection
Mauldin said he remembers Lewis being hit in the head with a club as police began beating people around him.
“I’ll never forget the sound of his head cracking open,” he recalled.
Officers then used tear gas.
“The action of tear gas burns your skin and forces you to run away, threatening to burst your lungs,” Mauldin continued.
He got as low as possible to the ground. He said he and others then ran to the river and eventually returned to Brown Chapel AME Church.
“There was nothing we could do unless we could get out of there,” Mauldin said. “This is a pretty harrowing experience, especially for children.”
Years after Mauldin was tear gassed, he was diagnosed with asthma. Although there are no studies showing tear gas causes asthma diagnoses, it’s technically possible because the chemical can cause lung damage, tear gas expert Sven Jolt, a professor at Duke University School of Medicine, told ProPublica. In one court statement we read as part of our reporting, the mother of a 12-year-old boy who developed hives said her son also developed a “chronic respiratory illness” and needed an inhaler after months of inhaling tear gas that seeped into their home. The family lives near an ICE facility in Portland, Oregon, where federal agents routinely fire chemical munitions at protesters.
Another parent who lives near an ICE facility in Broadview, Illinois, said she has taken her 7-year-old daughter to the emergency room about five times since last fall, when police repeatedly used tear gas against protesters. Her mother said her daughter was complaining of a sore throat. “She’s almost unable to breathe.”
For Mauldin, who said he was the last survivor of being on the front lines that Sunday in 1965, being tear gassed as a child left a psychological toll on him that he is still coming to terms with.
The experts we spoke to emphasized how important it is for children who have recently been hit with tear gas or pepper spray to seek help for their mental health. That includes children who have been directly harmed by these chemicals, as well as those who have seen others harmed by law enforcement, said Dr. Sarita Chan of Boston Children’s Hospital, who studies pediatric disaster preparedness and response. “Without support, this can become a lifelong burden.”
Dr. Andrew Racine, president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, said that after experiencing a traumatic event, children may initially have trouble sleeping, eating, and having trouble concentrating. This is especially true for young children who may not understand what’s going on, he says. These reactions may fade over time, but the core events may remain in the child’s mind for a much longer time. “Some kids are going to remember this for a very, very, very long time.”
Mauldin has only recently begun sharing his experience about what happened on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, an act of police brutality that became known as “Bloody Sunday.” Mauldin said that after visiting the bridge with historians several years ago, she began to process the trauma, and that the historians brought to light repressed memories and emotions.
“If you don’t realize that and don’t get help…you’re limiting the experiences you have to grow and be the best you can be,” Mauldin says. “You have to be able to kill a part of yourself in order to overcome that trauma.”
