LAS VEGAS — A federal judge has barred the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department from firing pepperballs at one named protester, ruling that officers shot Kathleen Cavalaro in the back while she was obeying an order to leave a June 2025 anti-ICE demonstration in downtown Las Vegas, then followed her down the sidewalk, zip-tied her and arrested her anyway. Chief U.S. District Judge Andrew P. Gordon issued the limited preliminary injunction on Saturday, October 31, in Cavalaro's civil-rights lawsuit against the department, the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported on Monday.

Source: Las Vegas Review-Journal

The order is narrow and personal: Metro officers may not use pepperballs against Cavalaro unless she engages in assaultive conduct or presents an immediate threat to public safety. It is not a department-wide ban on pepperballs, and it does not change Metro's crowd-control rules for anyone else. The injunction stays in force while her underlying lawsuit continues.

What the judge found

In his ruling, Judge Gordon was sharply critical of how officers handled the protest. He wrote that officers hit Cavalaro in the back with a pepperball while she was complying with an order to leave, followed her down the sidewalk as she kept walking away, and then zip-tied and arrested her under Metro's practice of ending a protest after a dispersal order regardless of where people are. “Metro does not appear to adequately recognize the wrongfulness of the officers' conduct,” the judge wrote, according to the Review-Journal.

Body-camera video lies at the centre of the case: KTNV reported that the footage shows officers firing dozens of pepperballs at Cavalaro as she walked away while following police orders to leave. Granting the injunction, the judge cited what he described as repeated, documented incidents of excessive force and warned that the conduct is likely to continue without a court order.

Source: KTNV Channel 13 Las Vegas

The night behind the case: June 11, 2025

Cavalaro was one of thousands of people who rallied in downtown Las Vegas in June 2025 against the Trump administration's immigration-enforcement tactics. The June 11, 2025 demonstration was declared an unlawful assembly; the Associated Press reported 94 arrests and four officers injured that night, and local reporting put total protest arrests above 100. The Las Vegas city attorney's office later chose not to prosecute 90 of those arrested, including Cavalaro, according to the Review-Journal.

Cavalaro's federal lawsuit alleges civil-rights violations including arrest without probable cause and fabrication of evidence. Her attorney Stephen Stubbs has alleged that the arrest report does not match the body-camera footage or her workplace records, pointing to discrepancies in the stated time, place and charge of her arrest; those claims are allegations in a pending suit, not court findings. Metro had not publicly responded to the injunction in the Review-Journal's Monday reporting.

A narrower order than the one protesters asked for

At a hearing on Wednesday, October 28, Cavalaro's lawyers had asked for a much broader order: limits on how Metro enforces dispersal orders and a rule barring pepperballs against anyone who is not a physical threat or engaged in serious criminal behaviour. Judge Gordon told them existing case law prevented the court from granting broad injunctions reaching beyond the people immediately involved in the case, and asked them to narrow the request to their client alone. Metro's attorney, Daniel McNutt, defended the department's revised policies at the hearing.

Cavalaro's is not the only suit still moving. In a separate lawsuit, protester Emanuel Beltran alleges that the same officer who shot pepperballs at Cavalaro while she walked away fired more than 150 pepperballs at protesters that night — an allegation reported by The Nevada Independent that Metro has not been found liable for. Both cases remain pending.

What happens next

The civil case — Cavalaro v. Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, filed November 12, 2025 in the U.S. District Court for the District of Nevada (case 2:2025cv02234), naming Metro, Officer Joel Tomlinson and the City of Las Vegas — now proceeds with the injunction in place. For the wider public, including the immigrant communities across the United States who have filled immigration-enforcement protests since 2025, the ruling changes nothing on the street today: Metro's pepperball and dispersal policies remain lawful for everyone except one woman. But it puts a federal judge's finding — that officers used force on a complying protester and that the department does not adequately recognise the wrongfulness of it — on the permanent court record, where every remaining protester lawsuit can cite it.