Customs and Border Protection’s acting Internal Affairs chief said Friday that he is unaware of any Border Patrol agent or CBP officer being formally disciplined for killing someone through the use of force since at least 2004.
Source: www.azcentral.com
Guillermo Arevalo Pedraza (2nd L) poses with his wife and daughters in an undated photo released by his family in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico. REUTERS/Family of Guillermo Arevalo Pedraza/Handout via Reuters
The family of a Mexican man who was shot and killed by U.S. Border Patrol agents two years ago has filed a civil rights lawsuit alleging that the agency sanctioned an unbridled use of deadly force in response to rock throwing.
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Source: soboco.org
“A man brutally beaten by police in June after he surrendered and lay down on the ground is now at risk of being deported.
Police officers in Santa Ana, California, beat Edgar Vargas Arzate on June 20, according to surveillance video of the incident and interviews with Arzate’s attorney. Arzate, who has struggled with addiction and mental health issues, went to visit the house of a friend, apparently not realizing that the friend no longer lived there, according to his attorney, public defender Frank Bittar. The new residents saw Arzate mumbling incoherently outside their house and called police.
Arzate ran when he saw the officers, leading them on a roughly four-block chase before he surrendered in the front yard of a neighbor’s home, Bittar said. In the video, Arzate can be seen lying facedown on the ground. The officers then begin to savagely beat Arzate, punching, kicking and swinging a flashlight at him.
“He’s lucky he wasn’t put in a wheelchair,” Bittar told HuffPost.
Once he was taken into custody, Arzate was charged with assaulting a police officer. The charge was then enhanced to a higher-level felony when police accused him of having “personally inflicted great bodily injury” on one particular officer who claimed to have broken his hand, according to the charging document.
On Monday, Arzate, 27, who came to the U.S. without documentation as a teenager, was riding with family members to a preliminary hearing to face the charges. Suddenly, three unmarked cars pulled the family over and Arzate was quickly taken into custody by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.
“They stopped them and made everyone get out of the car and then arrested my brother,” said Araceli Vargas, Arzate’s younger sister. “Right now he’s under immigration hold and we’re just waiting on a bail so we can get him out of jail again. I don’t know what’s going to happen next, honestly.”
“My mom told me that the ICE agents made her feel less than human,” Vargas continued. “My dad was so disappointed in the system. My grandpa was so scared, he’s been in bed since. My aunt started crying. Nothing had happened since June, he was just living his normal life, but we have cameras here and we saw the cars that stopped my brother yesterday morning — it was a gray Chevy Impala — they didn’t have markings, but they had been spying on us. They passed by the house at least four times that morning, so they knew what they were doing. Why did they wait until we were leaving the house and going to court?””
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Source: www.huffingtonpost.com
James F. Tomsheck, seen in 2009, was chief of internal affairs with U.S. Customs and Border Protection for eight years. He was removed in June.
Credit: Alex Brandon/Associated Press
More than two dozen people have died in violent clashes with U.S. Customs and Border Protection since 2010. Despite public outrage over some of the killings, no agent or officer has faced criminal charges – or public reprimand – to date.
Yet at least a quarter of the 28 deaths were “highly suspect,” said James F. Tomsheck, the agency’s recently removed head of internal affairs. In a sweeping and unauthorized interview with The Center for Investigative Reporting, he said the deaths raised serious questions about whether the use of lethal force was appropriate.
Instead, Tomsheck said, Border Patrol officials have consistently tried to change or distort facts to make fatal shootings by agents appear to be “a good shoot” and cover up any wrongdoing.
“In nearly every instance, there was an effort by Border Patrol leadership to make a case to justify the shooting versus doing a genuine, appropriate review of the information and the facts at hand,” he said.
Those comments and others represent the most scathing public criticism ever lodged against Customs and Border Protection from a high-ranking official at the nation’s largest law enforcement agency. Although Tomsheck was removed from the internal affairs office, he is assigned to the Border Patrol as its executive director for national programs.
Source: beta.cironline.org
VIDEO
A central Iowa Boy Scout troop just returned from a three-week trip they will likely never forget.
Source: www.kcci.com
More migrants’ lives could be saved with a few inexpensive adjustments in water availability, rescue beacons, and search-and-rescue capability. A directive by the Department of Homeland Security for the Border Patrol to establish water drums, particularly alongside rescue beacons, would be an important step to avoid preventable deaths on U.S. soil. Increasing the number of rescue beacons, as well as providing additional funds to expand Border Patrol Search, Trauma, and Rescue Unit teams (BORSTAR), particularly in southwest border sectors with high numbers of migrant deaths, could also help to assist migrants in distress.
Many of the recovered remains of migrants, which now number in the thousands, are unidentified. Local officials in Brooks County, Texas, estimate that the costs of dealing with the unidentified dead, including mortician fees and autopsies, amount to hundreds of thousands of dollars each year. No unified procedure exists to process remains and DNA samples of bodies found in the border region. Many remains have not had their DNA sampled, and there has been no consolidated effort to match the DNA of unidentified remains with family members searching for missing loved ones.
Measures such as the following would greatly contribute to identifying these remains and provide answers to family members of missing migrants about the whereabouts of their loved ones:
Immigration reform legislation currently before the U.S. Senate (S. 744) includes billions of dollars in new funding for border security. It makes no mention, however, of steps to prevent needless deaths of migrants on U.S. soil, or to help cash-strapped counties identify the dead. The current bill offers an important legislative opportunity to stem the rise of this alarming human tragedy on the U.S. side of the border.
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Source: www.wola.org
Texas recently sent 1000 National Guard to the border. That should prevent some deaths. But we need to prevent all the deaths.
Immigration policy is leading to broken families, children in crisis and border deaths.
Since border security has increased, deaths of (im)migrants and refugees has escalated.
The data: This year, an average of 31,410 captives were held daily in U.S. detention facilities. In 2012, 478,000 foreign nationals were detained — an all-time high. Officially, 2013 saw the second-highest number of migrant remains found on the U.S.-Mexico border.
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Source: www.washingtonpost.com
Gil Kerlikowske, head of Customs and Border Protection, tells NPR that he is reviewing scores of incidents. “We need to be better at admitting when we’re wrong or where we’ve made a mistake,” he says.
Source: www.npr.org
Vargas has been taken into custody at the McAllen Border Patrol Station.
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Source: colorlines.com
I wonder if the Border Patrol knows who they are messing with?
Detainees wrested from sleep every 30 minutes, the lights in their frigid cells never turned off. One detainee told by officials, don’t lie or you’ll be raped. Another detainee sexually abused by guards. Detainees forced to stand in stress positions. Others denied adequate food, water, and medical treatment and held in dehumanizing conditions. “Welcome to hell,” one guard told a detainee, a good metaphor for what occurs across these sites of torment.
These incidents don’t come from military prisons in Iraq or Afghanistan or CIA black sites. This has been happening for years along the Southwest border in U.S. government facilities run by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and its Border Patrol. The victims: children, some as young as infants, as documented in arecent complaint filed by a group of immigrant rights advocates who interviewed 116 unaccompanied children previously held in CBP custody.
Just as appalling, government agencies have known about these abuses for a long time, but failed to take action. Now, more children are vulnerable to harm in Border Patrol custody than ever before. Since October, 47,000 children have left their homes in Central America, mainly in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, for the United States. They flee destabilizing violence and crime fomented by criminal syndicates and gangs, more often than not without a loved one leading the way. With their fate far from certain, they make an arduous, perilous trek, sometimes spanning thousands of miles, in search of refuge in America. They risk it all, not so much in search of a better life, but simply to live.
Once here, many of these brave and resourceful children — who have already suffered abuse many times before throughout their lives — encounter not compassion and empathy from U.S. immigration officials but abuse. The most vulnerable are once again taught a cruel lesson: There’s nowhere safe for them to lay their heads down and just be children.
The advocates’ interviews with unaccompanied children are chilling.
One in four detained children reported physical abuse at the hands of CBP, including sexual assaults and beatings. More than half reported verbal abuse, including racist and sexist insults and even death threats, as well as the denial of urgent medical care. In one instance, a 14-year-old girl’s asthma medication was confiscated. She subsequently suffered multiple asthma attacks. After the first attack, CBP officials threatened her, telling her she better not be faking or else.
Seven out of ten interviewed reported detentions lasting longer than the 72-hour period mandated by law. Three out of ten children reported that their belongings were confiscated and never returned. Many others reported being shackled during transport, the metal restraints excruciatingly digging into their wrists and ankles. Eighty percent reported CBP personnel denied them adequate food and water.
Sometimes the cruelty shocks the conscience.
One 17-year-old girl, soaking wet, was placed in a frigid holding cell, which detained children commonly referred to as the hielera, or the freezer. Her only drinking water came from the toilet tank. When she had to use the toilet, she found herself exposed to other detainees and a wall-mounted security camera.
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Source: www.huffingtonpost.com