We have been presented with scenes of Border Patrol agents on horseback and “whips” rounding up people as if they were cattle in Del Rio, Texas. News commentators and black activists were outraged. President Joe Biden was so embarrassed by the “optics” that he forbade Border Patrol activities on horseback in Del Rio. We read stories like this:
One agent still on horseback commanded Mr. (name redacted) to re-join the group. While Mr. (name redacted) was walking with his hands on his head the Border Patrol agent while on his horse, was hitting him on the head with his lasso. After warning the agent several times to stop hitting him, Mr. (name redacted) could no longer stand the pain from the lasso hitting his scalp and ran. The agent still on his horse, again chased Mr. (name redacted) down and bumped Mr. (name redacted) with the horse. Mr. (name redacted) fell to the ground on his stomach and face down. That is when Mr. (name redacted) felt a “warm” feeling on his back after hearing a single gunshot. He had been shot the agent. The agent then yelled “oh fuck, oh fuck” and left the scene.
Well, actually you probably never read about this, and no, this wasn’t one of those Haitian migrants you saw being “rounded-up” by Border Patrol agents. The victim was Jesus Castro Romo, and the incident occurred in 2010. The above was a statement from a document in a court case which never would have been heard save for the embarrassing revelation that the border agent who claimed that he shot Castro Romo for throwing a rock at him was later charged and convicted of taking payoffs from drug smugglers. This kind of thing has been going on for a long, long time; in 1924 when the Border Patrol was first established, agents on horseback were used to “round-up” Chinese migrants crossing the border in enforcement of the “exclusion” laws. In a 2017 The Atlantic article, we saw this; note the caption:
In a 2018 report in The Guardian, from 2005 to 2017 the Treasury Department paid out $47 million in 1,300 cases to victims of “reckless driving” by Border Patrol agents; perhaps “reckless riding” could be added to that. In the 40 court cases that the Guardian was able to review that involved these activities, six were fatal incidents, and 18 involved “amputations and disabilities.” The report noted that the Treasury Department was “cutting a check” to cover a claim against the Border Patrol every 32 hours, to the amount of $177 million. But these payments only constituted payouts from a “poverty fund” that the Border Patrol accessed because it didn’t have enough funds to cover the cost of its malfeasance from its own budget. Cases and payments are generally kept “secret” by the courts, and this means, as an ACLU spokesman noted, this allowed not just a cloak of silence around the issue, but hid cases—particularly those involving unjustified homicide—that were never heard.
Yet one cannot ignore the hypocrisy of the national news media on this issue. Haitians have received largely sympathetic treatment outside the usual far-right suspects because they are black, and thus apparently deserve “special consideration” more than what the merely "brown-skinned" migrants receive on the national level; the use of horses and “whips” can still be used against Hispanic migrants because, well, who cares about them. They probably “deserve” the abuse anyways. It is up to local news outlets whose reporting is generally ignored by the national media that has to fill in the gaps of people’s awareness. The Arizona Republic published a “special report” in 2014 concerning the “cloak of silence” involving fatal encounters with Border Patrol agents, including that of a teenager named Jose Antonia Elena Rodriguez, who was shot at least 10 times in the back and in the head by at least one border agent while he was on the Mexican side of the border.
The later Guardian story offered a follow-up, noting that agent Lonnie Swartz, who was found to have fired 16 bullets at Rodriguez, was found “innocent” of murder. The Guardian also noted the similar case of Sergio Adrian Hernandez Guereca. His case reached the U.S. Supreme Court, which refused to rule on whether persons killed by U.S. government agents specifically during a border incident had any constitutional right to redress. Sent back to a lower court, the case was dismissed. Despite the seemingly high number of cases that do reach the “settlement” phase, the difficulty in getting such cases heard means that those that are in simply a drop in the bucket.
The Republic report noted that Border Patrol agents faced few repercussions even when they “mistakenly” killed U.S. citizens they assumed were “illegal.” In the nine-year period it examined, the Border Patrol acted with such impunity that even killing 13 U.S. citizens by on-duty agents failed to make a dent on the national conscious. According to the Republic, at the Border Patrol, “internal discipline is a black hole.” Confirming what was said in The Guardian report, the Republic notes that “There have been no publicly disclosed repercussions—even when, as has happened at least three times, agents shot unarmed teenagers in the back. That appearance of a lack of accountability has been fed by a culture of secrecy about the agents’ use of deadly force.” Furthermore, while most agents act with restraint and do not have itchy trigger fingers, most agents nevertheless appear to be under the impression that they were protected by the "handcuffs off” policy on the use of deadly force long before it was made “official” by the Trump administration:
CBP leaders refuse to release their policies, calling them law-enforcement sensitive. They won’t disclose the names of agents who use deadly force. They won’t say, in any instance, whether deadly force was justified. The lack of transparency goes against the “best practices” that national police organizations recommend for dealing with deadly-force incidents.
The Republic noted that most of the deadly incidents involving Border Patrol agents were similar to other cases where agents did not feel the need to resort to deadly force, suggesting that the problem was individual agents themselves—and who believed their actions were “protected” by Border Patrol policies. Further, it was determined that agents do not know of any policy limiting their use of lethal force; whether one uses it or not is entirely dependent upon the character of the border agent. The ones that have no “character” are apparently the ones that Texas Gov. Greg Abbott says that he has a “job” waiting for them if any are fired over the Del Rio caper.
Of course there are precedents for this kind of thing; after Bellevue, WA police officer Mike Hetle was allowed to “quit” the department after the killing of an unarmed Hispanic man in 2001, he found a job with the Department of Homeland Security; obviously he was of the right “temperament.” Hetle was then hired as a “security expert” by NASA; apparently no one bothered to look into his past, or thought it was very important, which became clear when he was charged with murder last year in the killing of his black neighbor over an argument about trash. A year later, the case still awaits trial. That is if anyone cares, the national news media for example; and it all began because someone didn’t think that the life of a Hispanic man didn’t matter enough to care about, and which is the reality on the border.
No comments:
Post a Comment