© The Independent, UK
Since 2005, patrol agents and CBP officers have killed some 42 people along the US-Mexican border without facing any public consequences – or any large-scale media coverage.
On 28 May 28 2010, 42-year-old Anastacio Hernandez Rojas was detained by US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents while attempting to enter California from Mexico, at the San Ysidro border crossing near San Diego. Hernandez Rojas had previously spent 25 years living as an undocumented immigrant north of the border, where he worked as a swimming pool plasterer and fathered five American-born children.
That evening, he was in the process of being deported back into Mexico when he was handcuffed and hog-tied on the tarmac close to the border, and surrounded by more than a dozen CBP agents and Border Patrol officers, who kicked and beat him until several of his ribs were broken.
As he pleaded for help, one officer reportedly yanked down the Mexican's trousers and shocked him with a taser gun at least five times. All told, the attack went on for almost half an hour. Hernandez Rojas was admitted to hospital, where, three days later, he died of his injuries.
San Ysidro is the busiest border crossing on Earth, so there were numerous eyewitnesses to the incident, several of whom recorded the violent scene on their phones.
Their videos undermine the official report, which claimed that Hernandez Rojas was hostile and combative. The San Diego medical examiner ruled his death a homicide, but the US attorney decided that the CBP response had been "appropriate".
When the victim's widow filed a wrongful death suit, her attorney Eugene Iredale asked to view the footage from the CBP's own closed-circuit cameras. "There are video cameras throughout the facility," Iredale recently told the Arizona Republic.
"But somehow, the video cameras weren't turned on, or they were facing the other way. I could say something cynical, but I don't need to."
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