Border Patrol ‘shadow unit’ protects agents, groups say
Border Patrol has special, secretive units that work to cover up any wrongdoing when agents kill someone or otherwise use force in potentially problematic ways, according to a letter sent to Congress on Thursday calling for an investigation.
These “shadow police units,” the letter says, have been operating since at least 1987 and without any actual authority under federal law. They do not appear in Department of Homeland Security documents as official entities.
The letter, written by the Southern Border Communities Coalition and Alliance San Diego, condemns the use of these units, which documentation shows have different names depending on their location.
The units “have allowed border agents to get away with nearly everything, including murder,” the letter says. It was sent to leaders of Senate and House judiciary, homeland security and oversight committees.
“Their stated mission is to mitigate liability for agents,” said Andrea Guerrero, executive director of Alliance San Diego, quoting from a presentation created by San Diego’s Border Patrol unit and obtained by a journalist, John Carlos Frey. “In other words, their mission is protect agents, not the public.”
When asked about the units, a spokesperson with Customs and Border Protection who declined to be named said that the agency has a “multitiered oversight framework in place to address allegations of misconduct involving agency personnel.”
“The U.S. Border Patrol maintains teams with specialized evidence collection capabilities across the southwest border,” the unnamed spokesperson said. “These teams consist of highly trained personnel available to respond around the clock to collect and process evidence related to CBP enforcement activities as well as critical incidents.”
The letter to Congress is the product of months of research and analysis, Guerrero said, and wouldn’t have happened without information that surfaced in a San Diego case.
She and other human rights attorneys investigating the 2010 killing of Anastasio Hernández Rojas at the San Ysidro Port of Entry found indications that the unit based in San Diego had tampered with and even destroyed evidence in the case to protect the agents involved.
Guerrero and her team found that the San Diego unit, called the sector’s Critical Incident Investigative Team, was the first to be notified after Hernández Rojas was beaten and tasered on the ground at the port of entry. The unit never notified San Diego police, which would have had jurisdiction over the criminal investigation. The local department found out about the incident after a media inquiry and arrived on scene a day later.
The Critical Incident Investigative Team controlled witness lists and were present at every interview during the San Diego police investigation, the letter says, and the team removed phrasing in the apprehension report for Hernández Rojas that said he was compliant before handing the report to San Diego police.
The Critical Incident Investigative Team was also present at the hospital soon after Hernández Rojas arrived and asked medical staff to draw his blood to test for drugs. Hospital records obtained by Guerrero’s team show that the blood was drawn but there were no results. The one blood test with results in his medical record indicates that there were no drugs detected. However, the letter says, the medical examiner in the case used a different blood sample — that had no chain of custody information — to determine that Hernández Rojas had meth in his body.
“It was this determination that led the Justice Department to decline to prosecute for murder,” the letter says. “This raises serious questions about ‘the unit’s’ interference.”
The letter identifies several other cases in which such units have had access to and possibly tampered with evidence.