By Kate Morrissey for Capital & Primary
President Donald Trump’s nominee to run Customs and Border Safety has been accused of collaborating in an alleged company cover-up after officers killed a person within the strategy of deporting him in 2010.
The household of Anastasio Hernández Rojas is ready on a choice from a world human rights tribunal that carried out a yearslong investigation into his killing and alleged torture and subsequent denial of justice.
Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) despatched a letter to the Division of Homeland Safety final week asking for paperwork associated to the case in preparation for Wednesday’s affirmation listening to of Rodney Scott, who oversaw a particular workforce that attorneys for the household say helped the officers concerned within the 2010 incident escape prosecution.
“I’ve critical considerations in regards to the gross failures of integrity and management he has proven,” Wyden wrote within the letter to Homeland Safety Secretary Kristi Noem.
Scott was appearing deputy chief patrol agent of the San Diego Border Patrol Sector in 2010 when border officers beat Hernández Rojas and shocked him with a Taser till he stopped respiratory. Hernández Rojas died in a hospital days later.
Within the aftermath of the killing, a Border Patrol investigative workforce that Scott oversaw on the time started working the case though the San Diego Police Division’s murder workforce had jurisdiction. Through the years, that Border Patrol workforce has been accused of protecting up and even tampering with proof each in Hernández Rojas’ case and in different situations of officers or brokers utilizing doubtlessly extreme pressure.
“Provided that CBP is the biggest legislation enforcement company within the nation and the least accountable, we ought to be very involved about placing somebody on the head of that company whose disregard for abuse of energy might endanger the nation,” mentioned Andrea Guerrero, govt director of Alliance San Diego and one of many attorneys who represented Hernández Rojas’ household within the worldwide human rights case.
Scott, who served as the pinnacle of U.S. Border Patrol through the first Trump administration, didn’t reply to a request for remark from Capital & Primary. The White Home additionally didn’t reply to a request for remark.
Scott’s affiliation with the Hernández Rojas case isn’t the one a part of his previous that immigrant rights activists discover problematic along with his nomination.
For instance, Scott was a member of a Border Patrol agent Fb group that ProPublica discovered was full of racist and sexist posts.
He served as deputy chief patrol agent for the San Diego Sector when brokers there used effigies of migrants as goal apply and used those self same effigies to show youngsters how you can shoot weapons.
However it’s his oversight of Border Patrol’s investigative models that has advocates notably involved. It’s not clear whether or not Scott ever labored on the unit himself, however it’s clear that he was in a supervisory place to the workforce on the time of Hernández Rojas’ loss of life.
Interfering With Justice
To hunt justice after the U.S. authorities determined to not prosecute brokers concerned in Hernández Rojas’ loss of life, his members of the family labored with attorneys to submit a case to the Inter-American Fee on Human Rights in 2016. The fee is a part of the Group of American States, of which the U.S. is a member.
It was through the subsequent work to collect proof for that case that attorneys representing the household found that Border Patrol sectors had particular investigative models whose position, in response to a PowerPoint doc from the San Diego Sector, included defending officers from legal responsibility.
Referred to as important incident groups, important incident investigative groups, or proof assortment groups, the models responded to what the Border Patrol known as important incidents, or “incident(s) involving CBP personnel that leads to a critical harm, a loss of life, a use of lethal or extreme pressure, or widespread media consideration,” in response to a Authorities Accountability Workplace report.
The groups have been homegrown inside Border Patrol and weren’t formally licensed to research agent use of pressure. The Biden administration disbanded them in 2022 after attorneys engaged on the Hernández Rojas case publicized their existence.
The Inter-American Fee on Human Rights has mentioned that nations are supposed to make sure that the individuals investigating in-custody deaths are impartial each hierarchically and institutionally. Having the Border Patrol examine its personal brokers’ wrongdoing falls in need of that requirement, however paperwork within the Hernández Rojas case present that the investigative workforce’s involvement went past a possible battle of curiosity.
All of it started when, one night in Could 2010, a gaggle of border officers that included members of Border Patrol, Customs and Border Safety, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement beat, kicked, knelt on and used a Taser on Hernández Rojas whereas he was handcuffed and face down on the bottom on the San Ysidro Port of Entry within the walkway that deportees went all the way down to return to Mexico, in response to police data. He stopped respiratory and was taken to a hospital, the place he died three days later.
On the scene, officers allegedly deleted movies from the telephones of witnesses, and the Important Incident Investigative Crew started its work. Nobody contacted the San Diego Police Division till the following day, when a radio journalist known as to inquire in regards to the case, in response to police data.
“It was such a clusterfuck,” mentioned Ron Newquist, who on the time labored as a murder investigator for the San Diego Police Division and has since retired from the pressure. “When the mud had settled, all of the witnesses have been gone. Individuals who have been concerned within the bodily wrestle with Anastasio have been gone. Individuals have been pointing double fingers in each instructions.”
A Border Patrol briefing doc that’s a part of police data from the day after the beating exhibits that the Border Patrol Important Incident Investigative Crew was “coordinating” the investigation with San Diego police. However the Important Incident Investigative Crew’s report was by no means given to police, Newquist mentioned.
In accordance with a letter despatched by Alliance San Diego to the San Diego District Lawyer’s workplace in 2021 calling for officers concerned within the alleged cover-up to be investigated, a duplicate of the Border Patrol workforce’s report is beneath protecting seal and comprises a model of the arrest report from when a Border Patrol agent apprehended Hernández Rojas crossing the border that’s totally different from what was given to San Diego police. The letter alleges {that a} part of the arrest report narrative that might contradict the company’s claims that Hernández Rojas was aggressive previous to the beating was eliminated.
Whistleblowers who labored within the oversight department of Customs and Border Safety got here ahead through the worldwide human rights case to say that an official within the highest ranks of the company in Washington had tried to spin what occurred and had even given orders to falsify reviews.
Members of the Border Patrol investigative workforce have been current for interviews with witnesses in addition to the post-mortem, in response to police data. Brokers additionally issued an administrative subpoena for Hernández Rojas’ medical data on the hospital after which declined to offer them to San Diego police, citing medical privateness considerations. A briefing filed with the fee by attorneys representing Hernández Rojas says that Scott signed the subpoena since he was in control of the San Diego Sector on the time.
One of the vital obtrusive items of lacking proof for San Diego police is video footage of what occurred from authorities cameras within the space.
“We by no means received the video we have been hoping to get — that you simply assume you’d get on the port of entry to the busiest border on the planet,” Newquist mentioned. “The [police] report reads like a runaround. I feel there’s sufficient verbiage in there that it speaks for itself.”
Within the police report, investigators documented an in depth back-and-forth with Customs and Border Safety and Border Patrol. The police detective mentioned within the report that he discovered that Border Patrol had forwarded footage to its investigators, however when an agent later gave a CD of footage to the police detective, it was for the mistaken time-frame. Officers then punted the detective amongst brokers and officers till finally he discovered that the footage had been written over by new recordings.
“I’m not saying there was a cover-up,” Newquist mentioned. “Perhaps it was simply incompetence, and so they have been so sloppy, they have been embarrassed. However once you begin dropping movies, and also you don’t get the medical stuff, you might infer what you need.”
The consequence, in response to attorneys representing the household of Hernández Rojas, was a violation of the suitable of entry to justice.
Defending the Brokers
It’s not clear whether or not Scott ever labored on a important incident workforce himself, however a questionnaire from a 2019 job posting exhibits that Customs and Border Safety seen participation on these groups favorably within the promotion course of.
What is obvious, lawyer Guerrero mentioned, is that Scott supervised the workforce when he labored within the higher ranks of the San Diego Sector, together with through the Hernández Rojas investigation and after.
In 2016, a lady agent filed a lawsuit over a hidden digital camera {that a} man agent put in in a ladies’s lavatory and altering room utilized by members of the Important Incident Investigative Crew. In accordance with courtroom data, Scott and one other supervising agent confronted the person, who was additionally a member of the investigative workforce, after a lady agent found the digital camera.
In his time in management, Scott confirmed himself to be fast to defend agent actions, even in questionable circumstances.
In 2012, when Scott was deputy chief of the sector, a San Diego Border Patrol agent shot and killed Valeria Tachiquín, a 32-year-old U.S. citizen and mom, on a residential avenue in Chula Vista, California.
“It doesn’t matter what I do,” the girl’s father, Valentin Tachiquín, instructed reporters in 2022. “My daughter gained’t ever come again to me and to her youngsters, and it’s very unhappy.”
Tachiquín was inside a house the place brokers in plainclothes appeared with a warrant on the lookout for another person. Tachiquín tried to go away, and an agent adopted her.
Tachiquín ended up useless in her automotive, her windshield riddled with bullet holes.
Scott, who arrived on the scene whereas the investigation was ongoing, instructed reporters that Tachiquín had struck the agent together with her automotive and that the agent shot her in self-defense. However a number of witnesses, together with a U.S. Marine Corps veteran, instructed native information retailers that they noticed the agent standing on the road in entrance of the automotive, which was slowly transferring in reverse, when he fired his gun.
That was the primary time, Guerrero mentioned, that she had seen Border Patrol give a press release at first of an energetic investigation into one in every of its brokers’ use of pressure.
In the meantime, Prince Watson, the veteran who’d witnessed the taking pictures, instructed information retailers that Border Patrol brokers locked him of their patrol automotive when he refused to talk with them about what he’d seen. Watson mentioned the brokers saved saying that the agent had been hit by the automotive and was on the hood when he fired his gun, as if attempting to get Watson to undertake their model of the story.
“That’s a transparent disregard for investigative protocol and an instance of how investigations of brokers are routinely obstructed,” Guerrero mentioned.
ABC 10News later discovered that the agent who shot Tachiquín had beforehand resigned from the Imperial County Sheriff’s Division after being instructed he could be fired for misconduct that included mendacity.
“[Scott] has by no means been part of any significant try at accountability with brokers. Each shoot is a ‘good shoot.’ That’s very Border Patrol language,” Guerrero mentioned.
“And an individual who can’t acknowledge abuse of energy is an individual who shouldn’t maintain energy,” she added.
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Scott’s stance on the border and the brokers who work it appear to be carefully tied to his non secular beliefs. He beforehand instructed a KQED journalist that “the primary deportation and the primary borders have been created in Genesis.”
Pedro Rios, director of the American Mates Service Committee’s U.S./Mexico Border Program, recalled a telephone dialog with Scott after Border Patrol brokers arrested religion leaders protesting mistreatment of migrants by approaching the wall at its westernmost level in December 2018. He mentioned Scott instructed him the religion leaders’ actions “didn’t actually replicate what a real dedication to God meant.”
In 2020, Scott turned chief of Border Patrol nationwide. He retired in August 2021 through the Biden administration after refusing to go together with a few of the president’s coverage modifications, together with eliminating authorities use of the controversial phrase “unlawful alien.”
Scott’s affirmation listening to was held on April 30.
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