At Border Patrol Checkpoints, Many Complaints of Abuse, Few Immigrant Arrests, Report Finds
Drawing from thousands of pages of Border Patrol documents, a new report alleges that Border Patrol actions at interior checkpoints, and in “roving patrols” far from the international border, “violate border residents’ most basic civil and constitutional rights on a dramatic scale” and amount to a policy of “stop and frisk” for border residents.
Produced by the American Civil Liberties Union, the report suggests that complaints of civil-rights violations and other forms of abuse at the interior checkpoints are more numerous than the Homeland Security Department has disclosed. And the data suggests that the Border Patrol makes only a tiny percentage of its immigrant arrests at the checkpoints.
“Border Patrol’s own records show that the agency’s extra-constitutional police practices often result in abuses of border residents far into the interior of the country and with no consequences for the agents involved,” A.C.L.U. Attorney James Lyall said. “At a time of increasing national attention to police accountability, Congress and the Obama administration should not allow the Border Patrol to conceal this ugly reality from the American public.”
The report on the Border Patrol’s interior enforcement operations was released last week by the A.C.L.U. of Arizona. The organization drew from almost 6,000 pages of complaints, arrest data and other records it obtained after suing the Department of Homeland Security. The report is focused on the Border Patrol’s Tucson and Yuma sectors, in southern Arizona, but the A.C.L.U. contends that the patterns identified there likely extend across the U.S.-Mexico borderlands.
The Border Patrol operates hundreds of checkpoints in the U.S. interior, far from the international border – including two in Hudspeth County. The A.C.L.U. report draws from hundreds of complaints related to interior checkpoints in Arizona, between 2011 and 2014.
Scores of complaints accuse checkpoint agents of threatening behavior, excessive roughness and racial profiling. Motorists describe being threatened with assault rifles and tasers, having personal property destroyed or confiscated, enduring lengthy detentions after false alerts from Border Patrol canines and being interfered with while attempting to video-record agents’ activities. Many of the complaints allege that agents became aggressive after the driver asked why he or she was being detained for inspection.
In one complaint, a man describes being detained at a checkpoint after a service dog falsely alerted to his vehicle; after his release, the man found that agents had confiscated much of his prescription medication. In another complaint, a woman described being followed by a Border Patrol agents after leaving an interstate rest stop, 75 miles from the border, with her 4-year-old daughter in the vehicle. The agents tailgated her vehicle, the woman said, and an agent approached her vehicle with his hand on his weapon when she stopped. The agent claimed he had “probable cause” to stop her – but did not identify that cause, and agents searched through the family’s personal items before releasing them.
Border Patrol agents’ representatives in Arizona have disputed the report, saying that it misrepresents agents’ activities in the region.
“You know there is a lot of misconceptions that we are out there running around with machine guns and just harassing everybody,” Art del Cueto, president of the Border Patrol officers’ union in the Tucson Sector, told Arizona Public Media. “The reality is that we really truly believe in what we are doing. We believe in the cause of defending our nation, and we take our job very serious.”
The A.C.L.U. report alleges that Customs and Border Protection officials have dramatically underreported the number of complaints they receive. For fiscal years 2012 and 2013, for example, Homeland Security oversight agencies reported to Congress a total of three complaints nationwide of violations of the Fourth Amendment – the Constitutional prohibition against unreasonable searches and seizures. The records the A.C.L.U. obtained, however, contain 81 such complaints for the same period – in the Tucson and Yuma sectors alone. The report also notes that the Border Patrol has no consistent process for receiving complaints – and that complaint forms are not available in Spanish.
Information turned over to the A.C.L.U. was redacted and incomplete, the organization said. But the A.C.L.U. said that, of the 142 complaints it received, only one resulted in disciplinary action – in an incident that appeared to involve the son of a retired Border Patrol agent.
CBP officials have not commented on the report, but have pointed to statements by CBP Commissioner R. Gil Kerlikowske, who took up the leadership post in March 2014 and has said that he wants to make “openness and accountability” “top priorities” at the Border Patrol.
In “roving patrol” stops in the interior of the country, “many agents refused to provide motorists with any explanation at all” for the stops, the A.C.L.U. report said.
“One woman demanded to know why she was pulled over in Tucson, 60 miles from the border,” the report said, and “agents told her, ‘We’ll think of something.’”
The A.C.L.U. alleges a culture of impunity in the Border Patrol. Not only does the agency fail to investigate or discipline abuses, the report alleges, but “some of the records show Border Patrol tacitly or explicitly encouraging its agents to violate the law.” Unless the matter is related to a question of immigration status, federal law requires an agent to have reasonable suspicion to conduct a secondary inspection at a checkpoint. Training documents obtained by the A.C.L.U. indicate that some new agents are not informed of this legal requirement – or are told that reasonable suspicion is “just ‘generally’ required,” the report said.
The report also calls into question CBP claims about the effectiveness of interior checkpoints. According to the CBP data, less than 1 percent of apprehensions in the Tucson sector in 2013 occurred at interior checkpoints, and nine of the sector’s 23 checkpoints “produced zero arrests of ‘deportable subjects’” in 2013. The documents show that the vast majority of people arrested at southern Arizona checkpoints – as, historically, at checkpoints in Hudspeth County – are U.S. citizens.
“The high percentage of U.S. citizen arrests illustrate what many border residents already know from experience,” the report says, “Border Patrol agents at checkpoints are often more concerned with finding drugs than with immigration enforcement, notwithstanding U.S. Supreme Court precedent prohibiting general ‘crime control’ checkpoints.
“The records support the contention,” the report says, “that, in the words of Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Alex Kozinski, there is ‘reason to suspect the agents working these checkpoints are looking for more than illegal aliens. If this is true, it subverts the rationale of [the Supreme Court decision] and turns a legitimate administrative search into a massive violation of the Fourth Amendment.”