New York Times: “10 Shots Across the Border”

The death of a Mexican teenager four years ago in Nogales, Mexico and its aftermath has again led to serious questions about the agency’s use of excessive force as well as corruption within Customs and Border Protection’s (CBP) Border Patrol. In 2012, when Nogales police and the Border Patrol were alerted to two drug smugglers at the border wall that splits Nogales, one Border Patrol officer, Lonnie Ray Swartz, who claimed that rocks were being thrown at the officers, opened fire. He shot sixteen-year-old José Antonio Elena Rodríguez on the Mexican side of the border. Rodriguez’s death was, in the words of James F. Tomsheck, who at the time led CBP’s Office of Internal Affairs, the “most egregious’’ of any excessive-force cases he’d seen at the agency, telling the New York Times that he felt ‘‘angry and sickened. Even if he had been throwing rocks previously—it’s conceivable, but there’s no evidence. But this was evidence of a Border Patrol agent shooting an unarmed boy.’’ By not charging the agent, Tomsheck said, the message would be that it’s “open season at the border.’’

Tomsheck, who has since left the agency, has been a severe critic of CBP’s handling of violence and abuse claims as well as CBP leadership, which he said had ‘‘a well-established history of intentional misinformation. Having sat through these meetings for years, after every one of these shootings, there’s an effort to spin and distort facts and obscure a clear understanding of what actually occurred.’’ In his position in Internal Affairs at the agency, he claimed that he held little actual power to investigate and remedy the misconduct claims. “We had a mandate to hold the Border Patrol accountable but were given very few to no authorities to do that job,’’ he told the New York Times.  ‘‘From Day 1, they aggressively resisted every effort.’’

In the past years, CPB has been accused of many instances of excessive force and abuse, including the shooting death of a Mexican man who was at a park with his family when a Border Patrol boat opened fire on a crowd of people, as well as other instances. A 2013 investigation by the Arizona Republic found that since 2005, CBP agents had killed forty-two people, and few had faced any repercussions even when the justification for the shooting was in doubt. While on average one CBP officer was arrested every day between 2005 and 2012—144 of them for corruption-level offenses—historically, Border Patrol agents have been rarely disciplined for misconduct allegations. In the case of Rodríguez, the officer who killed him was indicted three years after the teenager’s death, and only after the family’s civil lawsuit against the officer brought the case to public attention.  

One possible reason for the increase in misconduct cases over the years has been the dramatic surge in the number of border agents after September 11, along with the militarization of the agency. The number of Border Patrol agents doubled from 11,000 to 22,000, during President Bush’s second term, and the border patrol received such military hardware as drones, assault rifles, and Black Hawk helicopters. This arguably resulted in inexperienced agents with excessive firepower and a military-like mindset who often escalated tense situations.

In their defense, CBP agency leaders have said that critics don’t understand the threats Border Patrol agents face, and that it’s easy for those to judge who don’t “wear green,” a reference to the border patrol uniforms. With dangerous drug cartels operating on the border, agents must be vigilant in the threat of extreme violence. "Anything that is out there can be used against our agents," Hector Garza, spokesman for the Laredo local of the border agents union, told the Los Angeles Times. "Mesquite wood, firearms, rocks, you name it." The National Border Patrol Council, which exclusively represents approximately 18,000 Border Patrol Agents and support personnel, claims that despite being one of the largest law enforcement agencies in the US, Border Patrol agents “use lethal force seven times less than the average law enforcement officer nationwide. The facts don't lie, we stand by our agents and the truth.”

New York Times: “U.S. to Further Scour Social Media Use of Visa and Asylum Seekers”

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is building tools to examine social media accounts of visa applicants as well as those seeking asylum or refugee status in the US for possible terrorism ties. At a congressional hearing last month, Francis X. Taylor, Under Secretary for Intelligence and Analysis, the top counterterrorism official at DHS, said after the mass shooting in San Bernardino “we saw that our efforts are not as robust as they need to be,” and therefore would start to examine posts on Twitter, Facebook, and other social media sites.

This DHS announcement comes after terrorist groups, most prominently the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, have been increasingly successful in using social media sites to spread propaganda, encourage independent terrorist attacks, and as a recruitment tool. Previous to DHS’s announcement, Senator John McCain introduced a bill that would require the DHS to screen social media sites for refugees and those visiting or immigrating to the US, and Representative Vern Buchanan has additionally introduced a bill mirroring McCain's that requires the DHS to examine all public records, including “Facebook and other forms of social media,” as part of the routine security background check.

“This legislation adds an important and necessary layer of screening that will go a long way in properly vetting the online activities of those wishing to enter the United States,” Representative Michael McCaul, chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, told the New York Times. “A simple check of social media accounts of foreign travelers and visa applicants will help ensure that those who have participated in, pledged allegiance to or communicated with terrorist organizations cannot enter the United States.” While Congress has yet to act on the proposed legislation, in December, twenty-two Democratic lawmakers urged DHS to examine social media accounts for those seeking US visas.

Melanie Nezer, Vice President for Policy & Advocacy at HIAS, an agency that assists in refugee resettlement, commented to the New York Times about DHS’s social media plans: “We haven’t seen the policy, but it is a concern considering the already lengthy and opaque process that refugees have to go through. It could keep out people who are not a threat.” The American Civil Liberties Union of Maine agreed, telling WMTW News, an ABC affiliate: “We already have a rigorous and multi-layered security screening program in place for refugee resettlement that works. This proposal will only serve to further stigmatize immigrants and divide our country."

DHS’s new plan to review social media accounts comes after they abandoned a similar proposal in 2011. Currently, US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), an agency of DHS, examines social media accounts as part of the screening process for certain Syrian refugees, but only when there is a "hit" in an intelligence database for the applicant or if there is a security concern stemming from the interview with immigration officials. DHS says they are now hoping to automate the social media review, as a huge amount of messages and other data will need to be processed, as well as make additional hires to conduct the necessary social media security checks.

While data mining experts such as John Elder, who has worked with the Internal Revenue Service and the Postal Service on fraud detection, believe that analyzing social media accounts of millions of people who enter the US each year is feasible, other stress that conducting a thorough and accurate review would be very difficult. David Heyman, a former Assistant Secretary of Policy for DHS, told the New York Times: “You have to be careful how you design the proposal to screen people,” he said. “Artificial intelligence and algorithms have a poor ability to discern sarcasm or parody.”

Huffington Post: “Democratic Lawmakers Want Kids In Immigration Proceedings To Get a Fair Shot”

Many unaccompanied minors in deportation hearings do not have legal representation, and a new bill sponsored by Democratic senators proposes to change this. The bill, called “Fair Day in Court for Kids Act,” led by Senators Harry Reid, Bob Menendez, Patrick Leahy, Patty Murray, and Dick Durbin, proposes to ensure that children in immigration proceedings have access to lawyers, legal orientation programs, and post-release services. It also applies to "vulnerable individuals," defined as people with a disability or victims of abuse, torture, or violence.

In a speech on the Senator floor introducing the bill, Senator Reid discussed the importance of dealing with the humanitarian crisis from Central America, noting that thousands of migrants, mainly women and children, have fled the region to escape extreme violence, human trafficking, drug trafficking, sexual assaults, and widespread corruption and have come to the US seeking asylum. He said:

These refugees should have help in making their asylum request. And that means that they need a lawyer. Under current U.S. law, there is no right to appointed counsel in non-criminal immigration removal proceedings, even if the person in question is a child. Imagine that. These children, who don’t speak English and are in a new country, are unreasonably expected to represent themselves in a court of law?

Having legal representation can prove critical for women and children in deportation proceedings, as a study by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University found that children were allowed to remain in the US in seventy-three percent of cases in which they had representation, according to data from fiscal years 2012 to 2014. Children without representation were only allowed to stay in fifteen percent of cases. "Trying to win asylum without a lawyer is like playing Russian roulette," Gregory Chen, Director of Advocacy for the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA), said on a call with media.

While some groups, including Kids In Need of Defense (KIND) help provide attorneys for children in deportation proceedings, and the Justice Department provided grants in 2014 for attorneys to assist, currently only about a third of minors are going through the immigration process with legal counsel, according to the latest data. "It's just so patently unfair to put these kids through this process unless they have some help," Wendy Young, president of KIND, told the Huffington Post. For deportees returned to the highly dangerous Central American region, a Guardian report found many of them including minors were killed after their return to their home countries.

The legislation will likely face opposition from the Republican-controlled Congress. In a congressional hearing earlier this month, several Republican panel members blamed President Obama’s lax immigration policies for attracting the surge of migrants and children from Central America. Congressman Trey Gowdy said that migrant children are told that once in the US they should find an immigration officer and claim asylum, and he charged the Obama administration with not conducting adequate background checks on the people who sponsor the newly-arrived children, leading to their possible exploitation, he asserted.