By Kate Morrissey for Capital & Important
President Donald Trump’s nominee to run Customs and Border Safety has been accused of taking part in an alleged company cover-up after officers killed a person within the means 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 group that attorneys for the household say helped the officers concerned within the 2010 incident escape prosecution.
“I have serious concerns about the gross failures of integrity and leadership he has shown,” Wyden wrote within the letter to Homeland Safety Secretary Kristi Noem.
Scott was performing 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 respiration. Hernández Rojas died in a hospital days later.
Within the aftermath of the killing, a Border Patrol investigative group that Scott oversaw on the time started working the case although the San Diego Police Division’s murder group had jurisdiction. Over time, that Border Patrol group has been accused of overlaying up and even tampering with proof each in Hernández Rojas’ case and in different situations of officers or brokers utilizing probably extreme power.
“Given that CBP is the largest law enforcement agency in the country and the least accountable, we should be very concerned about putting someone at the head of that agency whose disregard for abuse of power could endanger the country,” stated Andrea Guerrero, government 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 in the course of the first Trump administration, didn’t reply to a request for remark from Capital & Important. 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 together with his nomination.
For instance, Scott was a member of a Border Patrol agent Fb group that ProPublica discovered was stuffed with 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 follow and used those self same effigies to show youngsters easy methods to shoot weapons.
However it’s his oversight of Border Patrol’s investigative items 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 group on the time of Hernández Rojas’ demise.
Interfering With Justice
To hunt justice after the U.S. authorities determined to not prosecute brokers concerned in Hernández Rojas’ demise, 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 in the course of the subsequent work to collect proof for that case that attorneys representing the household found that Border Patrol sectors had particular investigative items whose function, in accordance with a PowerPoint doc from the San Diego Sector, included defending officers from legal responsibility.
Known as vital incident groups, vital incident investigative groups, or proof assortment groups, the items responded to what the Border Patrol known as vital incidents, or “incident(s) involving CBP personnel that results in a serious injury, a death, a use of deadly or excessive force, or widespread media attention,” in accordance with a Authorities Accountability Workplace report.
The groups had been homegrown inside Border Patrol and weren’t formally licensed to research agent use of power. 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 stated that nations are supposed to make sure that the folks investigating in-custody deaths are unbiased 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 group’s involvement went past a possible battle of curiosity.
All of it started when, one night in Might 2010, a bunch 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 accordance with police information. He stopped respiration 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 Workforce started its work. Nobody contacted the San Diego Police Division till the subsequent day, when a radio journalist known as to inquire concerning the case, in accordance with police information.
“It was such a clusterfuck,” stated Ron Newquist, who on the time labored as a murder investigator for the San Diego Police Division and has since retired from the power. “When the dust had settled, all the witnesses were gone. People who were involved in the physical struggle with Anastasio were gone. People were pointing double fingers in both directions.”
A Border Patrol briefing doc that’s a part of police information from the day after the beating exhibits that the Border Patrol Important Incident Investigative Workforce was “coordinating” the investigation with San Diego police. However the Important Incident Investigative Workforce’s report was by no means given to police, Newquist stated.
In keeping 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 group’s report is underneath protecting seal and accommodates 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 in the course of 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 stories.
Members of the Border Patrol investigative group had been current for interviews with witnesses in addition to the post-mortem, in accordance with police information. Brokers additionally issued an administrative subpoena for Hernández Rojas’ medical information on the hospital after which declined to provide 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 answerable for the San Diego Sector on the time.
One of the crucial obtrusive items of lacking proof for San Diego police is video footage of what occurred from authorities cameras within the space.
“We never got the video we were hoping to get — that you think you would get at the port of entry to the busiest border in the world,” Newquist stated. “The [police] report reads like a runaround. I think there’s enough verbiage in there that it speaks for itself.”
Within the police report, investigators documented an intensive back-and-forth with Customs and Border Safety and Border Patrol. The police detective stated within the report that he realized 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 unsuitable time-frame. Officers then punted the detective amongst brokers and officers till ultimately he realized that the footage had been written over by new recordings.
“I’m not saying there was a cover-up,” Newquist stated. “Maybe it was just incompetence, and they were so sloppy, they were embarrassed. But when you start losing videos, and you don’t get the medical stuff, you could infer what you want.”
The outcome, in accordance with 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 vital incident group 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 evident, lawyer Guerrero stated, is that Scott supervised the group when he labored within the higher ranks of the San Diego Sector, together with in the course of the Hernández Rojas investigation and after.
In 2016, a girl agent filed a lawsuit over a hidden digicam {that a} man agent put in in a ladies’s toilet and altering room utilized by members of the Important Incident Investigative Workforce. In keeping with court docket information, Scott and one other supervising agent confronted the person, who was additionally a member of the investigative group, after a girl agent found the digicam.
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 road in Chula Vista, California.
“It doesn’t matter what I do,” the girl’s father, Valentin Tachiquín, informed reporters in 2022. “My daughter won’t ever come back to me and to her children, and it’s very sad.”
Tachiquín was inside a house the place brokers in plainclothes appeared with a warrant searching for another person. Tachiquín tried to go away, and an agent adopted her.
Tachiquín ended up useless in her automobile, her windshield riddled with bullet holes.
Scott, who arrived on the scene whereas the investigation was ongoing, informed reporters that Tachiquín had struck the agent together with her automobile and that the agent shot her in self-defense. However a number of witnesses, together with a U.S. Marine Corps veteran, informed native information shops that they noticed the agent standing on the road in entrance of the automobile, which was slowly transferring in reverse, when he fired his gun.
That was the primary time, Guerrero stated, that she had seen Border Patrol give an announcement in the beginning of an energetic investigation into certainly one of its brokers’ use of power.
In the meantime, Prince Watson, the veteran who’d witnessed the taking pictures, informed information shops that Border Patrol brokers locked him of their patrol automobile when he refused to talk with them about what he’d seen. Watson stated the brokers saved saying that the agent had been hit by the automobile and was on the hood when he fired his gun, as if making an attempt to get Watson to undertake their model of the story.
“That’s a clear disregard for investigative protocol and an example of how investigations of agents are routinely obstructed,” Guerrero stated.
ABC 10News later realized that the agent who shot Tachiquín had beforehand resigned from the Imperial County Sheriff’s Division after being informed he could be fired for misconduct that included mendacity.
“[Scott] has never been a part of any meaningful attempt at accountability with agents. Every shoot is a ‘good shoot.’ That’s very Border Patrol language,” Guerrero stated.
“And a person who can’t recognize abuse of power is a person who shouldn’t hold power,” she added.
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Scott’s stance on the border and the brokers who work it appear to be intently tied to his non secular beliefs. He beforehand informed a KQED journalist that “the first deportation and the first borders were created in Genesis.”
Pedro Rios, director of the American Buddies 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 stated Scott informed him the religion leaders’ actions “did not really reflect what a true commitment to God meant.”
In 2020, Scott turned chief of Border Patrol nationwide. He retired in August 2021 in the course of the Biden administration after refusing to associate with among the president’s coverage modifications, together with eliminating authorities use of the controversial phrase “illegal alien.”
Scott’s affirmation listening to was held on April 30.
