Three months after Border Patrol shot and killed Claudia Patricia Gómez González, a migrant woman from Guatemala, there are still more questions than answers regarding her death. Border Patrol leadership at first claimed that Gómez González and a group others ambushed a lone agent with “blunt objects” in the Rio Bravo area of Texas last May. But, this was a lie.
Marta Martinez, a resident who live streamed the arrests of men who were with the young woman, disputed Border Patrol’s claims from start, saying that she believed the young woman was hiding from Border Patrol, not attacking. The agency not only ended up dropping any mention of her attacking the agent with “blunt objects” from a follow-up statement, it also cancelled a planned press conference on her killing. Gómez González was just 20 years old.
Other unpublished footage shot by Martinez and turned over to the FBI seems to back up her claims that it was Gómez González who was the victim. “For one, several agents are visible, though whether they arrived before or after the shooting isn’t apparent,” Buzzfeed, which got to view the footage, reported. “For another, Claudia’s body is in the bushes near the fence that separates the empty lot from Martínez’s. Martínez thinks Claudia probably was hiding.”
Martinez’s outrage was visible. “Why did you kill that woman? You killed her!” she said to the agents. “I saw you with the gun.” In the days following the killing, she told Buzzfeed that “the girl was in the grass and trees; to me she was hiding. They're saying they threw rocks at the agents, but the two migrants were scared and the one guy was scared—they didn't have rocks in their hands." Federal immigration agencies not only have a history of lying—their own employees have resigned in protest over it—but a history of violence.
The Guardian reported this past May that the government has, over a decade, “paid out more than $60m in legal settlements where border agents were involved in deaths, driving injuries, alleged assaults and wrongful detention.” In fact, the U.S. has paid more than $9 million to the families of at least 20 people who died at the hands of border agents since 2003. We know about those incidents because of paper trails, but a shroud of secrecy continues to hang over Gómez González’s death.
“The FBI and Texas Rangers,” Buzzfeed continued, “are still conducting investigations about which virtually nothing official is known not the name of the agent who fired the fatal shot nor the names of the three undocumented immigrants who were taken into custody as material witnesses. Nor is there a definitive account of what led to the shooting. The case faded quickly from the news, overwhelmed by fury over the Trump administration’s ‘zero tolerance’ policy and the resulting family separations.”
But Gómez González’s death cannot be forgotten. Months ago, her family hugged her goodbye as she set off for America in hope of opportunity and a future. She left a vibrant, bright young woman. She returned back home in a white casket. “I want justice,” her mother, Lidia, wailed in Spanish a few days after her killing. “Why did they do this to her? They should have just sent her back home. Why did they do this? They killed her. You are with God. I know you are with God.”
Gómez González’s death also cannot be forgotten because other immigrant lives depend on it. Instead of reining in unleashed federal immigration agents, Donald Trump is only interested in hiring thousands more, despite unauthorized border crossings being the lowest in decades in a trend that began well before he was sworn into office. The Republican-led Congress, meanwhile, is doing nothing to prevent more deaths like that of Gómez González, or other deaths happening in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody.
This past May, Roxana Hernández, a 33-year-old transgender woman who was a part of the so-called “caravan” of Central American asylum-seekers earlier this year, died in an Albuquerque hospital due to cardiac arrest, ICE claimed in a statement. "We are out here to demand explanations,” her advocates said in a protest outside an ICE facility in New Mexico a few weeks later. “Because every single time, ICE has not explained how or why this keeps happening. The conditions are pretty bad. And being transgender, LGBTQ, undocumented, it’s even worse."
Roxana and Claudia’s deaths cannot be in vain. We must remain vigilant, we must keep demanding answers, and we must get accountability from immigration agencies and the officials and elected leaders who have power to make change over those agencies. “It may be even impossible, but we are still here, present, and willing to keep on bringing it up and we will continue to call out these injustices,” said Ilse Mendez of the Laredo Immigrant Alliance.
