A top human rights advocacy organization is calling on the Trump administration to immediately stop the deployment of untrained Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents to communities protesting the police murders of George Floyd, citing a long history of racist and violent abuses by these agencies, including the deaths of migrants and the forcible separation of families at the southern border.
“Border Patrol agents have a disturbing record of killing people, including US citizens, with impunity, and ICE has a history of violating detainees’ rights,” Human Rights Watch’s Nicole Austin-Hillery said in a statement on Friday. “As people protest police brutality and encounter new police abuses, these agents risk infusing more danger into volatile situations.”
The organization said that the administration’s deployment of federal agents “raised particular concerns due to their histories of human rights violations and lack of accountability.”
“One policy organization found that of 809 complaints of alleged abuse lodged against Border Patrol agents between January 2009 and January 2012, 97 percent resulted in ‘no action taken’ by the agency,” Human Rights Watch said. This has only given permission for further abuses: “In 2019, two women, both US citizens, filed a lawsuit alleging racial profiling after Border Patrol agents held them for 40 minutes in a parking lot in Montana after hearing them speak Spanish,” the organization continued.
Yesenia Padilla of Southern Border Communities Coalition similarly noted in her blog post condemning the deployment of agents to U.S. cities: “The presence of border patrol agents places everybody’s safety at risk. Remember, these are the folks that willingly separated children from their parents, who let children in their custody to die of dehydration and the flu, and who killed Anastasio Hernandez Rojas in 2010.”
Of course we all know that Border Patrol hasn’t been the only agency guilty of egregious actions against communities. “ICE also has a long record of rights violations against migrants in custody,” Human Rights Watch continued. “People in detention, including transgender women, have long reported sexual harassment and abuse that has gone unaddressed. ICE has arrested or attempted to arrest people at courthouses, affecting domestic violence survivors’ safety and due process rights in general.”
Human Rights Watch noted agents are supposedly being deployed to enforce the law when they make it clear they believe certain people don’t deserve protections laid out by law. “Border Patrol agents have also failed to uphold and enforce US asylum laws, in their repeated failures to properly identify people who are seeking asylum. Asylum officers within the US Citizenship and Immigration Services and their union have repeatedly provided internal reports on multiple cases of intimidation, verbal, and even physical abuse against migrants by Border Patrol officers.”
The administration was also criticized by Human Rights Watch this week over refusing to halt deportations amid the novel coronavirus pandemic, noting the record number of infections within the U.S. poses a direct risk to nations around the world. “US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) carried out 232 deportation flights to Latin America and Caribbean countries between February 3 and April 24, 2020, according to the Center for Economic and Policy Development,” the group said in the statement. “Some migrants deported to Mexico, Haiti, El Salvador, and Guatemala have already tested positive for the Covid-19 virus.
“Despite outbreaks of Covid-19 in US immigration detention centers and government travel restrictions the world over, the US has continued deportations with little regard for the consequences,” Austin-Hillery said in that statement. “With these reckless deportations, the Trump administration is contributing to the spread of Covid-19 and endangering public health globally.”