Last week, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that a family could not sue the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol agent who murdered their child through American courts. The Court ruled that allowing them to do so could undermine the authority of the border patrol and put national security at risk.
15-year-old Sergio Adrian Hernandez Guereca was playing a game with his friends. The boys ran up to touch the fence on the U.S. side of the border and then ran towards Mexico when CBP Agent Jesus Mesa Jr. shot at him. Guereca was killed.
Mesa defended his deadly use of force by claiming the child had been throwing rocks at him, but cellphone footage of the incident showed that this was a lie. There were no rocks — the boys were just playing a harmless game. Video footage showed Mesa coming up to them on his motorcycle, grabbing one of them and then shooting across the border at the child.
In 2012, the Justice Department and U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Texas stated that there was “insufficient evidence” to indict Mesa. They claimed they had conducted “a comprehensive and thorough investigation into the shooting” and found that Mesa was justified in killing a child because “smugglers attempting an illegal border crossing hurled rocks from close range at a CBP agent who was attempting to detain a suspect.”
Again, there is video footage of this murder. There were never any rocks. You have to question the thoroughness of the investigation if they never bothered to check the footage, and referred to a group of teenage boys running back and forth across the border as “smugglers.”
The U.S. government used the exact same defense to defend the killing of 16-year-old Jose Antonio Elena Rodriguez by CBP Agent Lonnie Swartz. Swartz claimed he fired because he was defending himself against “rock-throwing drug smugglers.” Swartz shot an unarmed child 10 times in the back and head through a fence separating the border. The CBP refused to release surveillance camera footage of the murder.
In 2018, Swartz was found not guilty.
I don’t think this is a case of bureaucratic negligence. Rather, it was a willful disregard of facts because the U.S. government cares more about protecting their rancid, trigger-happy pigs than the lives of children of color.
Given the blatant racism and xenophobia of the Trump administration, the topic of immigration has been one of much debate these recent years. A lot of media outlets and people were (rightfully) outraged at Trump’s family separation policy which ripped children from their parents and kept them in cages — and is still currently doing so.
It is understandable that less attention has been placed on how these issues predated the Trump presidency given how egregious his policies are, but I think it’s nonetheless important to acknowledge how we got here.
Sergio’s shooting happened in 2010 — Obama was president, and it was his administration that refused to extradite Mesa to Mexico so that he could be prosecuted. During his term in office, the government deported over 3 million people.
Of course, there are nuances to this number. The Obama administration focused more on deporting people with criminal records, and put people who had already established roots in the U.S. with no criminal record as a lower priority.
In no way am I claiming that Obama stocked the same kind of fervent and racist hatred for immigrants of color as Trump. But, my point still stands that the system Trump is using to terrorize undocumented immigrant communities predates him, and has been used by past presidents to much of the same effect.
The decision the Supreme Court handed down last week on Güereca’s case reinforces the past administration’s apathetic response to murder. Also, it sets a legal precedent that could allow for more murders of Mexican people by CBP Officials to go unprosecuted or unpunished.
To be able to properly reckon with and reform America’s immigration system, Americans must look at its past victims and acknowledge that a single person did not get the country to this point.
On the other hand, we should also acknowledge the relative newness of some of these policies and organizations. I am a college freshman and am literally older than the Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which was established in 2003.
Not only that, ICE’s original mission was to “prevent acts of terrorism by targeting the people, money, and materials that support terrorist and criminal activities” as a part of former President George W. Bush’s expansion of Homeland security in response to the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.
It was only in 2004 that the conservative think tank Heritage Foundation, whose name sounds like it came out of a white supremacist manifesto, suggested ICE be combined with CBP — also established in 2003.
In fact, the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general stated in a 2005 report that “We could not find any documentation that fully explains the rationale and purpose behind ICE’s composition.”
It is important to note that ICE merely took on the duties of the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Deportation has always been a part of how the U.S. government deals with certain immigration cases.
What ICE did do — once its purpose was defined by some conservative think-tank — was create a centralized federal organization dedicated to interior deportation. Thus, it allowed for large scale removal of undocumented immigrants whose only “crime” was coming to America without papers. My point is, abolishing ICE is not a radical idea, because this country functioned just fine without it for centuries.
Frankly, I don’t have a call to action to end this article with. I think I’m too angry to come up with anything coherent. Although, I hope this discussion about the origin of cruel government practices motivates people to donate to and volunteer in organizations helping those victimized by CBP and ICE like RAICES and Movimiento Cosecha.
I wanted to write this to offer my thoughts and prayers to Sergio Adrian Hernandez Guereca and Jose Antonio Elena Rodriguez’s families. I hope that we as a community can remember their names and rectify the injustice that has been done to them.
