Border Patrol in Question

In the novels we have read thus far in the semester, we have been pretty well acquainted with characters crossing the Mexico/US border in a relatively movie-esque, peaceful way like in "All the Pretty Horses". Recently though, we've begun to look at the border for what it truly is: A desert wasteland full of nature's death traps. Somehow, there are still those brave enough attempt to cross under the watch of the border patrol. Through reading a small excerpt of "The Devil's Highway" and the beginning of "It Came From Del Rio" we have begun to grapple with the issues that face the border and those who patrol it. From "The Devil's Highway", Urrea describes the general consensus of how various groups of people feel about the border patrol. "Don't go out in uniform. Don't cross the border. Don't flash your badge. Don't speed, and if you do and get tagged for a ticket, don't use your badge to try and get out of it" (23). This paints a pretty bleak picture of how the BP is regarded. In "It Came From Del Rio", the first BP we come across, Refugio, actually intends to help Dodd after getting a cut of his smuggling pay-off. With this dull, pretty bad first-impression of the border patrol, I decided to investigate further into recent news to see if I could find more information about what the border patrol was all about.

The first article that I came across was an article by the Arizona Daily Star titled, "Border Patrol Faces Little Accountability". This photo below was the first photo among a reel of others showing mother's with pictures of their sons, which you assume are dead. When you read further, you find that they are in fact dead.






            

What I found in this really chilled me.

"Just two months after a Border Patrol agent shot her 16-year-old son in Nogales, Sonora, Araceli Rodríguez Salazar sensed silence spreading over the case.

"I'm tired of crying. I'm tired of waiting. I want justice," she said on a recent afternoon, standing outside her humble home on a downtown hillside.

If the pattern holds, she'll be waiting much longer.

Even as the number of shootings by agents increases, the system for holding them accountable remains complicated and opaque, leaving the public in the dark about the status of the cases, an Arizona Daily Star investigation has found. One Arizona case has remained secret and "ongoing" for almost three years.

Questions have sharpened after agents shot people who apparently weren't threatening them at least twice in Arizona over the last two years."

Reading further into the article, we simply find that there are nothing but questions regarding basically all shootings that the border patrol is responsible for. Even when the questions arise, there are no answers. When a case finally does get to be seen in court, most of the border patrol guards are let off the hook as they are found to have justified reasons for shooting and killing those who wish to cross the border--but yet there are still no answers because of the secrecy of the process.

There is much talk throughout the article about people throwing rocks at the agents resulting in shootings. Wait...... WHAT? "LaMadrid and a passenger began climbing a ladder friends had put against the fence, and at the same time someone atop the fence began throwing rocks at the agent. The agent fired and killed LaMadrid as he climbed the ladder. The rock throwers escaped into Mexico." I find it seriously hard to believe that rock-throwing could really be justifiable to shooting and killing someone, especially from a person who was on their way back to Mexico, on the ladder for god's sake... Isn't the whole point to run them back anyways? The article claims that there are more shootings happening now than before because many border jumpers resist arrest. It would seem to me that it is frequent that even American citizens resist arrest from a cop--I wonder how many of them get shot, with no answers to follow.

I urge my classmates to read this article to shine some light on some things that really happen at the border, not just because this is prevalent in our class, but also to be aware that is this happening in our country, with little answers. The article can be found here: http://azstarnet.com/news/local/border/border-patrol-faces-little-accountability/article_7899cf6d-3f17-53bd-80a8-ad214b384221.html