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Birth certificates. Baby formula. Diapers. A last set of clothes.
These are some of the vital items that the Border Patrol is allegedly throwing away as it processes unauthorized migrants for return to Mexico.
A woman who fled to the US from Mexico City with her husband and two children, seeking to escape violent threats towards her family, recently told Arizona Public Media that the Border Patrol threw away her cell phone, as well as diapers and wet wipes for her children. A reporter observed her breastfeeding in Nogales, Sonora, wearing a hospital-style paper shirt, because officials reportedly threw away her clothes.
The Independent has contacted the Border Patrol for comment.
Data compiled by the ACLU and ProtectAZ suggests border officials routinely throw away lifesaving medicines, with a fifth of respondents with HIV saying their medicine had been tossed last year.
A May report by the General Accountability Office, a government watchdog agency, urged the Department of Homeland Security to clarify its written guidance for handling personal property at the broder, and give people written instructions on how to recover confiscated property. DHS sad it would implement these recommendations by the end of the year.
“We’ve been doing this advocacy for a long time, and we still cannot come up with a single reason why people should be stripped of their birth certificates and not given those back,” Noah Schramm, border policy strategist for the American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona, told Cronkite News last month. “It just doesn’t make any sense.”
The Border Patrol has also been accused of seizing and destroying turbans belonging to Sikhs crossing the border.
“The seizure and destruction of turbans—an article of faith that is deeply meaningful and personal to Sikh individuals—is just one example of the egregious practices of CBP with regard to migrants’ personal property,” Sahel Kaur, senior staff attorney for the Sikh Coalition, said earlier this year.
Border agents have also been filmed destroying water caches left for migrants, seeking to prevent the epidemic of heat-related deaths at the border each year.
The practice, which is ostensibly against Border Patrol rules, has reportedly continued through at least 2023.
