SAN DIEGO — More families whose loved ones were killed by border officials are calling for investigations into secretive Border Patrol units that have been accused of covering up what really happened in use-of-force cases.
The units are known by different names in different sectors of the border — Critical Incident Team, Critical Incident Investigative Team or Evidence Collection Team among them. Advocates have unearthed documents from cases spanning years that suggest regardless of name and location, these teams have worked to cover up wrongdoing by border officials when they kill or otherwise use lethal force. According to an internal presentation about the San Diego team, their job was to mitigate officials' liability.
Customs and Border Protection, the parent agency to Border Patrol, has maintained that the teams are there to help other investigating agencies in such cases, but police documents show that these teams have impeded or even taken over investigations by local law enforcement. The teams do not have authorization from Congress to investigate fellow agents' lethal uses of force.
CBP did not respond to a request for comment. The agency has previously said that it has "a multi-tiered oversight framework in place to address allegations of misconduct involving agency personnel."
"The U.S. Border Patrol maintains teams with specialized evidence collection capabilities across the southwest border," an unnamed spokesperson previously told the Union-Tribune. "These teams consist of highly trained personnel available to respond around the clock to collect and process evidence related to CBP enforcement activities as well as critical incidents. In the case of serious incidents involving CBP personnel, members of these teams are sometimes called upon to assist investigators... This is a vitally important capability as many critical incidents involving CBP operations occur in remote locations where other agencies may be unwilling or unable to respond."
Earlier this year, two congressional committees opened an investigation and asked the Government Accountability Office to look into the Border Patrol units.
Vicki Gaubeca, director of the Southern Border Communities Coalition, the organization supporting the families' call for action, said that so far the committees have sent letters requesting documents and have only received a letter in response describing who the special teams are and which use of force cases are reportable. Gaubeca said her organization will continue to call for a Congressional hearing on the units.
Attorneys working on an international human rights case first raised public awareness about the units after reviewing police records about the investigation into the 2010 killing of Anastasio Hernández Rojas at the San Diego border. The records showed that the Border Patrol team tampered with the case, and the family has since asked the district attorney to charge those agents with obstruction of justice.
"For the case of my husband, there hasn't been justice," said Maria Puga, Hernández Rojas' widow, in Spanish. "We want these individuals who participated in this investigation to be investigated themselves. What they did is not OK. They didn't let everything be how it should be."
Now other families have joined Puga to call for more action to investigate and dismantle the teams.
Among them is Valentín Tachiquín, father of Valeria Tachiquín, a 32-year-old U.S. citizen who was shot dead by a Border Patrol agent in Chula Vista in 2012.
"We are seeking justice," the father told reporters during a press conference Tuesday. "We want everything to be clarified. We want everyone in the department to be transparent about the facts, and it just came to light, the cover-up units that they're using — they shouldn't be there."
His daughter would have turned 42 last week, he said.
The Union-Tribune reviewed case records provided by advocates about her case, including the autopsy report, a transcript of a police interview with the agent involved, analyses of evidence by two experts for a civil case related to the killing and part of an internal report created by the Border Patrol unit. One early afternoon in September 2012, Valeria Tachiquín happened to be at an apartment building in Chula Vista when Border Patrol agents dressed in plainclothes showed up there to do a "knock and talk," meaning that the agents did not have a warrant to enter but could try to engage people there in consensual conversation.
Tachiquín did not live in the apartment, nor was she the person that agents were looking for. When she left the apartment building, an agent whose badge was not visible asked her to identify herself. She declined and went to her car.
The agent followed her and stood in front of her car. He called to run her license plate. She tried to maneuver her car out of the parking space, making contact with the agent in the process, though not in a way that left a mark, as noted in one of the expert analyses in the case.
He instructed another agent to punch her window in and arrest her. After the second agent punched her window, she tried to drive away. The first agent ended up on the hood of her car — there is debate among those cited in the documents about whether he landed there because she struck him or because he jumped. He fired 10 shots, killing her.
"She did what any sane woman would do, try to get away from a man with a gun," said Andrea Guerrero, executive director of Alliance San Diego, one of the organizations advocating with the families, emphasizing that the agent was not visibly identified as law enforcement throughout the encounter.
In the agent's version of events, he feared for his life and shot Tachiquín as he came off of the hood of the car. According to a witness who later came forward to speak with reporters, the agent was standing on the ground as Tachiquín reversed to get away from him when he shot her. A ballistic analysis conducted as part of a civil court case brought by Tachiquín's family found that the agent's version of the story did not hold up.
But it was only after the revelations in the Hernández Rojas case that attorneys noticed something else about the investigation into Tachiquín's killing.
The Critical Incident Investigative Team for the San Diego Border Patrol Sector had participated in the investigation, which raises questions about what influence the team had on its outcome. An agent from the team was present for Tachiquín's autopsy as well as a police interview with the agent who killed her. The agent from the team was even allowed to question the agent directly during that interview, according to the transcript.
The witness who came forward also reported that Border Patrol agents at the scene had detained him in their car, demanding to know what he saw. Bullet casings from the shooting were damaged, suggesting they were run over by cars and moved, according to a document from the civil court case, making them less useful in determining exactly what took place.
The Border Patrol team generated an internal report based on their participation in the investigation, which advocates believe they used to guide the agency's public-facing narrative as they had in the Hernández Rojas case.
"They did this in the interest of protecting the agents involved. They are not neutral," Guerrero said. "They should not have been anywhere near the investigation. They corrupted the evidence, and they damaged the case."
The grandmother of Jose Antonio Elena Rodriguez, a 16-year-old boy who was walking down a sidewalk in Mexico when he was shot and killed by a Border Patrol agent in 2012, and Marisol García Alcántara, who was herself shot in the head by a Border Patrol agent when she was sitting in the backseat of a car in Arizona in 2021, joined Tachiquín's father and Herández Rojas' widow in calling for more to be done after learning that the Border Patrol teams had been involved in their loved ones cases.
"He (the agent) destroyed an entire family. In the house, there's still a empty chair, an empty room," said Doña Taide, Rodriguez's grandmother. "I want that the case of my grandson be investigated again so that the truth can come to light, not lies."
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