Report Documents Physical, Verbal Abuse of Migrants By US Border Patrol Alberto Tomas Halpern - Newspaper Tree
go to original February 20, 2014

A Border Patrol agent processes individuals at a facility in Nogales, Arizona. (CBP)

Javier, a 35-year-old from Hidalgo, Mexico, was en route to New York where friends were going to help him find work. He had planned on returning back home after a few years working in the United States. Javier never made it past the border. He was apprehended by Border Patrol officers in January 2012 as he attempted to cross into the United States near Nogales, Sonora.

Javier is one of many recently repatriated migrants from Mexico who have detailed physical, verbal and psychological abuse - including beatings, sleep deprivation and racial slurs - by Border Patrol officers after being apprehended along the U.S.-Mexico border.

“They pushed me around. And they didn’t let us sleep,” Javier says in a report released this week by the Immigration Policy Center. “Every time we started to sleep they forced us to get up and march or clean the room. We didn’t sleep the entire night. They took away our watches so we didn’t know what time it was. I was forced to look at the floor and wasn’t allowed to look up,” he said.

The report found that 11 percent of deported migrants reported some form of physical abuse while being apprehended or detained and 23 percent reported being on the receiving end of racial, national and homophobic slurs.

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