Activist Lawyer Takes Up Torch for Those He Sees as Victims of U.S. Border Patrol

While growing up in Bakersfield, Marco E. Lopez said, he regularly delivered produce from his parents’ food-supply concern to nearby camps populated by migrant laborers. Their deplorable living conditions were striking to the Mexican-American youth, who was himself accustomed to a more middle-class life style.

“I had never done farm work,” Lopez recalled last week, “so those conditions made an impression.”

So much so, in fact, that Lopez later became a socially conscious lawyer specializing in migrant issues, eventually spending five years working with the United Farm Workers, the last two as the union’s general counsel.

Defends the Undocumented

Lopez, who turns 40 in September, has developed an even more singular, albeit related, legal specialty that has earned him a certain amount of prominence--in some cases, notoriety--in San Diego and throughout Southern California. He is still defending the defenseless. Now, however, Lopez carries the legal torch for undocumented Mexican citizens who, he maintains, have been wrongfully shot or otherwise abused by officers of the U. S. Border Patrol in San Diego County.

In so doing, Lopez says, he attempts to fill a void created by local and federal authorities who have done an inadequate job of disciplining and prosecuting official abuse along the Mexican border in San Diego, the primary entry point for hundreds of thousands of migrants en route to the United States. The Border Patrol, an enforcement arm of the U. S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, has its largest single contingent--about 800 officers--in San Diego.

“One would hope that, by taking on these cases and by winning them, the message is sent to the Border Patrol that you can’t violate people’s rights and abuse them with impunity,” Lopez said. “That there is a cost to be paid.”

Lopez says he currently represents two men who were shot by agents and survived, the families of two other shooting victims who died and one other person who was run over by a patrol vehicle. He is proceeding with civil action against the Border Patrol and the U. S. government in each case, attempting to win multimillion-dollar awards through the federal courts.

On Friday, Lopez announced that a 23-year-old Mexican laborer and his wife would file a $9-million claim for injuries received along the border in San Diego last March. The man was shot twice and the woman, then 6 months pregnant, was beaten, Lopez contends. (Border Patrol officials deny any wrongdoing.)

Lopez’s most striking success to date: The case of Humberto Carrillo Estrada, the 12-year-old Tijuana boy who, while standing in Mexican territory in 1985, was shot in the back by a border agent. Federal and local authorities declined to prosecute the officer, igniting protest in the United States and Mexico. But Lopez and his co-counsel, Carlos Alcala, proceeded doggedly with the civil suit, and, in July, 1987, after a seven-day trial, a federal judge handed down a $574,000 judgment on behalf of the youth. The judge questioned the veracity of the Border Patrol’s account.

Moved to San Diego

With that court victory, similar victims have sought Lopez out. In 1988, he moved his private practice from the San Fernando Valley to San Diego, in part because of the border business.

Some U. S. immigration officials have privately characterized Lopez as a border ambulance chaser in search of publicity and big judgments--federal law allows 25% of such post-trial civil judgments to be earmarked for legal fees. But Lopez describes himself as a lawyer with an admitted social bent who is just doing his job.

“I don’t take particular relish in suing my government, but what can I say?” he said in Tijuana last week, after his latest press conference announcing a civil suit. “I’m a personal-injury attorney, and when I see a wrong done to a client I prosecute the case as best I can, regardless of who the defendant is. I wouldn’t consider myself a radical. As I get older I’m more and more conservative.”

His ire rose four years ago, however, when he read about the case of the Tijuana boy who had been shot. “I was just shocked that a Border Patrol agent would shoot a 12-year-old boy,” he said. “I felt the agent must have went off, or he was just malicious.”

(According to U. S. and local officials, the agent shot the youth in the face of a life-threatening barrage of rocks coming from Mexican citizens gathered along the border area.)

Familiar With Border

Lopez is not new to the border. He was born in the border community of Douglas, Ariz., the son of U.S.-born Mexican-Americans. He later lived for a number of years in El Paso, Tex., along the Rio Grande, before moving with his family to California, where he attended high school and college. In 1968 he met Cesar Chavez and Robert Kennedy in California, an experience he considers formative. Lopez attended law school at the University of California, Berkeley.

His public statements are typically composed more of reasoned allegations involving individual cases than of the broad anti- migra polemics typical of many border activists. Colleagues and other lawyers say his cases are well-researched and meticulously prepared. During the Carrillo case, Lopez and his co-counsel presented detailed charts, maps and diagrams indicating that the shooting could not have occurred as the Border Patrol agent said it had.

Contrary to the belief of many U. S. officials, Lopez says, he doesn’t have anything against the Border Patrol, which, he acknowledges, is necessary. He is not an advocate of open borders.

“We’ve never made a general indictment against all border patrolmen,” said Lopez, who speaks in a soft but firm voice. “By and large, we feel that most are dedicated people. But there is a problem that has not been addressed. They’ve failed to discipline those few agents who do commit acts of violence.”

For its part, the Border Patrol maintains that sufficient procedures are in place to ensure that any agent caught abusing his authority will be punished. “Any allegations against Border Patrol agents are investigated to their fullest extent,” said Michael Gregg, a patrol spokesman in San Diego.

Self-Policing Insufficient

Critics such as Lopez, however, say the internal mechanisms are simply insufficient, and, consequently, the abuses and unjustified shootings continue, escalating violence both for illegal border-crossers as well as for the agents.

Lopez also singles out for criticism San Diego County Dist. Atty. Edwin Miller, who, in the view of Lopez, has declined to prosecute Border Patrol agents and San Diego police officers in some cases involving improper shootings.

“A Border Patrol officer who violates his authority should be treated like whatever other criminal,” said Lopez, who attributed the district attorney’s perceived hesitancy to prosecute the agents as an effort to avoid “politically sensitive” cases.

Not so, said Steven J. Casey, chief spokesman for the district attorney. “With all due respect to Mr. Lopez, that’s fatuous nonsense. . . ,” he said. “The district attorney of this county has never at any time made any decision involving any case on the basis of anything remotely resembling a political decision.”