Congressional Rights Panel Schedules Hearings on Violence at Border

A congressional human rights panel, expressing concern about allegations of abuse along the U.S.-Mexico border, will examine violence along the boundary in hearings scheduled for April 18 in Washington.

The long-awaited congressional session, announced this week, comes at a time when violence along the border is said to be on the rise, as is the number of illegal border crossings.

Human rights activists along the border have long lobbied for some form of congressional airing of alleged abuses by officers of the U.S. Border Patrol, a uniformed arm of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and by other law enforcement personnel.

Immigration officials and other law enforcement agencies operating along the border have generally stated that the abuse has been exaggerated or that officers have acted in self-defense when they have shot or otherwise injured would-be immigrants during confrontations.

The issue of border violence, although attracting less national attention than that of illegal immigration, has been exceptionally divisive in the bicultural communities along the almost-2,000-mile long border. It has often pitted Latino and immigrant rights groups against mostly white law enforcement agencies.

After considerable delay, the House Foreign Affairs Committee’s subcommittee on human rights and international organizations has agreed to tackle the issue.

“What we’re hoping is that, by taking our message to Washington, we will not only get the attention of the INS, but also send out a message that we’re dead serious about putting an end to human rights violations along the border,” said Roberto Martinez, a long-time human rights activist in San Diego who works with the border program of the American Friends Service Committee, social action arm of the Quaker Church.

“We can’t go for another decade with this kind of dismal record of human rights abuses along the border,” said Martinez, who is scheduled to speak at the congressional hearings.

He expressed the hope that the session will lead to a reform of training procedures that will lessen the possibility of abuse by immigration officers. Another possibility, Martinez said, is that some form of improved internal investigation of abuse allegations could emerge. Activists have long alleged that officials whitewash investigations of abuse--an allegation denied by U.S. and local law enforcement authorities.

Virginia Kice, an INS spokesman in Los Angeles, declined to comment on the upcoming hearings, but said that INS officials are also concerned about violence along the border. INS officials have condemned attacks against the almost 4,000 U.S. Border Patrol agents who are posted along the Southwestern border, which stretches from the Gulf of Mexico in Texas to the Pacific Ocean in California.

Among the lawmakers calling for the hearings was Rep. Esteban E. Torres (D-Pico Rivera), who issued a strong statement condemning incidents of abuse.

“Reports of violence and human rights violations at the hands of Border Patrol agents, local law enforcement officials and self-styled vigilantes are on the increase,” Torres said. “Shootings, beatings and harassment are unconscionable practices that should not be associated with U.S. government officials.”

U.S. Rep Jim Bates (D-San Diego) was also among the congressmen calling for the hearing on border abuse. “I’m very pleased that the treatment of Mexicans by U.S. officials and citizens will be fully aired this soon,” Bates said. Bates said he discussed the issue during a recent meeting with Mexican President Carlos Salinas de Gortari in Mexico City.

Among the most infamous incidents in the San Diego area--the nation’s busiest legal and illegal border crossing--was the shooting by a Border Patrol agent, in April 1985, of Humberto Carrillo Estrada, a 12-year-old Mexican boy who was hit as he stood in Mexican territory in Tijuana.

U.S. authorities cleared the agent of any wrongdoing, contending he shot the youngster as he was being attacked by a group of rock-throwing migrants. But a U.S. District judge later awarded $570,000 in damages to Carrillo, who suffered permanent injuries in the shooting.

There are no firm figures indicating that incidents of violence are increasing along the border.

Recently, there have been reports that youthful vigilantes have been patrolling the border in San Diego, although others have disputed the extent of the youths’ activities. There have been a number of documented attacks against migrants by U.S. citizens, including the hate-crime murders of two Mexican migrant laborers in northern San Diego County in November 1988.

The hearings come at a time when U.S. officials say more and more people appear to be entering the United States illegally via the southwestern border, a situation that always results in heightened tension. In the past 10 months, U.S. immigration officials say, arrests border-wide--a barometer of illegal immigration--have increased by almost one-third when over the same period during 1988-89. In the past six months, arrests in the San Diego area have risen by more than half.