Border Patrol’s Record on Abuses Is Among Nation’s Worst, Report Says

Amid a federal campaign to fortify the Southwest border, the record of alleged human rights violations by the U.S. Border Patrol amounts to “one of the worst police abuse problems in the country,” according to a report by an international human rights group.

This week’s report by Human Rights Watch, which monitors government abuses worldwide, presents new examples of a familiar litany of allegations of misconduct by border agents. Despite promised reforms by the Clinton Administration, a persistent climate of impunity allows rogue agents to evade punishment, the study says.

“The Clinton Administration has abdicated its responsibility to correct the ongoing abuse problem,” the report said.

In response, Justice Department officials said they have improved training and hiring standards, created a citizens advisory panel--which met for the first time Wednesday--and otherwise professionalized the agency. The long-neglected Border Patrol, which is part of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, has gained an increasingly higher profile as border issues have attained national stature.

“It’s not common for INS officers to abuse legal or illegal immigrants,” said Justice Department spokeswoman Ana Cobian, who questioned whether the report provides much new information. “There are isolated instances. And, where proof is available, we definitely prosecute and take the appropriate action.”

Some incidents in the report seem ambiguous, showing the difficulties of scrutinizing a force that polices a dangerous, politically charged environment in which the truth can be elusive.

Nonetheless, Human Rights Watch documented cases of questionable shootings, beatings, sexual assaults and cover-ups in the study, which is based on interviews with U.S. and Mexican government officials, immigrant rights activists and alleged victims.

The watchdog group warned that history could repeat itself: The Border Patrol has embarked on a politically driven hiring push comparable to hurried increases in the 1980s, which Border Patrol commanders blame for an influx of problem agents with dubious pasts and even criminal records. By 1998, the agency’s ranks will increase from 4,200 agents to about 7,000 and, as in the past, a temporary training academy at a military base will handle the overflow.

A new personality test for recruits and one-month background checks are being established to prevent the decline in standards that hurt the Border Patrol previously, said Charles Huffman, chief of the training academy.

The agency’s efforts at reforms clash with a code of silence among agents, according to the human rights group’s report. In March, the former station chief in New Orleans and two agents pleaded guilty to assault and conspiracy. They were among nine agents charged with covering up an assault on a handcuffed prisoner, the report said.

Similarly, it took the INS more than two years--and the insistence of the U.S. attorney--to initiate the dismissal of two agents for alleged perjury during the trial of an agent who shot an unarmed suspect in the back in Arizona, according to the report.

Turmoil in Arizona includes new sexual assault allegations against an agent convicted of a similar on-duty crime and investigation of an agent in a double murder. Suggesting cynical defiance of reform, new posters advising immigrants how to report mistreatment were defaced with profanities in the Nogales, Ariz., station, according to the report.

In San Diego, scene of the 6-month-old crackdown, officials say an agent faces dismissal proceedings in the shooting of an unarmed border crosser last year. In another case, Agent Robin Hutchens was convicted of drunk driving in February for an off-duty traffic dispute in which he chased a driver into a store and held him and the manager at gunpoint.

The report criticized the bureaucracy that oversees the Border Patrol. It dismissed a special internal audit unit created in 1993 by the INS commissioner to correct agency problems as ineffectual, citing interviews with agency chiefs and prosecutors, one of whom is quoted as saying: “I couldn’t even hazard a guess as to what they do.”

Justice Department spokeswoman Cobian said the beefed-up internal audit unit has looked into recent complaints about conditions in San Diego detention facilities.