By NAN Staff Writer
News Americas Now, WASHINGTON, D.C., Fri. Mar. 15, 2013: The U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency has been slapped with 10 lawsuits due to allegations of abuse.
The lawsuits were filed over the past week by an alliance of immigration groups, private attorneys and a law school clinic to call to attention what advocates and attorneys say is rampant abuse towards immigrants. The cases include claims for unlawful search and seizure, false imprisonment, intentional infliction of emotional distress, assault, and battery.
Coordinated by the American Immigration Council, the National Immigration Project of the National Lawyers Guild, the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project, and the ACLU of San Diego and Imperial Counties, the lawsuits claim border patrol agents routinely exceed their statutory mandate by conducting enforcement activities outside border regions, making racially motivated arrests, employing derogatory and coercive interrogation tactics, and imprisoning arrestees under inhumane conditions.
Among the cases is that of a four-year-old U.S. citizen child who was allegedly detained for more than twenty hours without adequate food and water by CBP agents at Dulles International Airport.
The child, according to the lawsuit, was also deprived of any contact with her parents, and sent her back to Guatemala. CBP agents reportedly informed the child’s father that they could not return her to “illegals.”
In another case, CBP agents reportedly forced a 63-year-old woman with no criminal history off a Greyhound bus in Ohio, subjected her to hours of interrogation, and refused to let her use the bathroom for so long that she urinated on herself.
After being detained all night in her urine-soaked jeans, CBP agents then transferred her to an immigration detention facility, where she suffered an acute stroke, the lawsuit claims. As a result of this trauma, she suffers from chronic pain, numbness, and partial paralysis on her left side.
“These cases exemplify the culture of impunity that has taken hold at CBP,” according to Melissa Crow, director of the American Immigration Council’s Legal Action Center. “The agency must take immediate steps to promote more effective oversight and accountability within its ranks.”
“These claims are especially relevant in light of the call of many in Congress for further expansion of the numbers of Border Patrol Agents,” said Matt Adams, legal director for the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project. “While both the bipartisan Senate framework and the President’s proposal acknowledge concerns about racial profiling and other abuses, specific guidelines and limits must be implemented with any immigration reform.”
Trina Realmuto, a staff attorney with the National Immigration Project of the National Lawyers Guild added, “While these cases shed light on CBP misconduct, there are hundreds more such incidents that go unreported.”
