SAN DIEGO (Border Report) — U.S. Border Patrol officials say they are aware of an incident involving an agent hitting a migrant with a marked unit along the border wall, which was captured on camera and is circulating on social media.
The impact sends the migrant into the air before landing hard on a dirt road.
An unidentified person took the video late last month just south of the border in Tijuana.
Pedro Rios, a migrant advocate who has seen the video, described it as “brazen act to injure a human being.”
“There was no intent to stop or put the brakes on that vehicle,” Rios said. “Whatever Border Patrol agent is driving that vehicle, there’s no intention of stopping, drives straight forward to where there are two individuals purposefully striking one of them.”
Rios, who is the director of the American Friends Service Committee in San Diego, stated he can’t think of any reason why the agent would purposely want to ram a migrant with a patrol car.
“There is no policy that states that a Border Patrol agent has a right to use their vehicle to strike a human being. It’s completely unconscionable that the Border Patrol agent would use the vehicle to strike a person with the intention of hitting them — raises questions for me, about whether the Border Patrol agent had used his vehicle in the past as an instrument to cause pain and suffering, and that’s concerning.”
The two-and-a-half-minute video begins with after a group of migrants using a ladder to climb over the first barrier and approaching the second border barrier to gain access into the U.S. from Tijuana.
Some of the individuals then use a taller ladder to scale the second border wall as sirens ring out in the background. This is when the agent is seen in the video approaching quickly in an SUV. The man appears to brace himself for impact for being hit and and flying onto the ground. He quickly gets up and runs back toward Mexico.
Rios says he has asked the Department of Justice’s Office of Professional Responsibility to launch an investigation, although he doesn’t expect much to come from it.
“Because of their polices, we will likely never know much about their findings, we might hear certain actions were taken, but we might not get more than that,” he said. “What I would like to see is that this agent be held accountable for his actions so that no other agent feels they have the license to use their vehicle to strike a human being as they’re crossing into U.S.”
Border Patrol officials told Border Report they are aware of the incident and said a formal statement will be released in the coming days.
As for the migrant who is struck by the Border Patrol unit, it’s hard to say if he suffered any injuries.
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