New ICE leaders bring more violence, no accountability

from Pedro RiosCalMatters

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In late October, rumors of a major reorganization of the Department of Homeland Security’s immigration enforcement agencies indicated that the US Border Patrol would usurp senior command posts in the leadership of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Anonymous sources told NBC News “growing frustration with the rate of daily arrests” among President Donald Trump’s top aides has sparked internal turmoil.

Once completed, the Border Patrol’s takeover of its subsidiary agency will likely mark a dramatic change in the way immigration agents conduct law enforcement operations. Don’t expect improvements.

People who live in California’s southern border regions have lived through decades of inexplicable antics by the Border Patrol. Californians should be concerned that this culture of impunity and widespread fascination with cruelty will lead to a new phase of immigration raids.

Los Angeles and surrounding counties in Southern California have experienced a relentless assault by Border Patrol agents. Agents have indiscriminately targeted people working in car washes, home improvement store parking lots and bus stops where arrest warrants are not required.

Community members document daily incidents on social media at pervasive violations of the Fourth Amendmentwhich protects against unreasonable searches and seizures. But the Border Patrol agents leading the most overt enforcement actions are often misidentified as ICE officers.

ICE and Border Patrol, different but similar

Both ICE and the Border Patrol are ruthless against immigration. Although not always the case, ICE officials rely on investigations to lead people for arrest. They have orders that guide their activities.

Border Patrol agents, on the other hand, use dubious interpretations of “intelligible facts” to racially profile people, and sometimes that means targeting many people at once.

The Supreme Court now agrees with this flawed logic – so if you fit a racial profile, consider yourself a target.

Andrea Guerrero, executive director of Alliance San Diego, is working to seek accountability from the Border Patrol’s parent agency, Customs and Border Protection. She is concerned about a possible change in leadership.

“The gap between what the Border Patrol does and what is humane, safe and effective law enforcement is so wide that it is unfathomable that the most abusive, unaccountable agency would be asked to step up and lead another,” she said.

Border Patrol violence is part of the international record. In a landmark case decided in AprilThe Inter-American Commission on Human Rights holds the United States responsible for the extrajudicial torture and killing in 2010 of Anastasio Hernandez Rojas, a longtime San Diego resident who emigrated from Mexico.

Hernandez Rojas was a construction worker and father of five who immigration agents transported to the border. The commission found that more than a dozen Border Patrol and ICE agents assaulted Hernandez Rojas, electrocuting him repeatedly, punching and kicking him while he was detained, in view of dozens of border crossers. He arrived at the hospital brain dead.

Later on The Border Patrol uses a “shadow unit” to change, disguise and destroy evidence of the meeting.

In June, Congress confirmed Rodney Scott as the newest commissioner of Customs and Border Protection. In 2010, Scott held a senior supervisory role in the San Diego Sector of the Border Patrol.

C confirmation hearing, Scott got involved in attempting to cover up Hernandez Rojas’ death by admitting to signing an administrative subpoena to obtain Hernandez Rojas’ medical records. That’s right unlawfully interfere with an active investigationbut Scott said he wanted to gather evidence on Hernandez Rojas and it was “standard procedure.”

Hernandez Rojas hoped for a better future for his children, said his widow Maria Puga. She believes Border Patrol agents commanding ICE agents will lead to more aggressive arrests.

“My family is forever devastated by what they did to Anastasio and I worry about our families and our loved ones,” she said. “And just like what happened to my husband, when the Border Patrol uses violence, there are never charges against them; there is only impunity.”

Puga is correct in his assessment. Despite hundreds of documented cases of serious abuse, not a single Border Patrol agent has been charged with criminal acts while on duty.

Trump classifies Customs and Border Protection as a “security agency.”” during his first term, allowing Border Patrol agents to enjoy greater protection from public disclosure if they are implicated in abuse or misconduct.

Hundreds of deaths, no prosecutions

A group of nonprofits called the Coalition of Southern Border Communities has collected 351 incidents since 2010 where Border Patrol and other Customs and Border Protection components have engaged in fatal, violent encounters with no accountability.

These include when Border Police officers fatally shot a child several times behind—the child was in Mexico—and when an agent fatally shot an American citizenmother, in Chula Vista, and when agents deliberately crashed their patrol vessel into a boatcausing a female migrant to drown off the coast of Encinitas, San Diego County.

Most recently, officers of the Border Police pursued a 52-year-old man Roberto Carlos Montoya Valdes of Guatemala from a Home Depot parking lot in Monrovia on August 14. He was hit by a vehicle and died.

The Border Patrol’s militaristic approach to law enforcement is endemic to border communities. Agents revel in the infrastructure of militarization, from the 30-foot-tall border walls to the razor-sharp concertina wire that once characterized as “a new way of thinking about border security in San Diego.”

Militarizing inland communities — or “containment,” as Guerrero calls it — is what Gregory Bovino, chief of the Border Patrol’s El Centro sector, is doing in Los Angeles, Chicago and other cities.

Bovino is the face of Trump’s violent attacks, and he is one of the faces tasked with overhauling the ICE regional offices, which will include San Diego and Los Angeles. He did not respond to requests for comment on the enforcement strategies of Border Patrol agents.

Unprofessional and undisciplined

A former commissioner of Customs and Border Protection was more forthcoming. Gil Kerlikowski, who served as commissioner from 2014 to 2017, has expressed concerns about the Border Patrol’s ability to operate in urban settings, especially as more people protest their presence.

he suggested Border Patrol agents under Bovino’s command were undisciplined and unprofessional and that Bovino encouraged excessive force against protesters.

“The Border Patrol agents under his leadership are going out in ragged style,” Kerlikowski told a WBEZ reporter in Chicago, referring to Bovino’s leadership. “The direction to the agents at one point was ‘Light them up,’ which meant they could hit people with pepper spray. I also saw agents pick people up, slam them into the concrete and walk away.”

A a new study found that the Border Patrol’s El Centro Sector under Bovino, there was a higher ratio of use-of-force incidents to assaults on agents than any other branch of the Border Patrol from fiscal years 2022 to 2025, according to American University’s Project on Government Oversight and Investigative Reporting Workshop.

With more than $170 billion earmarked for immigration and border projects in the Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill signed in July, including $45 billion for detention and nearly $30 billion to increase ICE’s activities, we can expect an increase in gross abuses — and a lack of accountability, opacity, and zero oversight.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and is republished under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives license.