The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights has found U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents who fatally beat Mexican father Anastasio Hernández Rojas responsible for acts of torture. It’s the first time the independent commission, which investigates extrajudicial killings and human rights violations, has issued such findings against a U.S. law enforcement agency. In 2010, Rojas was crossing the southern border in an attempt to return to San Diego, where he’d lived for 25 years, to reunite with his wife and five children after being deported. He was stopped by border agents, who brutally beat and tasered him while he was handcuffed, until Rojas died from heart failure. His death was later ruled a homicide.
This comes as President Trump’s nominee to head Customs and Border Protection, Rodney Scott, is accused of obstructing the criminal probe into Rojas’s killing.
The decision “exposes the unchecked powers of policing in the United States and holds the United States accountable for what is one of the worst violations in human rights, which is the taking of a life,” says Andrea Guerrero, executive director of Alliance San Diego.
