U.S. Customs and Border Protection is investigating an incident caught on camera last week in which a U.S. Border Patrol agent in an SUV sped toward a group of people trying to climb a ladder over the border fence in San Ysidro and struck a member of the group.
The video of the Nov. 27 incident showed a person who appeared to be a man trying to jump out of the way of the fast-moving SUV at the last second. The vehicle hit the side of the man’s body and flipped him into the air. He then stood up and ran back toward Mexico.
A spokesperson from CBP, the Border Patrol’s parent agency, said the incident resulted in the arrests of two other people from the group and occurred near the San Ysidro Port of Entry as agents were responding to an illegal border crossing attempt.
“Upon arrival at the incident location, an agent driving a Border Patrol vehicle collided with an individual who then absconded into Mexico,” the spokesperson said in a statement. “The incident is being reviewed by the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Office of Professional Responsibility and the United States Attorney’s Office. The Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General and the Mexican Consulate were notified.”
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CBP’s Office of Professional Responsibility investigates use-of-force incidents and allegations of criminality or serious misconduct by Border Patrol agents and other CBP personnel.
A spokesperson from the U.S. Attorney’s Office declined to comment on questions about the nature of its review of the incident.
Pedro Rios, director of the American Friends Service Committee’s U.S./Mexico Border Program, said he reported the incident to the Office of Professional Responsibility last week after seeing the video online.
“I was shocked,” Rios said. “What we’re able to see in that small clip is an egregious action that could have needlessly ended someone’s life.”
The video, which appears to be cellphone footage shot from Tijuana and was first posted online the morning of the incident by a Mexican columnist, showed a group of people using a ladder to scale the first of two barriers that separate the U.S. and Mexico in the area. It showed a group of four people scrambling up a brush-covered hill and across a wide dirt road that’s typically used by agents to patrol the area between the fences. Two of the people carried either end of another ladder toward the secondary fence. Emergency sirens were audible in the background.
After the group of four set up the ladder against the roughly 30-foot tall fence, two of them began to climb the ladder, according to the video. The footage showed that as those two started to climb, the two people still standing on the dirt road near the foot of the fence turned their attention toward the sound of an approaching siren.
The video showed one person running across the dirt road just before the Border Patrol SUV sped into view of the camera. Another person hesitated, then began to move in the same direction. But as he moved, the right side of the SUV’s hood struck the man on the right side of his body, flipping him onto the ground.
Rios said that several troubling factors stood out to him the more times and the more closely that he watched the video.
“On closer inspection, there weren’t any brake lights,” he said, noting that the agent appeared to slow down the SUV only after hitting the man. Rios also noted that there appeared to be no visual obstructions — it was daytime, the dirt road was clear and there were no curves in the road — and no obvious threats to the agent.
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Rios said he suspects that the Border Patrol has high-quality cameras in the area that help agents monitor for illegal crossings. He hopes those cameras will give investigators a clearer idea of what happened.
The Department of Homeland Security, CBP’s parent agency, updated its use-of-force policy in February 2023. The policy does not specifically address using a vehicle as a weapon against a person, though it does mandate that DHS employees report “any use of a vehicle, weapon or physical tactic or technique that delivers a kinetic impact to a subject.” CBP’s use-of-force policy only addresses the use of vehicles as a weapon to stop other vehicles. It prohibits agents, in most cases, from using their vehicles to crash into vehicles with two or three wheels, but does not mention using a vehicle against a person.
Both the DHS and CBP policies stipulate that officers or agents can only use force that is “objectively reasonable.”