Colorlines, News Report, Posted: Sep 26, 2011

 People who are crossing the border or are in the process of being deported are routinely abused by members of the nation’s largest federal law enforcement agency, which consistently fails to keep its officers in line and has no mechanism for oversight, a new report has found.

Over the course of two and a half years, the border humanitarian aid organization No More Deaths conducted interviews with 13,000 people along the U.S.-Mexico border, and found more than 30,000 incidents of misconduct that violated people’s basic civil rights and even Customs and Border Patrol’s own limited guidelines for the treatment of people in their custody.

“The problems we found are systemic and pervasive,” said Katerina Sinclair, one of the authors of the report. “Abuses occur in all detention centers, across all time points, through all points of entry.”

People report enduring psychological, verbal, physical and sexual abuse at the hands of Border Patrol officers. Migrants crossing the treacherous border region who are often severely dehydrated are consistently denied water and, the report found, children are more likely to be denied water than adults. People who’ve been separated from loved ones are forced to listen to a continuous loop of migracorridos, border songs about people dying in the desert, while in Border Patrol custody. Others who are in urgent need of medical care are denied exactly that and left to writhe in pain in the arms of fellow inmates in detention centers.

Only 20 percent of people in custody for more than two days received a meal, researchers found. People being repatriated to Mexico are routinely separated from essential personal belongings like their ID, which make them extremely vulnerable to abuse once they arrive in the bustling and dangerous border cities they’re dropped off in. Border-crossing families are often separated from each other and sent to separate detention centers for processing, which makes reuniting with family members nearly impossible. 

Customs and Border Patrol denied wrongdoing. “As a matter of policy, Border Patrol agents are required to treat all those they encounter with respect and dignity,” U.S. Customs and Border Patrol said in response to the No More Deaths report. “This requirement is consistently addressed in training and consistently reinforced throughout an agent’s career.” Read more here.