After an Immigration Raid, a City’s Students Vanish
By Johnathan Blitzer David Morales teaches social studies at Mayfield High School, in Las Cruces, New Mexico, a city of a hundred thousand people, located fifty miles north of the Mexican border. Some of his students are the children of undocumented immigrants, and a few of them might even be undocumented themselves. He doesn’t know which ones, exactly, and he doesn’t care. “When they’re in my classroom, I’m there to teach them,” he...
Judge: Arizona cross-border shooting case stays in federal court
By Howard Fischer A federal judge has rejected claims by a Border Patrol agent that he can’t be tried on murder charges in his court. U.S. District Judge Raner Collins said the evidence shows that Lonnie Swartz was standing within a 60-foot zone adjacent to the international border when he shot 16-year-old Jose Antonio Elena Rodriguez, who was in Mexico. Collins said he reads the law to say that zone is part of what he is known as the...
Can border agents inspect your electronic devices? It’s a tricky subject.
By ACLU We’ve been getting a lot of questions about when border agents can legally conduct searches of travelers’ electronic devices at international airports and other ports of entry. Unfortunately, the answer isn’t simple. The government has long claimed that Fourth Amendment protections prohibiting warrantless searches don’t apply at the border. The ACLU takes issue with this position generally, especially when it comes to...
Arizona-based Border Patrol agent convicted of bribery, drug trafficking
By Rafael Carranza A Border Patrol agent stationed in Nogales will spend more than 13 years behind bars, after he was convicted on federal bribery and drug-trafficking charges. Juan Ramon Pimental of Rio Rico pleaded guilty to the charges, which stem from separate 2015 incidents. U.S. Judge Ranier Collins sentenced Pimental to 160 months in prison and five years of supervised release. In the first incident, in February 2015, Pimental...
ACLU Files Claim Against Customs and Border Protection for Alleged Sexual Assault of Teen Sisters in Texas
By Monique Judge The American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California on Wednesday filed two claims with the federal government on behalf of two sisters who were allegedly sexually assaulted by a U.S. Customs and Border Protection last year. According to the ACLU, the sisters “continue to suffer severe emotional distress as a result of the assault,” which they say occurred in July 2016, when they were 19 and 17 years old. Read...