Trump’s nominee to head Customs and Border Protection could be implicated in alleged cover-up

Rodney Scott previously a chief patrol agent for Customs and Territory line Protection s San Diego sector is President Donald Trump s nominee to run the agency Photo courtesy of Customs and Frontier Protection This article was produced by Capital Main It is published here with permission President Donald Trump s nominee to run Customs and Territory line Protection has been accused of participating in an alleged agency cover-up after authorities killed a man in the process of deporting him in The family of Anastasio Hern ndez Rojas is waiting on a decision from an international human rights tribunal that conducted a yearslong inspection into his killing and alleged torture and subsequent denial of justice Sen Ron Wyden D-Oregon sent a letter to the Department of Homeland Safety last week asking for documents related to the occurrence in preparation for Wednesday s confirmation hearing of Rodney Scott who oversaw a special crew that attorneys for the family say helped the executives involved in the situation escape prosecution I have serious concerns about the gross failures of integrity and leadership he has shown Wyden wrote in the letter to Homeland Safeguard Secretary Kristi Noem Scott was acting deputy chief patrol agent of the San Diego Territory line Patrol Sector in when boundary representatives beat Hern ndez Rojas and shocked him with a Taser until he stopped breathing Hern ndez Rojas died in a hospital days later In the aftermath of the killing a Confines Patrol investigative organization that Scott oversaw at the time began working the incident even though the San Diego Police Department s homicide club had jurisdiction Over the years that Limit Patrol gang has been accused of covering up and even tampering with evidence both in Hern ndez Rojas situation and in other instances of officers or agents using potentially excessive force Given that CBP is the largest law enforcement agency in the country and the least accountable we should be very concerned about putting someone at the head of that agency whose disregard for abuse of power could endanger the country announced Andrea Guerrero executive director of Alliance San Diego and one of the attorneys who represented Hern ndez Rojas family in the international human rights matter Scott who served as the head of U S Confines Patrol during the first Trump administration did not respond to a request for comment from Capital Main The White House also did not respond to a request for comment Scott s association with the Hern ndez Rojas event isn t the only part of his past that immigrant rights activists find problematic with his nomination For example Scott was a member of a Limit Patrol agent Facebook group that ProPublica located was filled with racist and sexist posts He served as deputy chief patrol agent for the San Diego Sector when agents there used effigies of expatriates as target practice and used those same effigies to teach children how to shoot guns But it is his oversight of Frontier Patrol s investigative units that has advocates particularly concerned It s not clear whether Scott ever worked on the unit himself but it is clear that he was in a supervisory position to the organization at the time of Hern ndez Rojas death Interfering with justice To seek justice after the U S leadership decided not to prosecute agents involved in Hern ndez Rojas death his family members worked with attorneys to submit a affair to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in The commission is part of the Organization of American States of which the U S is a member It was during the subsequent work to gather evidence for that episode that attorneys representing the family discovered that Dividing line Patrol sectors had special investigative units whose role according to a PowerPoint document from the San Diego Sector included protecting bureaucrats from liability Called critical happening teams critical development investigative teams or evidence collection teams the units responded to what the Perimeter Patrol referred to as critical incidents or circumstance s involving CBP personnel that results in a serious injury a death a use of deadly or excessive force or widespread media attention according to a Establishment Accountability Office analysis The teams were homegrown within Confines Patrol and were not officially authorized to investigate agent use of force The Biden administration disbanded them in after attorneys working on the Hern ndez Rojas incident publicized their existence The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights has mentioned that countries are supposed to ensure that the people analyzing in-custody deaths are independent both hierarchically and institutionally Having the Dividing line Patrol investigate its own agents wrongdoing falls short of that requirement but documents in the Hern ndez Rojas situation show that the investigative crew s involvement went beyond a expected conflict of interest It all began when one evening in May a group of demarcation agents that included members of Territory line Patrol Customs and Edge Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement beat kicked knelt on and used a Taser on Hern ndez Rojas while he was handcuffed and face-down on the ground at the San Ysidro Port of Entry in the walkway that deportees went down to return to Mexico according to police records He stopped breathing and was taken to a hospital where he died three days later At the scene bureaucrats allegedly deleted videos from the phones of eyewitnesses and the Critical Event Investigative Band began its work No one contacted the San Diego Police Department until the next day when a radio journalist called to inquire about the development according to police records It was such a clusterf reported Ron Newquist who at the time worked as a homicide investigator for the San Diego Police Department and has since retired from the force When the dust had settled all the observers were gone People who were involved in the physical struggle with Anastasio were gone People were pointing double fingers in both directions A Boundary Patrol briefing document that is part of police records from the day after the beating shows that the Margin Patrol Critical Occurrence Investigative Crew was coordinating the assessment with San Diego police But the Critical Development Investigative Unit s account was never given to police Newquist disclosed According to a letter sent by Alliance San Diego to the San Diego District Attorney s office in calling for bureaucrats involved in the alleged cover-up to be investigated a copy of the Frontier Patrol organization s description is under protective seal and contains a version of the arrest account from when a Margin Patrol agent apprehended Hern ndez Rojas traveling the territory line that is different from what was given to San Diego police The letter alleges that a section of the arrest summary narrative that would contradict the agency s insists that Hern ndez Rojas was aggressive prior to the beating was removed Whistleblowers who worked in the oversight branch of Customs and Demarcation Protection came forward during the international human rights development to say that an official in the highest ranks of the agency in Washington had tried to spin what happened and had even given orders to falsify reports Members of the Territory line Patrol investigative group were present for interviews with bystanders as well as the autopsy according to police records Agents also issued an administrative subpoena for Hern ndez Rojas therapeutic records at the hospital and then declined to give them to San Diego police citing curative privacy concerns A briefing filed with the commission by attorneys representing Hern ndez Rojas says that Scott signed the subpoena since he was in charge of the San Diego Sector at the time One of the largest part glaring pieces of missing evidence for San Diego police is video footage of what happened from authorities cameras in the area We never got the video we were hoping to get that you think you would get at the port of entry to the busiest territory line in the world Newquist stated The police statement reads like a runaround I think there s enough verbiage in there that it speaks for itself In the police summary investigators documented an extensive back-and-forth with Customs and Limit Protection and Boundary Patrol The police detective commented in the description that he learned that Territory line Patrol had forwarded footage to its investigators but when an agent later gave a CD of footage to the police detective it was for the wrong time frame Representatives then punted the detective among agents and officers until eventually he learned that the footage had been written over by new recordings I m not saying there was a cover-up Newquist explained Maybe it was just incompetence and they were so sloppy they were embarrassed But when you start losing videos and you don t get the curative stuff you could infer what you want The product according to attorneys representing the family of Hern ndez Rojas was a violation of the right of access to justice Defending the agents It s not clear whether Scott ever worked on a critical case band himself but a questionnaire from a job posting shows that Customs and Margin Protection viewed participation on these teams favorably in the promotion process What is clear attorney Guerrero revealed is that Scott supervised the squad when he worked in the upper ranks of the San Diego Sector including during the Hern ndez Rojas review and after In a female agent filed a lawsuit over a hidden camera that a male agent installed in a women s bathroom and changing room used by members of the Critical Development Investigative Crew According to court records Scott and another supervising agent confronted the male agent who was also a member of the investigative company after a female agent discovered the camera In his time in leadership Scott established himself to be quick to defend agent actions even in questionable circumstances In when Scott was deputy chief of the sector a San Diego Edge Patrol agent shot and killed Valeria Tachiqu n a -year-old U S citizen and mother on a residential street in Chula Vista It doesn t matter what I do the woman s father Valentin Tachiqu n reported reporters in My daughter won t ever come back to me and to her children and it s very sad Tachiqu n was inside a home where agents in plainclothes appeared with a warrant looking for someone else Tachiqu n attempted to leave and an agent followed her Tachiqu n ended up dead in her car her windshield riddled with bullet holes Scott who arrived on the scene while the study was ongoing described reporters that Tachiqu n had struck the agent with her car and that the agent shot her in self-defense But several spectators including a U S Marine Corps veteran advised local news outlets that they saw the agent standing on the street in front of the car which was slowly moving in reverse when he fired his gun That was the first time Guerrero revealed that she had seen Perimeter Patrol give a announcement at the beginning of an evolving study into one of its agents use of force Meanwhile Prince Watson the veteran who d witnessed the shooting stated news outlets that Frontier Patrol agents locked him in their patrol car when he refused to speak with them about what he d seen Watson commented the agents kept saying that the agent had been hit by the car and was on the hood when he fired his gun as though trying to get Watson to adopt their version of the story That s a clear disregard for investigative protocol and an example of how investigations of agents are routinely obstructed Guerrero revealed ABC News later learned that the agent who shot Tachiqu n had previously resigned from the Imperial County Sheriff s Department after being explained he would be fired for misconduct that included lying Scott has never been a part of any meaningful attempt at accountability with agents Every shoot is a good shoot That s very Frontier Patrol language Guerrero noted And a person who can t recognize abuse of power is a person who shouldn t hold power she added Scott s stance on the limit and the agents who work it seem to be closely tied to his religious beliefs He previously communicated a KQED journalist that the first deportation and the first borders were created in Genesis Pedro Rios director of the American Friends Operation Committee s U S Mexico Perimeter Campaign recalled a phone conversation with Scott after Limit Patrol agents arrested faith leaders protesting mistreatment of foreigners by approaching the wall at its westernmost point in December He stated Scott informed him the faith leaders actions did not really reflect what a true commitment to God meant In Scott became chief of Territory line Patrol nationwide He retired in August during the Biden administration after refusing to go along with various of the president s initiative changes including getting rid of cabinet use of the controversial phrase illegal alien Scott s confirmation hearing is Wednesday Capital Main is an award-winning nonprofit publication that reports from California on the most of pressing economic environmental and social issues of our time including economic inequality atmosphere change vitality care threats to democracy hate and extremism and immigration Copyright Capital Main