Call for Better Tracking of Cases of Excessive Force at Borders

A recent New York Times article brings light to the issue of excessive or unnecessary use of force by Border Patrol agents and a failure to properly document these excessive-force accusations. The problem begins with the agents not being properly trained on "all of the less-lethal weapons available to them", the article goes on to list pepper spray and tasers as examples. Another issue is that although the agents know the basics they are not sufficiently trained on real life situations like rock assaults. Because of this lack of training, once they are placed in these situations and are faced with the real life fear and stress, they immediately resort to using weapons and this leads to deadly consequences.  Documented from January 2010, fifteen people have been killed by agents, including a 16-year-old. There have been many changes and reforms to the Customs and Border Patrol, as well as financing for use-of-force training, to try and aid in countering these deadly situations. But the agency has still not set up a mock border fence for the agents to practice on which could help in simulating high stress scenarios.  On top of this, these incidents of excessive use of force are not being properly documented.  The system to track these incidences is actually broken up into two separate systems that are the arms of the Department of Homeland Security. Both systems have different ways of classifying the complaints. This causes it to be very difficult to determine the exact number of excessive force accusations. And although this fact has been known since this past spring the second arm of the Department of Homeland Security, which is jointly run by Customs and Border Protection and Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, has not added the use of force as a way to categorize the complaints. I chose this article because of its relevance to the presentation given in class on Wednesday on the laws of immigration and what measures the U.S. Government are taking to prevent it. I think this article is worth reading because it shows that, although America says it's very passionate about the issue of immigration, it seems it is doing very little to deal with this very serious situation in a safe and efficient way.