Border Patrol In Trouble For Using Force

A U.S. Border Patrol agent is being federally investigated for shooting a violent Mexican migrant during a confrontation near a border portion of the Arizona desert where Mexican gunmen attacked a National Guard post less than two weeks ago.

Though many of the details are being withheld by U.S. authorities, the unidentified agent shot the Mexican migrant because he feared for his life. The man, Francisco Javier Dominguez-Rivera, was attempting to enter the United States illegally with a group of seven between Bisbee and Douglas. The agent took six people into custody, but Dominguez-Rivera began fighting and a confrontation ensued.

At the request of Mexico’s president and the would-be illegal immigrant’s parents, the FBI has launched an investigation into the incident and the Border Patrol agent has been suspended. Dominguez-Rivera’s mother, who lives in the central Mexican state of Puebla, has actually demanded that the Border Patrol agent receive the death penalty and his father said the agent’s version cannot be true because “the one certain thing is that people there are racist and this is not the first Mexican they’ve killed.”

Violence at the U.S.-Mexico border is on the rise, with Border Patrol agents repeatedly under fire from violent Mexican drug cartels as well as human smugglers. Evidently, U.S. agents are punished for defending themselves and the country they were hired to protect. Recent examples include two Border Patrol agents sentenced to prison for shooting a Mexican drug smuggler last year in El Paso Texas and National Guardsmen retreating after armed Mexican drug smugglers ransacked their unit in well-known drug corridor of the Arizona desert.