Yesterday, I
highlighted the case of
Clarisa Christiansen, who was rousted by roving Border Patrol
agents on a road well within the United States and left stranded
after they slashed her tire.
But good, old-fashioned border crossings are a great place to
get roughed up by federal employees, too. Larry Kirschenman, a
75-year-old Vietnam Veteran and retiree living in a border
community, who was in the habit of heading to Mexico “to get
haircuts or dental work, or sometimes just for lunch” (Mexico is a
popular destination for affordably dentistry), was pulled over
at the Nogales port of entry. He ended up in the hospital.
That’s him pictured above right, holding photos from the
hospital of his injuries.
At the American Civil Liberties Union blog, he
tells his story:
When I got to the border crossing where customs officers checked
my passport, I was told to pull over into what’s called secondary –
a parking area where they search vehicles for contraband. The agent
there took my keys and in a gruff voice ordered me to get out of my
truck, put my hands on the vehicle, and said he was going to search
me. I did exactly as he said, then turned and asked him, in a calm
and polite voice, whether he needed some kind of probable cause to
search me. He answered “No I don’t!” Then he grabbed me in an arm
lock, slammed a pair of handcuffs down on my wrists hard enough to
split the skin, and pushed my wrists up behind my neck so far that
my shoulders started to go out of joint. It hurt so badly I started
screaming “Please stop, please stop, you’re hurting me.” I wasn’t
resisting at all, but he just kept on while I cried out in
pain.
Next the
officer marched me to a holding cell. There he picked me up by the
seat of my pants and slammed my head onto the tile floor. I blacked
out for a moment, then I woke up with a head wound that had peeled
a chunk of skin off the top of my head. I was still bleeding when
an officer handcuffed me to the side of a bench so tightly that I
couldn’t even stand up. And they kept on questioning me, “Why do
you come here so often? What are you doing over there?
Unshockingly, Kirschenman started having chest pains. The agents
agreed to call on ambulance, “but only if I agreed to pay the
hospital bill, which I did.”
According to him, the ER doc called the police, in fury over the
injuries inflicted by the Border Patrol agents.
In a release at the time of the incident, Customs and Border
Protection insisted that Kirschenman’s lacerations were “self-inflicted
injuries” which he sustained after becoming combative. He must
have thrown himself against the agents’ batons, over and over
again.
The stop, claim the feds, was actually because of an outstanding
California warrant which turned out to be “non-extraditable and no
further charges are pending.” Well, that’s nice.
Kirschenman is still trying to get the Border Patrol to
surrender survellance footage of the incident. Below is a video
presentation of his story.
The ACLU filed a
lawsuit Monday to force the federal government to be more
forthcoming about its agents’ conduct along border.
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