Issues surrounding the handling of the US Border Police of the rising number of undocumented immigrants has reached fever pitched in 2012 when 16 year-old Jose Antonio Elena Rodriguez was shot in October 2012. It was said that Rodriguez was simply walking along a street in Nogales, which runs parallel to the US border fence.
Now, Rodriguez's mother has filed a lawsuit in the US District Court in Tucson for excessive use of force against the Border Police, and is seeking unspecified monetary and punitive damages for what she believed was the wrongful death of her son, Business Insider said. On Tuesday, Araceli Rodriguez and the American Civil Liberties Union said in a press conference that the Border Police, or at least one of time, violated the law. The minor was shot at least eight times.
In an interview from Nogales by the Los Angeles Times, Rodriguez said, "I want to know who these people were who assassinated my child. Why were there so many bullets in my son's body? Put yourself in my shoes. Imagine if your child were shot 10 times - a child thrown on the floor in a pool of his own blood. And there are no answers. There is no justice."
Although officials of the US Customs and Border Protection refused to comment on the case, the Border Patrol has since claimed that the unidentified agent had been hit by rocks when the latter responded to reports of drug smugglers climbing the border fence, indicating that such actions from the agent were warranted, the LA Times said.
On the other hand, an expert said that it is unlikely that the Rodriguez family would be able to get a favorable result from their filing of the lawsuit, given the fact that American constitutional protections will not apply to the victim.
Arizona State University's Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law professor Aaron Xavier Fellmeth explained, "In the distant past, the U.S. Supreme Court decisively denied constitutional protections to aliens outside the United States. In fact, it denied constitutional protections to U.S. citizens outside the United States as well, so aliens didn't have much of a chance."
