In March, NI requested updates from the U.S. Attorney’s Office, the FBI, and U.S. Customs and Border Protection regarding three incidents of people being shot in Santa Cruz County by Border Patrol agents or CBP personnel since 2019. Did.

Neither the FBI nor the CBP responded. A USAO spokesperson declined to comment and did not confirm whether an investigation was ongoing.

As a result, more than three years after it happened, the public still wonders whether the federal government thought the officers who shot Mendiville in 2019 had legal justification or committed criminal acts. The same applies to two other local incidents in which border agents shot civilians, one of whom was fatally injured.

Meanwhile, investigations into other police shootings conducted by local prosecutors are unfolding without significant delay.

On May 24, 2021, a total of 10 officers from the Nogales Police Department and/or the Santa Cruz County Sheriff’s Office opened fire at three locations in Glenn Ray Cockrum Jr., ultimately killing 39 Arkansas natives at North Grand. Murdered an old truck driver. Avenue.

So why did the federal investigation take so long?

For example, in the Mendiville incident, one officer fired a gun while on duty. Additionally, police officers were stationed at border crossings full of potential witnesses and surveillance cameras.

“I hate delivering bad news,” D. Brian Burghart said of the federal investigation in Santa Cruz County.

Burghart is a former newspaper editor and founder of Fatal Encounters. Fatal Encounters is a database that tracks fatalities involving officers nationwide. Speaking to NI on Tuesday, he said federal agencies are often opaque when it comes to public knowledge of such cases.

Over the years, Burghart estimates he has filed thousands of public records requests seeking information about incidents involving officers.

To request information about federal investigations, journalists and members of the public can file Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. However, FOIA requests can take months, if not years. And they can still be rejected.

Burghart recalled a call from the Federal Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms Service asking if the FOIA request regarding the incident in Alabama was still of interest.

He applied five years ago.

“I said, ‘Yes, yes,'” Burghart said.

Two years have passed since that call, and he added that he had not yet received any information about the incident.

According to the federal government’s own records, its opacity is increasing.

In 2021, the Government Accountability Office reported that FOIA denials have increased in recent years. Between 2012 and 2019, the number of his FOIA requests denied increased by 10%. There was also a 76% spike in the number of partially denied FOIA requests during the same period.

The first and oldest of the local CBP/Border Patrol shootings covered in this article involved Mendivil, a 21-year-old US citizen living in Tucson at the time.

On February 7, 2019, the Mendiville was reportedly driving south through the Deconcini port of entry when it was stopped by CBP officers conducting a southbound inspection. A CBP media release at the time stated that Mendiville “accelerated the vehicle toward Mexico” during the interrogation process. At that time, CBP said officers released their weapons.

After sustaining a gunshot wound, Mendiville was taken to a hospital in Nogales, Sonora. She was then treated in Arizona in critical condition.

In February 2021, Mendiville filed a civil suit against the Department of Homeland Security. The lawsuit alleges that officers used “unreasonable and excessive force” to inflict a life-altering head injury on Mendiville.

The complaint also suggests Mendiville still has questions of his own about the details of the shooting — unanswered questions.

“We were unable to obtain information regarding the exact location of the shooter or the exact location of the vehicle at the time of the crash,” the complaint said.

The litigation remains at the discovery/deposit stage.

Criminal charges, such as assaulting a federal employee, might be expected as a result of a legitimate shooting in which the victim survived, but Mendiville does not appear to have faced criminal charges in the case.

The government also never publicly released the name of the officer who shot him, but Mendiville’s lawyers submitted to the court that the officer’s name was eventually revealed to him.

On September 21, 2020, Border Patrol agents shot and killed 25-year-old Alejandro Bertrand Figueroa in the Patagonian Mountains.

The next day, CBP released a statement on the incident, saying that as investigators were trying to arrest a group of illegal immigrants, one person (apparently Figueroa) attacked him with a knife.

“The Border Patrol agent sustained multiple stab wounds but was able to fire a sidearm and fatally shoot the assailant,” CBP said at the time.

The agency never named the agent or the person he shot. But NI found Figueroa’s name using a database maintained by the nonprofit Human Borders and data from the Pima County coroner’s office.

On June 16, 2021, Border Patrol agents shot and killed 37-year-old Marisol García Alcantara, an illegal immigrant from Mexico, on Bancard Avenue in Nogales.

Garcia recently crossed the border with a group of immigrants. She told NI later that yearThe group was being driven through Nogales in a van when border patrol vehicles began pursuing them.

Around 5:00 pm, an agent shot Garcia above the eyebrow while he was sitting in the passenger seat. After receiving her treatment, she was transferred to a detention center, and after she told NI, she was deported to Mexico.

Like Mendivil, she doesn’t appear to have been charged with a crime that justified the shooting. U.S. officials have not said whether the investigators who shot her believed the van or anyone else posed an imminent danger to their safety.They also did not identify her agent. .

On December 9, 2021, Garcia signed a claim against CBP. This is the first step in filing a civil suit. The allegation states that Garcia has endured “having bullet fragments lodged in her brain” and enduring her “permanent lifelong consequences” as a result of the shooting.

The case of truck driver Cockrum, who was shot dead by police in Nogales last May, is one of several locally investigated cases that contrast with the slow, opaque methods of federal authorities.

In February, the Cochise County Sheriff’s Office reported that Border Patrol agent Kendrek Staheli shot dead illegal immigrant Carmelo Cruz about 30 miles northeast of Douglas. The prosecutor announced that he had reviewed the sheriff’s investigation and determined that the shooting was justified.In the process, county officials provided the Sierra Vista Herald/Review with a full report of the investigation.

McIntyre came to the decision less than three months after the shooting occurred. This is a far cry from years of research conducted by federal agencies.

Asked whether the transparency of local and federal investigations generally differs, Burghart, who studies cases nationwide, admitted it was difficult to generalize.

But he added that locally-led investigations have their own drawbacks. Cooperation with county governments and local law enforcement could create more room for potential bias, he said.

“Generally, I am confident in the state-led findings,” he explained. “Because[state investigators]don’t work with these officers on a daily basis.”

Arizona State Police led an investigation into the Cockrum shooting. Neither state nor local officials are known to have conducted their own investigations into the shootings involving his three federal officers investigated in this article.

It wasn’t immediately clear why Cochise County prosecutors decided to investigate the recent Border Patrol shooting near Douglas.

In recent years, following police-involved shootings, advocates and policymakers across the country have called for greater transparency.

In 2018, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed into law the Right to Know Act, which requires the public to be informed of armed incidents involving law enforcement agencies. And earlier this week, CBP announced it was disbanding its Critical Incidents Team. The controversial unit was intended to investigate the use of force internally, but critics claimed they were operating as a cover-up team.

But federal investigations, typically conducted by the FBI under the direction of the federal attorney’s office, remain sluggish.

Burghart argued that federal authorities could do more in terms of keeping the public informed. For example, he suggested we could take on his job of collecting and publishing data on shootings and other fatal incidents involving police officers.

“The federal government could afford to collect this data if they wanted to,” Burghart said.

Without that effort, Burghart said the responsibility falls to non-governmental agencies, such as non-profit organizations like Fatal Encounters.

“It’s like a blunt instrument, just Google alerts and online research,” Burghart added.

The FBI currently records a limited number of violent incidents across the country in its online database.

However, in 2021, only 41 out of 114 federal law enforcement agencies provided data. CBP is one of 41 participating agencies. But the database is ambiguous. Only the number of reported incidents is recorded.

Location, date, name and other details are not shown in the database. In other words, it is impossible to find the cases of Mendiville, Figueroa and Garcia.