Fearing for My Life During a Traffic Stop: Rising Police Violence in the Borderlands Ankur Singh - Truthout | |
go to original May 24, 2017 |
Posters and graffiti in Nogales, Sonora call for justice after the fatal shooting of 16-year-old Jose Antonio Elena Rodriguez (Kino Border Initiative)
Three cop cars with their sirens blazing were coming fast behind me. It was a dark night in April 2017 in Nogales, Arizona, along the US-Mexico border. The infamous wall was visible from where I was stopped. I am an Indian-American college student who had been living in Nogales for the past few months studying journalism and education. My heart dropped as I pulled over to the side of the road.
"Driver!" a Nogales Police Department (NPD) officer yelled at me through the loud metallic intercom of his vehicle.
I didn't know how to respond since the officer's statement wasn't really a question or a command, so I just shouted, "Yes?" out the window. In my driver-side mirror, I saw an agent creeping toward my car with his blinding, bright flashlight and gun pointed directly at me. Two more officers stood on the other side of my car with their flashlights and guns drawn, too. I didn't understand what was going on, but I tried to remain calm. I knew I could be shot.
Just a few minutes walk away from where I was pulled over, in October 2012, US Border Patrol agents shot and killed 16-year-old Jose Antonio Elena Rodriguez through the wall in Mexico. I thought of this as I sat in my car, surrounded by armed police officers. I had become subject to what Attorney General Jeff Sessions would call a few days later the "Trump era" of immigration enforcement and border security during a visit to Nogales in mid-April. There was an eerie premonition that what happened to Elena Rodriguez would happen with more frequency under a Trump administration poised to fortify the border, as Sessions made quite clear, even more than it already is.
...The Trump era will inevitably lead to more instances of excessive use of force by law enforcement in the borderlands as immigrants continue to be criminalized. During Sessions' speech, he ordered that federal prosecutors charge undocumented immigrants with a felony (previously a misdemeanor) "if they unlawfully enter or attempt to enter a second time."
Read the rest at Truthout
(Photo: Banspy/LW)
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