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Standing By Our Border Patrol Agents

By Congressman Mark Souder

This column was first published by the KPC Media Group in the News-Sun (Noble & LaGrange Counties), the Evening Star (DeKalb County), and the Herald-Republican (Steuben County).

Just over two years ago, a couple of U.S. Border Patrol agents chased down drug dealer Osvaldo Aldrete-Davila, who had fled a van packed with almost 800 pounds of illegal narcotics. The agents got into a scuffle with him and in the chaos one of them thought he pulled a gun. They shot him once in the hind-end, so to speak.

Aldrete-Davila escaped across the U.S.-Mexico border. Subsequently, the Justice Department prosecuted the two agents. They granted Aldrete-Davila immunity so he could come up from Mexico to testify against them. The agents were convicted and sentenced to 10- and 11-year prison terms. Outraged Hooisers write me regularly about this issue.

Here’s the Justice Department’s side of the story. They say that Aldrete-Davila tried to surrender by raising his hands, and a third agent who arrived on the scene heard one of the agents say he was going to shoot a Mexican. Aldrete-Davila was a hired driver who was shot before the agents knew that he had a truck full of narcotics and was in the United States illegally. They say the agents threw some of their shell casings into a drainage ditch after the incident, destroying evidence of the shooting, and then lied about what happened.

Quite a different story.

As the Republican leader of the Homeland Security Subcommittee on Border, Maritime and Global Counterterrorism, I have direct daily oversight of our nation’s borders. I have sided with the agents in this case.

Here are some key points:

1. While the agents weren’t certain Aldrete-Davila was running drugs, his location and vehicle made the probability extremely high.

2. The scuffle was witnessed by no one—only the two agents and Aldrete-Davila were involved—and one agent says he saw the suspect with a gun. A firearm was never found, but Aldrete-Davila could have thrown it away during his escape.

3. There is disputable evidence about which way Aldrete-Davila was facing, and when. While it’s justifiably against the law to shoot someone in the back, especially if they’re unarmed as Aldrete-Davila may have been, it’s uncertain that he was running away when he was shot.

4. The statement allegedly overheard by a third agent about “shooting a Mexican” was later retracted. Whether intentional or not, it was a smear.

5. Evidence was destroyed and some of the agents’ statements were contradictory, which gets to a major question: Why would federal agents destroy evidence?
Our agents were concerned—as it turns out, justifiably—that the government would not back them up during an investigation, so they broke the law by destroying evidence.

I want to know why federal agents aren’t given the benefit of the doubt.

The facts are that Aldrete-Davila tried to enter our nation illegally trafficking huge quantities of drugs. There’s a fundamental dispute about whether he had a gun and what actually occurred, but we know he escaped to Mexico.

Past this case, though, here’s the bottom line: our Border Patrol agents are now even more afraid to use force to protect our borders. And if our borders are not secure, America is not secure.

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