Border

U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) is the largest federal law enforcement agency in the United States, with over 60,000 personnel, including approximately 20,000 U.S. Border Patrol agents. CBP and the Border Patrol have expanded rapidly for almost 20 years—ever since CBP was moved into the then-newly formed U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) after September 11.

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The Border Patrol is notorious for civil and human rights abuses, violence, and impunity. At least 102 people have died as a result of encounters with Border Patrol in the last decade. No agent has ever been convicted of criminal wrongdoing while on duty, despite deaths in custody and uses of excessive, deadly force. Border Patrol agents engage in criminal activities outside their official duties at five times the rate of other law enforcement agencies’ officials. The agency’s discipline system is broken and agency leadership has not weeded out corrupt agents.

U.S. border communities have long understood the cruel tendencies of these rogue agencies—whose militarized over-policing of our border communities reflects our nation’s history of over-policing of Black and Brown people. Since 2013, the ACLU of San Diego & Imperial Counties has dedicated significant resources to identifying, documenting, and litigating civil and human rights abuses perpetrated by CBP and the Border Patrol. Led by Senior Staff Attorney Mitra Ebadolahi and in partnership with countless community partners throughout the United States, our border litigation work strives to ensure that government agents who trample border residents’ rights are held to account.

Listen to Ebadolahi provide an overview of the history of border abuses on the ACLU's podcast, AT LIBERTY, here:

Abuse and Accountability at the Border

The Latest

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CBP’s Long History of Mistreatment of Detained People

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Government documents show Customs & Border Protection Officials Have Abused Migrant Children

News & Commentary
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Neglect & Abuse of Unaccompanied Children by U.S. Customs and Border Protection

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties (“CRCL”) is the agency within DHS that is, according to its own website, responsible for “promoting respect for civil rights and civil liberties in policy creation and implementation,” and for “investigating and resolving civil rights and civil liberties complaints filed by the public.”In response to our FOIA request, CRCL released approximately 4,600 pages of records, consisting of complaints submitted by legal service providers and immigrants’ rights advocates on behalf of migrant children detailing various forms of abuse. The CRCL records also consist of internal agency records documenting the limited investigations it undertook.The International Human Rights Clinic at the University of Chicago School of Law has written a report highlighting the experiences of migrant children (often asylum-seekers) who suffered verbal, physical, or sexual abuse from CBP officials. The appendix contains all of the original records cited in the report.REPORT: Neglect & Abuse of Unaccompanied Children by U.S. Customs and Border ProtectionAppendix: CRCL documents discussed in Report1-Pager Summary: English & SpanishFor the full set of CRCL documents, please visit http://bit.ly/cpbclcrdox
Know Your Rights
Image made to look like a transportation ticket with information on people's rights on trains and buses. Text: Your Rights on Trains and Buses. If Immigration agents board your bus or train or are patrolling a bus or train station:You have a right to rema

ACLU: Greyhound Must Stop Giving Border Patrol Permission to Conduct Bus Raids

Court Case
Jun 04, 2013

Lopez-Venegas v. Johnson

In 2012, the San Diego ACLU became aware of a practice in which immigration officials were routinely forcing immigrants to sign "voluntary return" forms, using misinformation, deception, and coercion to convince them to sign.
Court Case
Nov 05, 2019

Doe v. Wolf

Pursuant to DHS’s former so-called Migrant Protection Protocols tens of thousands of asylum-seeking individuals and families were forced to wait in precarious conditions in Mexican border cities while their asylum cases were adjudicated. On November 5, 2019, we filed a class action to challenge...
Court Case
Feb 11, 2015

Child Abuse FOIA

This lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) challenges the failure of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and several of its component agencies to produce records related to the abuse and mistreatment of children in the custody of U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP).
Court Case
Nov 20, 2019

Guan et al. v. Wolf et al.

The five journalists filed a federal lawsuit alleging that CBP’s questioning aimed at uncovering their sources of information and their observations as journalists was unconstitutional.