Mexico is demanding answers from Washington over the fatal shooting of a teenager by a US border patrol agent and has sent a formal complaint over the incident, Mexico’s foreign minister said.
At a wake on Wednesday, grieving relatives wept over the body of Sergio Hernandez, shot on the Mexican side of the border in the frontier city of Ciudad Juarez as he and other youths were running from US border patrol agents.
The death of the teenager has sparked outrage in Mexico, where many already bristle at the way Mexican immigrants doing menial jobs are treated in the United States.
“I would just caution on this particular incident … Any law enforcement officer has the right of self-defence if people are taking up arms or (throwing) rocks against them,” Crowley told reporters in Washington.
Espinosa said it was not clear if the youths, who were under a bridge border crossing a few meters into Mexican territory, had attacked the agents.
Tensions between the major trading partners have been fanned by the state of Arizona’s decision to crack down on illegal immigrants.
First we have to get control of the human rights problem. We need better training of the agents so they won’t abuse the migrants. Several of them have been indicted recently for rape, beatings and so on. Fortunately, we haven’t had any shootings here since the early nineties.
Secondly, once we get the human rights issue under control we need to revisit our immigration laws. We have three to five million undocumented migrants in the U.S. and we have to look at the whole amnesty issue all over again. We have to find ways that people can cross to the U.S. and work legally. That’s something that has to be agreed on by immigrants rights groups as well as by Congressional leaders and immigration authorities. Sooner or later they are going to have to revisit the whole amnesty issue.
Right now it’s estimated between six and seven thousand. Five thousand on the border at least. Here in San Diego alone we have 2,200. In San Diego we are boxed in. That’s part of the problem. But the real big problem is these troops were not trained for immigration or interacting with civilians. They were trained for battle. For combat. For search and destroy. The boy is an example. They left that boy out there, after they shot him. He laid out there for 20 to 30 minutes bleeding to death. They didn’t have any first-aid on them. They didn’t have any medics with them like they do in combat. They had to wait for the Border Patrol to call the paramedics. By then the boy had bled to death. That’s the kind of people they are going to have out there on the border.