A review board within U.S. Customs and Border Protection is investigating a Monday incident in which Border Patrol agents used tear gas and pepper spray against people, including children, who attempted to illegally enter San Diego, Calif., from Tijuana, Mexico.
CBP said Tuesday its Office of Professional Responsibility is looking into agents’ deployment of 2-chlorobenzylidene malononitrile, a type of tear gas known as CS gas, but did not respond to requests regarding the reason for the probe.
“Under CBP use of force policy, this incident will be reviewed by CBP’s Office of Professional Responsibility,” the Department of Homeland Security agency said in a statement.
On New Year’s Eve, approximately 150 people attempted to climb over and crawl under barriers at the border. Agents arrived on scene and many migrants turned back. Some on the Mexico side then began throwing objects at U.S. federal agents.
“To address the rock throwers assaulting agents and risking the safety of migrants attempting to cross who were already on the U.S. side, both smoke and minimal countermeasures were deployed. Agents deployed smoke, pepper spray and CS gas to a position upwind of the rock throwers and south of the border fence,” CBP said in the statement.
The agency said its agents did not see any children affected by the gas, smoke, or spray. Witness accounts contradicted CBP’s claim.
President Trump defended the move in a Cabinet meeting Wednesday and said “people tried to charge the border and couldn’t.”
He compared the border to a sieve and said tear gas was flying through the air.
The part of the border the migrants tried to breach is between six and 10 feet tall. The 14-mile strip of barrier extends from the Pacific Ocean east and ends in the mountains where very few people attempt to face the difficult terrain. The current barrier is in the process of being replaced with 18-foot-tall bollard-style wall, which looks like jail cells and allows agents to see through. It’s also difficult to scale.
Trump said with the new wall, it would take a “champion pole vaulter” to get over it.
Around 2,000 people who traveled as part of a caravan to Tijuana remain in the northern Mexico city waiting to apply for asylum in the U.S.
A similar incident in which illegal entrants tossed rocks and objects at agents on the U.S. side of the barrier in November was also investigated by CBP’s internal review board.
Border Patrol San Diego Sector Chief Patrol Agent Rodney S. Scott asked the board to determine if his agents could have better handled the situation, according to Arizona Central.
However, CBP did not issue a public statement or news release that had launched a formal investigation into the incident and never released a report listing its findings.
In the Nov. 25 incident, hundreds of people who traveled to Tijuana from Central America as part of a caravan rushed at the barrier near the San Ysidro port of entry near San Diego, Calif.
Agents fired tear gas toward the clusters of people to get them to turn back.
Following the incident, Scott said the use of force was justified.
“What we saw over and over yesterday is that the group, the caravan as we call them, would push women and children to the front and then begin basically rocking our agents,” he told CNN. “The group immediately started throwing rocks and debris at our agents, taunting the agents, and once our agents were assaulted, and the numbers started growing, we had two or three agents at a time initially facing hundreds of people at a time, they deployed tear gas to protect themselves and to protect the border.”
Tear gas historically has been used by CBP officers and Border Patrol agents in similar incidents where groups have descended on one part of the border.
The Pentagon does not allow tear gas to be used in war situations.
In 2012, under former President Barack Obama, CBP reported 26 times when tear gas was used by CBP.
That number dropped over the next few years down to three total incidents in fiscal 2016.
The use of tear gas has crept back up to levels seen in 2012 and 2013 during Trump’s first two years in office. In 2017, federal agents documented using the gas 18 times. CBP has used pepper spray 29 times so far in 2018.
