In Tucson, Arizona, a Border Patrol agent called immigrants “mindless murdering savages” before ramming into one of these people with his truck. Said the agent later in his own defense, this sort of racist hate is simply “part of the agency’s culture.”
Doesn’t excuse what he is alleged to have done back in 2017, and I don’t doubt him.
From the Washington Post, which cites original reporting by the Arizona Republic in Tucson:
“PLEASE let us take the gloves off trump!” he texted another agent who, at the time, was facing criminal charges for shooting an unarmed Mexican teenager through the border fence. Migrants, Bowen suggested, are “disgusting subhuman s— unworthy of being kindling for a fire.”
Less than two weeks later, prosecutors say, Bowen hit one such migrant with his truck, coming inches away from running the man over — and then lied about the incident in a report.
The texts came to light in filings last month in U.S. District Court in Tucson as Bowen’s attorney fought to suppress a flurry of messages in which the agent used slurs and made light of violence by agents. But Bowen’s views are hardly extraordinary, argued his attorney, Sean Chapman. Rather, his sentiments are “commonplace throughout the Border Patrol’s Tucson Sector,” Chapman wrote, adding that such messages are “part of the agency’s culture.”
Chapman later clarified in an email to The Washington Post that he intended that argument only to apply to one particular term Bowen regularly used in texts: “tonk,” which some agents claim is an innocent acronym, the Arizona Republic reported, and others say is a slur derived from the sound of hitting an immigrant on the head with a flashlight.
The Tucson Sector of the Border Patrol told the Arizona Daily Star on Sunday its agents are “held to the highest standards, and any action of misconduct within our ranks will not be tolerated.”
Sure thing.
Read more: ‘Mindless murdering savages’: Border agent used slurs before allegedly hitting migrant with his truck [washingtonpost.com]