Man who died in San Ysidro was tortured, the provisions of the commission

Since Maria Puga saw the cell phone film material from her husband almost 15 years ago, who circles in fear of the soil of federal border officials, she knew that he was tortured before his death, she said on Thursday.

This week, the Inter-American Commission for Human Rights agreed and found that the law enforcement officers of the Federal Officials Anastasio Hernández had tortured Rojas by beating him with batons, several kneeling and kneeling at him, while he was tied up with handcuffs at the San Ysidro port of the entry.

The groundbreaking decision was the first time that the Commission, an international institution that is part of the organization of the American states and examined massacre, extrajudicial murders and other rights of rights in the western hemisphere, has issued such results in a case with regard to death by the US law enforcement.

The Commission also found that federal officials carried out an incomplete and incomplete examination of the death of Hernández Rojas, applied excessive violence while he was held back, discriminated against, and refused his family justice, all against international protocols that the USA approved.

“The actions of the police violence against Mr. Hernández in San Ysidro input harbor were deliberately committed with the aim of intimidating and punishing the victim, and … to an intensive suffering for the victim, and (the Commission) concludes that they wrote the officers released on Wednesday on Wednesday.

“That is the truth,” Puga told the Union Tribune on Thursday. In Spanish, she said that the death of her husband and the five children of the couple destroyed her, but to hear that his screams had triggered a mixture of courage and anger that has made her for more than a decade to look for justice. She hopes that the United States will follow the commission's recommendations to reopen the investigation and to account for the responsible civil servants.

“(This is) for the first time that an independent, impartial position provided a complete accounting of what happened to Anastasio,” said Roxanna Altholz, the director of the Human Rights Clinic at UC Berkeley Law and one of the lawyers, the Puga and her family to represent Andrea Guerrero from Alliance San Diego. “(The Commission) has also determined a milestone dass of the cornerstones of the US law, the so-called” objectively reasonable “standard, which violates the International Human Rights Act.”

Altholz said that the Commission's decision was “more than a conviction”, but “a blueprint for the structural reform and a call to the US government, its laws and guidelines with the basic principles of human rights and dignity”.

Hernández Rojas, who was 42 years old, was a Mexican citizen who had lived in San Diego since his teenager. Shortly after he was deported in May 2010, he was arrested when he tried to sneak back into the country and pulled to the port of San Ysidro, where he was to be sent back to Mexico. The authorities said that he was confrontative and that he had tried to step on the federal law enforcement officers at some point. During the incident, two immigration and customs authorities beat him with trouble sticks and another agent kneels on his back. A customs and border protection officer fired him four times with a taser while others had insured him.

Hernández Rojas stopped breathing during the encounter and was taken to the hospital for about two days before it was removed from a ventilation machine. An autopsy by the office of the Medical Investigation Office of the San Diego County decided his death as a murder and found that numerous factors contributed to a fatal heart attack, including methamphetamine poisoning, heart disease, Taser shocks, physical exertion and restrictions. This autopsy came to the conclusion that methamphetamine played a key role in his death, while a second, independent autopsy came to the conclusion that the methamphetamine was not a key factor.

The FBI, the Department of Civil Rights of the U.S. Ministry of Justice, the office of the General Inspector of the Ministry of Homeland Protection and a large jury all examined death. They concluded in November 2015 that no criminal complaints would be raised against the officials involved. The family of Hernández Rojas sued the federal government and stipulated the civil lawsuit for 1 million US dollars in 2017.

But Puga continued to push for justice and took the case to the Human Rights Commission, which is a body within the organization of American states and is based in Washington, DC,

The US State Department represents the United States in the organization of American countries. The officers of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs repeatedly failed or rejected the earnings of the case, and instead demanded that the Commission not take the case because the family of Hernández Rojas had already enclosed their civil lawsuit. The United States also argued that agreements that guarantee certain human rights that were signed by the members of the international organization are not binding, which means that the United States have no legal obligation to follow them.

In its report, the Commission found that it gave the US government the opportunity to react to its results in December and again in March. The Commission said the government never answered.

Altholz, the lawyer of UC Berkeley, criticized the United States in 2021 for not answering, and said that “authoritarian regime in America would give permission to do the same”.

On Thursday, she said that she and the other lawyers are “not naive. We know that the United States have a long history in which they have rejected international decisions. But we also know that Anastasios family is not alone. They are part of a growing movement of survivors and communities who believe that they would not be at the border, and no without justice.”

The case has already led to a concrete measure of the dissolution of so-called critical incident teams, which operated in border-patrouilla sectors along the border between the USA and Mexico without supervision. According to a report by the US office, the secret units, the first of which were founded in the San Diego sector in 1987 in the San Diego sector, committed themselves to investigating incidents that they did not have for an investigation.

Guerrero of Alliance San Diego and other lawyers who examined the death of Hernández Rojas alerted the congress of what they described as “shadow police units” after he had found signs that the unit in San Diego in San Diego had to protect the evidence in Hernández Rojas' case to protect the agents involved. They then found documentation of other cases in which similar units had entered other sectors.

It was one of her findings that President Donald Trump's pending candidate for CBP, Rodney Scott, signed an administrative summons for Hernández Rojas' medical records that the lawyers claimed that they had then examined the police officers of San Diego. Scott, who was the reigning deputy chief policeman in San Diego at the time, was interviewed on Wednesday during a confirmation hearing before the Senate Finance Committee on his role in the Hernández Rojas case.

Two former high-ranking CBP officials submitted affidavit in the event of the Human Rights Commission. One stated that this type of use of an administrative summons “illegally and possibly disabled justice”. Another called his use “inappropriate, if not criminal”.

Scott admitted that he signed the summons on Wednesday, but said that it was a standard procedure law that he had completed after checking the summons. When asked whether he had interfered in the investigation of the death of Hernández Rojas, he “absolutely not”.

Originally published: May 1, 2025 at 18:51 PDT