$1 Million Awarded To 9-Year-Old US Citizen Held For 34 Hours By CBP

As has often been said about ICE and CBP, the cruelty is the point. Both agencies have seemingly gone out of their way to harm people, even though their directives don’t demand the often cruel actions they take. Both CBP and ICE have been separating immigrant families for years, even though Trump’s decision to badmouth pretty much every country people are fleeing from as producers of garbage people and criminals meant he took most of the heat for this tactic.

The problem here is discretion: too much of it. Now that both agencies consider themselves to be a part of the national security apparatus (something that often is echoed by courts), they believe they’re justified to do almost anything they want, no matter how horrific. After all, the people hurt the most aren’t actual Americans, so who cares?

That mindset is tough to switch off. And that’s why the American people will be paying out more than a million dollars to the family of a child CBP officers pretty much kidnapped for 34 hours.

Julia Amparo and her brother Oscar Amparo Medina routinely traveled across the border from Mexico into San Ysidro, California to attend school. Their parents and siblings all lived in Tijuana, but Oscar and Julia were US citizens. For years, they had crossed the border without incident. In March 2019, that all changed.

After a CBP officer claimed to have detected a facial “mole” on Julia’s passport that wasn’t present on her face, the siblings were routed to secondary inspection. (This happened despite Julia producing a school ID that did not have the alleged “mole.”) Once they were there, everything went to hell.

Both children were aggressively interrogated by CBP Officer Willmy Lara (who other CBP officers claimed “had a reputation for obtaining confessions”). The siblings were interviewed together and separately. Every time the kids stumbled on an answer, Officer Lara chose to believe this was an indication of guilt.

As Lara stated during his testimony, it is CBP policy to have multiple officers in the room where children are interrogated, supposedly for their own safety. He claimed three other officers were present during the interrogation, but as the court notes in its judgment, there’s no record of any other officer being present and the officers referred to by Lara testified that they were not present during these questioning sessions.

That leads to the first finding the court makes en route to its judgment in favor of the children. From the decision [PDF], coming to us via Courthouse News Service.

Though other officers could see part of the room, no one else was in the room or within clear listening distance and the interview was not audio or video recorded. The Court finds that Officer Lara violated the CBP policy requiring a witness for interviews of children and otherwise failed to record the interview.

These interviews led to a “confession” from Julia, who — while being pressured to make this statement by Officer Lara — claimed to be her cousin, instead of herself. Her brother made a similar “admission.” This led to Oscar being held for 14 hours before being released. Julia’s nightmare lasted much longer: 34 hours. Julia’s wrongful detention only appears to have ended because her family appeared on Mexican television to talk about their missing children and got the Mexican consul involved.

The government continued to claim its assertions were truthful despite the lack of supporting evidence. The court doesn’t find the government credible, especially when represented by Officer Lara.

The United States contends that Julia and Oscar stated that Julia was [her cousin] Melany unprompted and then continued to say that throughout their interviews. The United States does not offer a coherent explanation as to why Julia would falsely confess that she was her cousin Melany. Further, because Officer Lara failed to have a witness present and prepared a report lacking in details, there is no corroboration of either claim.

True, there’s a lack of evidence on the plaintiffs’ side as well, but what there is of it (along with the court’s own observations during this lawsuit) tends to support the plaintiffs’ allegations.

Officer Lara’s report makes no reference as to what prompted Julia to (falsely) confess that she was Melany. Ex. 9. Officer Lara testified “it was just a normal interview” and that he did not remember Julia crying during or after the interview. However, according to Julia, Oscar, and Officer Melendrez, Julia was crying after the interview and Oscar consoled her. Additionally, at trial, Officer Lara testified with a confident and intense manner. Meanwhile, Julia was soft-spoken, easily confused by leading questions, and prone to freezing up and unthinkingly agreeing with the questioner, resulting in contradictory answers.

[…]

Because there were no witnesses or recording of the interview, it is not possible to determine whether Julia was threatened, pressured, or coerced to make a false confession. At the very least though, the Court finds that Officer Lara’s intense manner in questioning a scared 9-year old who was prone to freezing up and automatically agreeing when questioned by authority caused Julia to falsely admit that she was her cousin, Melany.

Discretion means something. And if you want to avail yourself of the benefits of discretionary functions, you need to be far more judicious when you utilize it. This was just an abuse of discretionary power — one that kept a nine-year-old separated from her family for 34 hours.

It was not reasonable to detain a 9-year-old and 14-year-old on suspicion of a false claim of citizenship while their mother and Julia’s godmother were trying to reach them and without doing any further investigating for over 5 hours in the middle of the workday. Officers failed to pursue opportunities to interview Thelma and Cardenas at 9:40 a.m., later in the morning, around noon, around 3:30 p.m., and again around 6 p.m.⸺opportunities created not by CBP but by Thelma and Cardenas looking for the Children. In determining that the actions of the officers were unreasonable, the Court has taken into account the CBP officers’ failures to abide by common sense and CBP directives aimed to protect the children, such as: (1) having a child’s interview witnessed or recorded; (2) providing timely parental notice; and (3) preserving recorded interviews.

There’s no immunity to be had here and Officer Lara is a genuine unicorn: someone who abused his position so fully it has allowed the plaintiffs to not only clear the extremely high “sovereign immunity” bar but secure a monetary judgment from a US federal court.

For these reasons, the Court therefore holds that the duration of the Children’s detention was unreasonable and violated the Fourth Amendment. As a result, the government has not met its burden to show that the discretionary function exception to the FTCA’s waiver of sovereign immunity applies.

The follow-up is quite the kicker:

The Court also need not address whether the discretionary function exception does not apply because CBP violated its own non-discretionary policies.

Here’s how the damages break down: $1.1 million for Julia, because she was the youngest and held the longest. Her brother receives $175,000. And their mother, Thelma, will receive $250,000. All of this is sure to be appealed, but the judgment is in place. More importantly, the ruling accompanying breaks this whole debacle down in great detail, providing a startling glimpse into the routine inhumanity of the people this country employs to supposedly secure our borders. And if that means locking up a nine-year-old for 34 hours, so be it.