By The opinion
Jun 25, 2024, 10:55 PM EDT
A federal court in California ruled that the US Government violated the rights of two American children by detaining them for several hours when they tried to enter the country from Mexico to study, and will have to compensate them.
According to the stories, Óscar Amparo Medina, who was 14 years old at the time, and his sister Julia Isabel Amparo, 9, were detained in March 2019 at the border crossing between Tijuana, Mexico and San Ysidro when they went to school in the Californian town; The immigration authorities indicated that they suspected that they had lied about his identity and that the young man could be trafficking the minor.
Five years from that moment, The court ruled in favor of Oscar Amparo Medina and his sister Julia Isabel Amparo, to whom the U.S. will have to pay $175,000 and $1.1 million dollars, respectively, after they were detained by Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents.
The girl was detained for 34 hours, while the minor was held for 14 hours in different cells.
The federal district judge for the Southern District of California, Gonzalo Curiel, determined that the actions of the CBP agents were negligent, had produced false imprisonment and emotional distress in the children, after forcing the minor to give a false confession .
“Julia began by stating that she was Julia, but at some point, under the influence and pressure of an intense officer known for directing confessions, she accepted that she was actually her cousin Melany,” Curiel said.
That is to say, After hours of interrogation, the girl, under pressure, said that she was not Julia, but a cousin of hers and that Óscar would be trafficking her.
“Having two officers in an interview is intended as a control of the pressure exerted by the officers, and that control failed,” the magistrate stated.
Besides, The judge also determined that the Government also violated the Fifth Amendment and that it intentionally caused emotional distress to the brothers.
“CBP officers failed to take advantage of available investigative opportunities that would have substantially reduced the children’s detention period … and, after obtaining the false confession, detained them without further investigation for more than five hours and continued to detain them when their mother arrived at the port of entry with their birth certificates and Social Security cards,” Curiel wrote.
“Common sense and ordinary human experience indicate that it was unreasonable to detain Julia for 34 hours to determine her identity or Oscar for approximately 14 hours to determine whether he was trafficking his sister, when there were multiple means of investigation available that the agents could not. “they used,” the judge wrote in the ruling that closed the case.
*With information from EFE.
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