Border Patrol Shooting Shakes Town Where Illegal Crossings Are Part Of Daily Life

RIO BRAVO, Texas ― The vague message J.C. Gonzalez received over the radio on May 23 led him to believe that it was the Border Patrol agent who’d been shot.

But when this tiny border town’s fire chief arrived on the scene, it was Claudia Gómez, an unarmed, 20-year-old Guatemalan immigrant, who lay dying in an empty lot, her legs tangled upon each other. The bullet from the Border Patrol agent’s firearm had pierced the left side of her forehead around her hairline and exited through the rear side of her skull. She was still breathing, so the chief drove back to the fire station, a few blocks away, to retrieve a neck brace and backboard to stabilize her head and spine. Then Gonzalez’s partner and a Border Patrol agent ― Gonzalez didn’t know whether it was the one who had fired the shot ― took turns administering chest compressions.

By the time emergency medical services arrived, Gómez was dead. Officers from the Texas Department of Public Safety, the Webb County Sheriff’s Office, Texas Rangers and Laredo Police gathered around her body. A medical evacuation helicopter landed nearby. Marta Martinez, a resident who lived next to the empty lot, filmed the aftermath and streamed it live on Facebook, spreading the news to millions of people. When Gonzalez went back to the station, he left behind the medical supplies he’d brought, which became evidence in an investigation into the shooting led by the FBI.

Details remain scarce about the circumstances that prompted the 15-year veteran of Border Patrol, whom the agency has not named while the investigation proceeds, to pull the trigger. The circumstances appear damning.

The agent had responded to a report of illegal activity near a culvert where the town meets the river, according to Customs and Border Protection. The agency initially released a statement saying that the group refused to obey the agent when he confronted them and that some of them attacked him with “blunt objects.” CBP walked the story back the next day, saying instead the group had “ignored his verbal commands and rushed him.” Neither Gómez nor the group of three other unauthorized immigrants on the scene, who were later apprehended, were armed. The shooting took place midday on one of the town’s main streets, but no one has claimed publicly that they witnessed it.

Gómez’s family plans to sue Border Patrol over the killing.

Gonzalez, an Army veteran who worked for several years as a deputy sheriff, worried the incident would undermine trust with Border Patrol in a town where that confidence has always been scarce. In Rio Bravo, illegal crossings are so common that parents urge their kids to avoid playing in the river to keep from getting caught up in law enforcement operations and to use caution in the street to avoid Border Patrol trucks whizzing by.

People in Rio Bravo have never trusted Border Patrol, Gonzalez said. And the agency’s reputation had already taken a blow earlier this year, when another Border Patrol agent who worked in the same county, Ronald Anthony Burgos Aviles, was arrested on accusations of killing his mistress and her 1-year-old son.

Several residents ― most of whom declined to be named for fear of angering Border Patrol or inviting threats, like the ones Marta Martínez received after posting her video to Facebook ― viewed the shooting with suspicion.

One longtime resident who lives near the river said it was a common occurrence for people to run through his property and scale the fence to evade Border Patrol, before he put up a gate to keep them out. He also installed security cameras and wished his neighbors had too. “Yeah, I trust them,” he said, speaking in Spanish, of Border Patrol. “But then they do these things and you don’t. If it would’ve happened here, it would’ve been filmed and then we’d have evidence.”

Even so, many of them are willing to give the agent the benefit of the doubt, given the lack of details about the first Border Patrol shooting in the city’s history.

“No one likes them here,” another resident, speaking in Spanish, said of Border Patrol. But having crossed himself illegally in the past, he also knows first-hand the pressure that grinds upon the agents that used to chase him. “It’s like any other job,” he said. “You get frustrated. That will trick your mind.”

Mayor Francisco Peña would rather have been planning his town’s first city-sponsored Independence Day celebration when he heard of the shooting last week. He himself had crossed from Mexico at age 4, not knowing that he was an undocumented immigrant. (He adjusted his status decades later, after realizing that his father’s birth in Laredo qualified him for U.S. citizenship.) Peña went on to serve in the Army, fight in the Korean War, work as a teacher and become a medical doctor.

He suspected that Gómez, who earned a college degree in accounting but migrated after struggling to find work, might have have made similar contributions if given the chance.

As the leader of a town with an $800,000 budget and no local police force along the banks of an unfenced section of the Rio Grande, he wished he had more Border Patrol agents. People wade through the river almost every day, and he has little faith in the technology the agency uses to catch them. He’s seen people walk up from the banks of the river on all fours like dogs or roll like logs, which he thinks allows them to evade the Border Patrol’s sensors.

But after the killing, Peña found himself struggling to balance his sympathy for Gómez with his loyalty to the Border Patrol in a town where illegal crossings and drug trafficking are a fact of daily life. He feels certain the shooting was accidental, though he acknowledged it had unsettled the town, where many residents are undocumented. It was clear, he thought, that Gómez was not one of the “animals” the president sometimes spoke about.

He was frustrated, too: Over the last four years, the last two Republican governors have spent more than $2 billion to send state Department of Public Safety troopers and the National Guard to border towns like Rio Bravo. But the state ignored more mundane public safety requests.

When Tropical Storm Charley hit Rio Bravo in 1998, flooding at the edge of the Rio Grande destroyed several houses that remain abandoned to this day. Local officials insist that human traffickers and drug smugglers use the structures as safe houses. But state lawmakers in Austin ignored Peña’s requests since 2015 for funding to buy the properties from the current owners and tear them down. His last ask in January of 2017 totaled $200,000.

Mayor Peña doubts that the cat-and-mouse game between Border Patrol and the immigrants coming to his town to try to make a better life will ever end. But he hopes the killing won’t dampen the patriotic fervor he hopes to instill at the city’s first official Independence Day celebration in July. The abandoned houses will remain for now, but he’s looking forward to unveiling a new park, with an outdoor theater and public gathering space. It sits on Tuliapán Drive, directly in front of the culvert where CBP says that Gómez crossed.

He’s recruited young residents for a kite-flying show and goal-scoring contest on the new soccer field. And he’s curated a list of songs he hopes will encourage the town to feel the same sense of national pride that he does, including a special rendition of “America the Beautiful.” It’s by Tejano musician Jay Perez.

“He makes the most beautiful version of ‘America, the Beautiful,’” Peña told a visitor Wednesday. “And he’s one of us.”

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This article originally appeared on HuffPost.