The American Civil Liberties Union has made public thousands of pages of previously secret reports detailing allegations of abuse of minors by Border Patrol agents.

The documents describe alleged instances of minors being beaten and robbed by agents, migrants hiding under bushes being run over by agents riding ATVs, and of minors being placed in detention with adults. At least one case describes a legal U.S. resident being held in an immigration detention center because he did not have the right form of identification on him.

The “significant incident” reports cover a time period between 2009 and 2014, during the Obama administration.

Also included in the collection of records are some instances alleging assaults against Border Patrol agents by migrants along the southern border, including rock throwing.


This is actually the second trove of documents the ACLU has released in as many years. In 2018, the ACLU published documents obtained from U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s two oversight agencies, outlining possibly hundreds of separate allegations of abuse or mistreatment of minors under 18 who either crossed the U.S.-Mexico border illegally or claimed asylum from 2009 to 2014.

Those documents were the basis for a report called “Neglected and Abused” that the ACLU wrote with academics from the University of Chicago.

The new documents published last week by the ACLU of San Diego and Imperial Counties include records from CBP and Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Combined, the records make up some 35,000 pages.


The ACLU originally asked for these documents in 2014 to scrutinize the Department of Homeland Security’s investigation of allegations made against both agencies between 2009 and 2014. It took five years of litigation for the ACLU to finally obtain the heavily redacted documents this year.

Staff attorneys with the ACLU wanted the documents to get a sense of how thoroughly DHS investigated those allegations.

But the documents are so heavily redacted that the ACLU has been unable to determine what happened to each individual claim, said ACLU staff attorney Sarah Thompson.

“We have been unable to trace a single complaint from beginning to end,” she said.


Thompson described DHS’ method of investigating complaints as a hot-potato approach in which oversight agencies simply pass claims along to different departments. Each time an allegation is handed over to another agency it gets a different case number, which makes it difficult to track.

“These documents show a persistent pattern of serious allegations of child abuse at the hands of federal immigration officials dating back to 2009,” said Mitra Ebadolahi, senior staff attorney at the ACLU. “Additionally, they show how dysfunctional DHS oversight can be, and underscore the urgent need for meaningful accountability throughout the Department.”

When the ACLU published a report based on the oversight committee documents from 2018, CBP responded with a rebuke of the report’s findings. The federal law enforcement agency said “the false accusations made by the ACLU against the previous administration are unfounded and baseless,” adding that regulators “already completed an investigation and found these claims to be unsubstantiated and did not observe misconduct or inappropriate conduct.”

DHS did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the more recent batch of documents.


The entire trove of documents only contains one clear example of a federal employee being disciplined.

That instance, back in 2009, involved an ICE agent who lied in a sworn affidavit about threatening to harm children while driving them from one facility to another.

That agent initially denied yelling, “Shut the f*** up. If I hear any s*** in the van I’m going to smash your f***ing faces in.” However, several witnesses corroborated the children’s allegations.

Documents show that a supervisor chastised the agent for the behavior.


“You essentially threatened the health and well-being of the juveniles,” the supervisor wrote. “As juveniles, the detainees were particularly vulnerable to any outside threat, including you. … Of even greater concern to me is your lack of candor when questioned about your conduct.”

The agent was transferred to a non-law enforcement role within DHS.

By releasing the documents, the ACLU hopes, in part, to show that these problems began well before the Trump administration.

“For those of us who have been doing this work for a long time, it’s exciting that people are finally paying attention to this, but we’ve been screaming about it for so long,” Thompson said. “Why do people think this is only happening now?”


The Obama administration deported more migrants than any administration before, earning then-President Barack Obama the title of “Deporter in Chief” among some migrant advocates. Additionally, the Obama administration detained minors when a then-unprecedented number of unaccompanied minors arrived at the southern border.

In some ways, immigration policies that the Trump administration has been able to implement are only possible because of the system he inherited from past presidents, Thompson said.

“This administration has been taking things to their logical end but the reason they’ve been able to do this is because of policies that long predate the Trump administration.”