BREAKING: Border Patrol shoots and critically injures person in southern Arizona

Emergency crews “found the patient in custody and in critical condition” 15 miles north of the US-Mexico border.

Border Patrol shot and critically injured a person near Tucson, Arizona, early Tuesday morning. The shooting took place a few miles south of the agency’s interior checkpoint on West Arivaca Road, and about 15 miles north of the U.S-Mexico border. Initial reports relayed by Tucson Emergency News “indicate Border Patrol involved in an OIS [officer-involved shooting]. One male reported with three gunshot [wounds].”

According Green Valley News, emergency responders “found the patient in custody and in critical condition.” As of writing, details about the incident, including the victim’s identity and current condition, are unknown. Tucson Sector Border Patrol did not confirm, deny, or provide any details when asked over the phone. Later in the day, the Pima County Sheriff’s Department issued a statement on social media saying the agency was “responding to a shooting involving U.S. Border Patrol in Arivaca” and is “working in coordination with the FBI Phoenix-Tucson office and U.S. Customs and Border Protection.”

A humanitarian aid worker currently on the scene told me that there are “about 10 undercover police vehicles and a handful of border patrol closer to site of shooting,” which apparently happened in wash south of the Arivaca Road.

Police, Border Patrol, and local media near the site of a Border Patrol shooting on Arivaca Road, January 27. Photo: No More Deaths

The shooting in Arizona comes just days after another Border Patrol agent shot and killed legal observer and ICU nurse Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, a tragedy that itself came just days after former Border Patrol and current ICE agent Jonathan Ross shot and killed Renee Good, a mother and legal observer, in that same city—both of them executed in cold blood and smeared by the Trump regime as “domestic terrorists” for documenting ICE and Border Patrol kidnappings in their neighborhoods.

The murders of Renee and Alex—both white U.S. citizens whose horrific deaths were captured on video in graphic detail—made international headlines and sparked mass protests in Minneapolis and around the country. But at the border, away from the cameras, killings by immigration agents are actually quite common, just as killings by police are common across the U.S.

When I heard of this morning’s shooting in Arizona, I scoured the internet for details. The only report I could find was about a totally different police shooting—also in the Tucson area, also early this morning.

Border Patrol killings include shootings and other acts of explicit murder, but they also include violent fatalities that result from chases—in vehicles and on foot, in the desert—as well as thousands of deaths in the remote desert borderlands that are a direct result of the bipartisan policy of “prevention through deterrence,” or deterrence through death.¹

Just last Thursday, January 22, near Nogales, Arizona (not far from today’s shooting) two people were killed in a Border Patrol vehicle chase, and a third suffered serious injuries. These killings happen all the time, and they rarely make national news.

As I wrote last week (before the murder of Alex in Minneapolis, a crime that DHS also justified by claiming that the agent had “fired a defensive shot” because he “feared for his life and safety”):

Fearing for his life and safety, an agent fired a defensive shot.

It’s an all-too-familiar phrase, to those all too familiar with the reality of policing in America. When I heard it on Wednesday, then again on Thursday, my mind immediately jumped back to 2012, to that street corner along the border wall in Nogales, Arizona/Sonora, where Border Patrol Agent Lonnie Swartz shot Mexican teenager José Antonio Elena Rodríguez 10 times in the back and head through the steel bollards of that monstrous metal fence that looms over the southern side of the city like the sinister monument to death and misery that it is.

Agent Swartz, echoing the mantra of the Israeli military—before the Gaza genocide, when occupation soldiers still felt the need to justify murdering unarmed children—claimed that José Antonio was a dangerous criminal who had threatened his life by throwing rocks from the street below. And so, fearing for his life, the agent fired a defensive shot. It was 16 shots, actually, fired through the wall into Mexico from an M4 machine gun and aimed at the boy’s back as he tried to run away. After pressure from the family and local communities, Swartz was charged with murder—the first Border Patrol agent in history to face murder charges for a cross-border shooting—but he was acquitted by a federal court in 2018.

José Antonio is just one of hundreds of people killed by Border Patrol in recent decades—data compiled by No More Deaths shows at least 519 “fatal encounters” with the the agency since 2010. [And again, this is in addition to the thousands killed by prevention through deterrence].

This is what these agencies were created to do: terrorize, disappear, murder. Border Patrol especially. It’s what they’ve done at the border for decades. It’s what police—regular police, not ICE—have done from the very beginning, when that institution went by a different name: slave patrols.

Better training will not stop them from killing. Body cams will not stop them from killing. Sending Border Patrol “back to the border” will not stop them from killing (though it might stop people from paying as much attention). Chuck Schumer’s “common-sense reforms to rein in ICE” will not stop them from killing. Killing is baked into the culture and mission of these agencies. Killing is what they do—and they laugh as they do it.

With Border Patrol in the spotlight and national tensions rising, we should expect DHS to issue a statement on the shooting in Arizona sometime soon. No doubt, irrespective of any facts, the regime will smear the victim as a dangerous criminal who deserved to die and salute the agent as a brave hero who, fearing for his life and safety, fired a defensive shot. But if people were blind to it before, now everyone has seen the truth—with their own eyes, watching what Border Patrol and ICE did in broad daylight to Renee and Alex—and how the regime lied through their teeth about it.

As an aid worker with No More Deaths put it to me this morning, reacting to the latest tragic news: “Federal agents killing and harming people in the borderlands isn’t new. For decades, the desert has been a place of violence and death, and for so many people there has been no accountability.”

1. As Harsha Walia reminds us: “Border deaths are presented as passive occurrences, as if people just happen to die, as if there’s something inherently dangerous about being on the move, which we know is not the case. Many people move with immense privilege, even luxury. It’s more accurate to call what is happening to migrants and refugees around the world border killings.”