A child's backpack, toys, and other personal belongings that migrants are forced to leave behind as they're processed and transported to a Border Patrol station are heaped on the ground. Photo: John Washington.
By John Washington – Feb 16, 2024
Several children have faced serious medical complications after Border Patrol confiscated critical medication in Arizona, the report says.
The U.S. Border Patrol’s practice of confiscating legally-protected religious items and vital personal belongings from people crossing the Arizona-México border has become so entrenched that some agents are seizing medications and endangering the lives of migrant children, according to a new civil rights report.
In November 2023, Border Patrol agents confiscated three seizure medications that were critical for a 2-year-old girl with a history of West syndrome, which causes frequent epileptic seizures. Only two out of the girl’s three medications were returned by Tucson Border Patrol, according to the report.
“Due to a missed dose of that medication, the child suffered six seizures before arriving at ProtectAZ Health’s clinic,” the report stated.
The toddler was transported from the ProtectAZ Health clinic to Phoenix Children’s Hospital, where she received treatment to control her seizures and restart her medication regimen.
“People have literally ended up in emergency rooms as a result of Border Patrol confiscating and failing to replace their medications, to say nothing of the harms caused by taking other types of items,” Noah Schramm, Border Policy Strategist at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Arizona, told Arizona Luminaria. Schramm is one of the authors of the report.
Since the beginning of 2022 through the end of 2023, Arizona organizations working with migrants have documented about 1,000 cases of Border Patrol taking away people’s personal belongings. Arizona Luminaria published reports in 2022 from whistleblowers with accounts of Border Patrol agents confiscating and trashing vital personal property in violation of the agency’s own policies requiring them to ensure such belongings are “safeguarded, itemized” and returned.
The report — “From Hope to Heartbreak: The Disturbing Reality of Border Patrol’s Confiscation of Migrants’ Belongings” — was released Feb. 12 from the ACLU, the Kino Border Initiative, ProtectAZ Health and the Sikh Coalition.
The examples presented in the report come primarily from the Kino Border Initiative and ProtectAZ Health — organizations with first-hand experience aiding migrant people whose rights have been violated. Kino Border Initiative, a migrant rights organization based in Nogales, Sonora, interviewed at least 278 migrants since October 2022 who described Border Patrol confiscating and not returning essential personal belongings.
ProtectAZ Health, a nonprofit which offers free medical screenings and care to recently released migrants in the Phoenix metropolitan area, meanwhile, identified 682 migrants in 2022 and 2023 who reported that medications or medical devices had been confiscated by Border Patrol and never returned or replaced.
Changing policies, continuing practice
The new report cites the hundreds of cases of people’s rights being violated as evidence that federal policies meant to hold Border Patrol agents accountable are failing.
Border Patrol policies state that personal property, not considered contraband, be safeguarded and cataloged and that, without compromising safety, agents “should remain cognizant of an individual’s religious beliefs while accomplishing an enforcement action in a dignified and respectful manner.”
U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s National Standards on Transport, Escort, Detention and Search, state “[a]ll detainees’ personal property discovered during apprehension or processing and not deemed to be contraband will be safeguarded.”
After the ACLU alerted Border Patrol about concerns with the confiscations in 2022, ACLU reported that Tucson Border Patrol Sector Chief John Modlin reached out to advocates working on the issue to express concern about the confiscations, saying that agents were being re-trained.
A Border Patrol spokesperson told Arizona Luminaria at the time that “CBP procedures allow personnel to discard items that pose a clear health or safety hazard,” reiterating that they have “provided additional guidance to field leadership reiterating the expectation that personnel exercise particular care when handling personal property items of a religious nature.”
CBP spokesperson John Mennell responded to Arizona Luminaria’s questions about the new report.
“CBP constantly works to ensure that all employees understand and maintain the highest level of professional standards in their interactions with those they apprehend consistent with law enforcement standards of performance and conduct,” Mennell wrote in a Feb. 15 email.
He added, “CBP is committed to ensuring alleged misconduct involving CBP employees is thoroughly investigated.”
And yet the confiscations continue.
The report includes examples of agents confiscating critical medications, including anti-seizure medications for children, as well as vital medical records.
The American Academy of Pediatrics documented two cases of young migrant children with pre-existing conditions whose health rapidly deteriorated after Border Patrol agents took away their medications, according to the report. Both of the children had to be admitted into pediatric intensive care units.
“In September 2023: ProtectAZ Health received a 13-year-old boy, Leonel, with a history of argininemia, a genetic condition in which a person lacks a critical amino acid necessary to prevent the build-up of ammonia in the body,” the report states. “Untreated, this condition can lead to muscle weakness, fatigue, seizures, coma, and even death.”
Leonel, and all other names included in the report, are pseudonyms to protect the identity and privacy of the people involved.
The boy requires daily medication, but his father said Border Patrol agents confiscated his medicine and he received none while detained for three days in a Border Patrol facility in Casa Grande. The medication was not returned to the father upon release.
“While staying at ProtectAZ Health’s shelter, Leonel’s condition quickly deteriorated. He became lethargic, was unable to walk, and had to be transported to the Phoenix Children’s Hospital, where he was treated for seven days.”
Border Patrol agents also have forced parents to hand over their children’s vital medical records.
“My son needs an operation within two months because of drainage in his brain. I showed the agent I spoke with all of the medical documentation and medical records,
including X-ray images and documents explaining the diagnosis of my son’s medical condition,” Victoria recalls from July 2021 in the report. “The agent took all of the papers and threw them in the trash. I went to get them out of the trash, and he took them away from me and threw them away once more, saying “those go to the trash.””
Victoria was with her child when she was apprehended by Border Patrol agents in Southern Arizona. “I explained that I needed them so that I could show the doctors what condition my son has. I tried to ask him once more for help, and he became angry. He told me to sit down and take a sleeping mat.”
Early the next morning Victoria and her son were expelled into Nogales, Sonora without Border Patrol agents returning her child’s vital medical records.
Confiscating money and personal objects
Non-medically related confiscations include Border Patrol agents forcing one migrant to throw away a prayer rug that had been in one man’s family for more than 100 years and one Nicaraguan man having to throw away his father’s ashes.
One unnamed migrant was included in the report as saying, “Passports are very important here. To open an account, to identify yourself, and I don’t have that document. I don’t have the children’s birth records because they took them from me. That makes me feel terrible.”
In August of 2022, Arizona Luminaria, in collaboration with The Intercept, first reported on the confiscations of religious items, including turbans, of Sikh people from India. Not cutting their hair and wearing a turban are important expressions of Sikh men’s faith.
“The turban is sacred to Sikhs,” Deepak Ahluwalia, a private immigration attorney and advocate for Sikh rights based in San Jose, California, told Arizona Luminaria at the time.
One day after that article, the head of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, Border Patrol’s parent agency, announced they were opening an internal investigation into the complaints of religious-rights violations.
A subsequent 2022 Arizona Luminaria investigation citing whistleblowers — who came forward after initial reports seemed to limit the cases to one port of entry — revealed that the removal and trashing of belongings by Border Patrol was widespread across Southern Arizona from Yuma to Nogales regions. Following the report, CBP issued interim guidance instructing agents to stop unnecessarily removing, confiscating and trashing the sacred turbans of Sikh asylum-seekers.
Sahel Kaur, a senior staff attorney with the Sikh Coalition, further underscored the harm caused by confiscating turbans. “The seizure and destruction of turbans — an article of faith that is deeply meaningful and personal to Sikh individuals—is just one example of the egregious behavior of CBP with regard to migrants’ personal property,” Kaur wrote on Feb. 12 in an emailed statement to Arizona Luminaria.
Kaur said that while CBP has been receptive to hearing feedback on this issue, “it truly needs to reorient its policy regarding the treatment of religious garb and other religious items to incorporate already existing robust legal protections, given that federal law protects the right of all people, including migrants, to practice their faith freely.”
Rep. Raúl Grijalva, D-Ariz., responded to some of the initial reporting on the confiscations in a Aug. 3, 2022 letter urging U.S. Customs and Border Protection to “ensure that all those who have been detained are treated fairly and with dignity and that their personal belongings are safeguarded.”
History of violations and policy recommendations
While the problem came to more prominent public attention in 2022, the report notes that such confiscations of migrants’ personal belongings have been happening for at least 15 years, as documented by the Tucson-based humanitarian aid organization No More Deaths.
And it’s not just watchdog groups that have been calling out the Border Patrol practice. An October 2022 report from a Department of Homeland Security Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman found that Border Patrol agents were “indiscriminately discarding detainee property.”
“Action on this issue by CBP is long overdue,” Schramm of ACLU told Arizona Luminaria in a February interview.
According to the report, after 2022 news reports on the confiscation of Sikh religious items, officials with the ACLU and other migrant-rights organizations had “extensive engagement with CBP leadership that we hope will result in long-needed changes in both policy and practice.”
Policy recommendations the new report makes include:
• Ensuring Border Patrol agents allow migrant people crossing the border to keep as many of their personal belongings as possible, prioritizing essential belongings.
• In regards to life-saving medication, Border Patrol should allow migrant individuals to have “continuous access to any medications or medical devices” they had when they were taken into custody.
• As for turbans, Bibles and other sacred religious objects, Border Patrol should “reorient policy regarding the confiscation of religious garb and other religious items to incorporate the robust religious-freedom legal protections that the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act provides to migrants and, consistent with these federal legal safeguards, permit confiscation of religious items only in very rare circumstances.”
Besides medication and personal or religious items, the report also documents the confiscation — sometimes the direct theft — of money.
In the summer of 2022, for example, one migrant told Kino Border Initiative that a Border Patrol agent had confiscated 5,020 pesos (about $264) from him and did not return the money. Another said he had witnessed a Border Patrol agent take 3,000 pesos from another migrant and rip it up in his face saying, “This is trash, this is of no value to you here,” before throwing the ripped bills into the garbage.
In 2022 the ACLU of New Mexico encountered a woman who reported that a Border Patrol agent confiscated her wallet containing $240, slid the money into his pocket, and then returned the wallet. According to the report, when she asked the agent where the money was, he changed the subject and told her not to worry since, “you have a very good case and will be approved to stay.”
The report documents widespread cases of migrants frequently arriving to Southern Arizona border seeking asylum after having experienced extraordinary challenges, hardship and violence
“For the U.S. government to greet them with systematic confiscation of the few belongings they carry is indefensible — particularly given the vast budgetary resources afforded to CBP and its operations,” the report concludes.
John Washington covers Tucson, Pima County, criminal justice and the environment for Arizona Luminaria. His investigative reporting series on deaths at the Pima County jail won an INN award in 2023. Before he joined Arizona Luminaria, John Washington was a freelance investigative journalist with a focus on immigration and borders, as well as criminal justice and literature. His first book, “The Dispossessed: A Story of Asylum at the US-Mexico Border and Beyond,” was published in 2020 by Verso Books.
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