The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights has found Customs and Border Protection agents who fatally beat Mexican father Anastasio Hernández Rojas are responsible for torture. It’s the first time the independent commission, which investigates extrajudicial killings and human rights violations, has issued such findings against a U.S. law enforcement agency. In 2010, Rojas was crossing the southern border in an attempt to return to San Diego, where he’d lived for 25 years, to reunite with his wife and five children after being deported. He was stopped by border agents, who brutally beat and tasered him while he was handcuffed, until Rojas died from heart failure. His death was later ruled a homicide. The commission’s findings come nearly a decade after his family filed a complaint in 2016. At the time, Democracy Now! spoke with international human rights lawyer Roxanna Altholz, who represented Rojas’s wife Maria Puga and his family in the case.

Roxanna Altholz: “Not a single agent in all of U.S. Border Patrol history has ever been held accountable for one of these killings, has ever been disciplined for one of these killings. As far as we know, all the agents responsible for Anastasio’s death are still on active duty. They have never been disciplined, much less held criminally accountable for the killing.”