Border Patrol "blowing off steam"

Border Patrol "blowing off steam" 

by digby

The humiliation of a prisoner at Abu Ghraib by putting women's underwear on his head and taking pictures of it.

Remember this?

CALLER: It was like a college fraternity prank that stacked up naked men -- 

LIMBAUGH: Exactly. Exactly my point! This is no different than what happens at the Skull and Bones initiation and we're going to ruin people's lives over it and we're going to hamper our military effort, and then we are going to really hammer them because they had a good time. You know, these people are being fired at every day. I'm talking about people having a good time, these people, you ever heard of emotional release? You ever heard of need to blow some steam off?
The impulses that led to the lawless sadism of Abu Ghraib are now appearing in the border camps in the United States. The torture is less violent, more subtle, but the appetite among those in power to humiliate and degrade is the same.

So is the obvious sense of impunity. That comes from the top:
US Customs and Border Patrol agents at a migrant processing center in Texas allegedly attempted to humiliate a Honduran migrant by making him hold a sign that read, "I like men," according to emails written by an agent who witnessed the incident.

The emails -- obtained by CNN -- were sent to the agent's supervisor and outlined the March 5 episode in which a Honduran man was forced to hold a piece of paper that said, "Me gustan los hombre(s)," which translates to "I like men," while being paraded through a migrant detention center. 
The incident is one of many, per the emails, in which the CBP agent allegedly witnessed several colleagues displaying poor behavior and management's failure to act.

Asked about the incident, a CBP official told CNN, "I am forwarding to the Office of Professional Responsibility, the office charged with looking into these allegations."

CNN has reached out to an attorney for the Honduran man for comment but has not received a response.

According to the emails, the agent, on-duty at the El Paso Processing Center, saw another agent give a handwritten note to a Honduran migrant and instructed him to walk in front of a group of other migrants who had also been apprehended.
An image, also obtained by CNN, shows a note with the words that read, "Me gustan los hombre(s)."
The witnessing agent saw the note, approached an agent responsible for writing it and another agent who was laughing. The witnessing agent told them their behavior was unprofessional, the emails say. Neither agent responded.

Seeing that the Honduran man was upset, the witnessing agent took the note away from him and provided him another without the derogatory phrase on it.

The witnessing agent in the emails names two senior Border Patrol agents and five other agents who also saw the alleged incident occur. The witnessing agent took the note to the senior agent in charge that night but the senior agent took no action, the emails said.

The allegations of the agents' conduct come on the heels of a report by ProPublica this weekthat revealed a closed Facebook group for current and former Border Patrol agents that featured jokes about migrant deaths and derogatory comments about Latina lawmakers
The culture in the CPB and ICE --- DHS in general --- is sick. It needs to be completely rethought from the ground up. This is intolerable.

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