“Deeply Troubling”
by Hannah Fry
In June 2024, a federal judge in San Diego awarded a family $1.5 million after ruling that U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) had unjustly violated the children's 4th Amendment rights, which protect against unreasonable search and seizure.
Julia Medina and her brother Oscar, innocent children, lived in Tijuana with their parents when they were detained and interrogated for 34 hours at the San Ysidro Port of Entry in March 2019 when they were trying to cross the border to attend school in the United States. The siblings had crossed the border many times before. Still, the situation took an unusual turn when they were stopped after a Border Patrol officer noticed a dot on Julia's passport photo that appeared to be a mole she didn't have in person.
The siblings were taken to a secondary inspection area where a supervisor selected an officer with "a reputation for obtaining confessions" to interview them. The officer allegedly pressured Julia to say she was her Mexican cousin. No one else was in the room during the interview, which violated the agency's policy,
U.S. District Judge Gonzalo Curiel noted in his ruling that the government refuted the idea that officers coerced the girl into falsely saying she was her cousin. They maintained in court records that she and Oscar both said, without being prompted, that the girl's name was Melany. This "confession" led the officers to suspect Oscar was trafficking the girl, according to court documents. Curiel criticized the officers in his ruling for failing to interview family members who could have provided proof of the girl's identity and not reviewing documents that could have quelled their suspicions.
"Common sense and ordinary human experience indicate that it was not reasonable to detain Julia for 34 hours to determine her identity or to detain Oscar for about 14 hours to determine whether he was smuggling or trafficking his sister when multiple means of the investigation were available, and officers unreasonably failed to pursue them," Curiel wrote.
As the children were being held in separate detention cells, their mother, Thelma Medina Navarro, and other family members were trying to find out where they were and provide documentation that would show their identities.
Oscar was released later that night, but Julia remained in custody. Navarro, desperate to have her daughter released, went to the television news outlet Telemundo and recorded an interview. The next day, the Mexican Consulate sent representatives to interview Julia. According to court records, they determined her true identity, and she was released.
The two children remain distressed following the incident. Oscar's grades declined, and his parents sought therapy for him. Julia, who was also in treatment following her detention, also suffered insomnia and nightmares that have continued for years, Curiel wrote in his ruling, highlighting the deep emotional scars left by this unjust incident.
Curiel awarded $250,000 to the children's mother, $175,000 to Oscar, and $1.1 million to Julia. The family's attorney, Joseph McMullen, said he appreciated Curiel not only for the verdict but for allowing "the opportunity to examine, at trial, the high-level CBP officials who were complicit in this outrageous conduct." He said the agency did not take steps to correct or investigate the behavior that led to the false confessions.
"No employee interviews were conducted. All audio and video evidence was deleted. CBP put out a press release blaming the children and swept the rest under the rug," McMullen said. "If CBP will try to hide the truth when U.S. citizen children are treated so outrageously, imagine how often misconduct against undocumented children will go on uncorrected. I find that deeply troubling." HF