Border Patrol in San Diego accused a young mom of punching an agent. Then the video came out 

In a two-page complaint filed in San Diego federal court last May, Border Patrol officials accused a 23-year-old woman they detained at a checkpoint along State Route 94 of pushing an agent as he moved her into a holding cell, and then throwing “a closed fist punch at him.” 

The agent blocked the woman’s punch, then another agent fired a Taser at her and she fell to the ground, according to the complaint. The day after the incident, the U.S. Attorney’s Office in San Diego charged her with assaulting a federal officer, a crime punishable by up to 20 years in prison and a fine up to $250,000. The charge didn’t stick.

Months after the federal complaint was filed, the woman and her attorney obtained body-worn camera video footage from the agents involved, and a more nuanced – and concerning – picture of the incident emerged.

Court documents filed by the woman’s attorney show that agents initially suspected her of smuggling undocumented migrants but found no evidence that she was committing a crime after searching her car and phone.

At one point, an agent told her he found “deleted evidence” on her phone when he hadn’t. When the woman grabbed her phone back, the agent twisted her arm behind her back and four more came to wrestle the phone out of her hand, her attorney said in court documents. 

When one agent shocked her with a Taser, it was after she had turned away from them, her back facing them, to walk into the cell. 

Outside, as other agents rifled through the woman’s car again, one agent “received word” that the woman had been shocked, prompting the group of agents there to “burst into laughter.” One agent shared the news with another group that hadn’t heard, saying “He just tased the shit out of her!” according to court documents filed by her lawyer.

The woman, who had a 2-month-old baby at the time, was sent to the hospital to have a Taser prong removed from her breast. Her breastmilk was laden with blood for weeks afterward, her attorney said in the documents.

The details of her case have not been previously reported. inewsource is not naming the woman because she could not be reached for comment. The video was described but not included in court documents reviewed by inewsource. 

Federal prosecutors dismissed the charge against the woman in August. She’s not the only one. 

In the first year of President Donald Trump’s second term, prosecutors in San Diego charged 22 individuals with assaulting a federal officer. Almost half – 10 of 22 – were later dismissed, though they could potentially be refiled. Five of the 22 cases are still pending. 

Still, prosecutors have already dismissed cases at a higher rate – about 45% – in Trump’s first year than in former President Joe Biden’s last year in office. In the prior year, they dismissed just two of the 25 cases filed, or about 8%, according to inewsource’s review of cases. 

John Kirby, who served as a federal prosecutor in San Diego for a decade until 2005, said the high rate of dismissed cases is cause for concern. Normally an internal review process within the office would weed out weak cases that weren’t worth pursuing, he said.

“If you have that many cases that are being dismissed, that means that someone in the upper reaches of the U.S. Attorney’s Office of the Southern District is not doing their job,” he said. 

A spokesperson for the southern district office, which covers San Diego and Imperial counties, declined to answer questions from inewsource about the recent dismissals. Instead, U.S. Attorney Adam Gordon said in a prepared statement that “federal officers are enforcing established laws.” 

“If someone chooses to physically assault a federal officer, they need to know that an arrest on federal charges will soon follow,” Gordon said.

To be sure, federal prosecutors over the years and more recently have secured wins in cases where federal officers said they were assaulted on the job. 

Earlier this week, a Venezuelan man was sentenced to eight months in custody for biting an ICE officer’s forearm near Mission Bay last summer, one of five cases filed last year that ended in the defendant pleading guilty to the assault. 

Other such cases involved defendants who threw rocks at a Border Patrol agent and helicopter and punched an agent in the jaw. Two additional cases ended with the defendant pleading guilty to different charges.

But the local woman’s case echoes others nationwide in which federal agents carrying out the president’s mass deportation campaign have claimed to be assaulted by protesters or targets for deportation – often to justify their own aggressive tactics – only for those cases to fall short in court. 

The Los Angeles Times reported in November that 38% of cases filed in five districts across the West Coast; Washington, D.C., and Illinois since Jan. 20 ended in dismissals or acquittals, sometimes because the defendants were deported, and that the majority of alleged assaults resulted in no injuries to agents. 

The nonprofit newsroom Block Club Chicago reported last month that nearly half of the federal prosecutions tied to immigration enforcement protestors in a three-month period in the city were suddenly dropped. None had yet ended in a conviction. 

The Department of Homeland Security, led until this month by former Secretary Kristi Noem, had been quick to defend agents’ actions and cast alleged aggressors as “domestic terrorists.” The agency has claimed assaults on its agents are up more than 1,000%.

But videos of clashes between federal agents and civilians have sometimes contradicted versions of events from Trump administration officials – and the allegations made by agents in federal court.

The Department of Homeland Security did not return a request for comment. 

In Chicago, a preschool teaching assistant was shot five times by Border Patrol agents who said she rammed into their vehicle in October. A DHS spokesperson called her a “domestic terrorist” who was “armed with a semi-automatic weapon.”

While the woman had a gun in her purse at the time – which she said she carried for personal protection after her sister was carjacked – she never took it out during the interaction with agents. Prosecutors dismissed her case the following month. 

In Minnesota, federal prosecutors charged two Venezuelan men with assault, alleging they beat an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer with a broom and snow shovel in January. The ICE officer shot one of the men in the leg. 

The charges were dismissed last month after prosecutors discovered new evidence they said was “materially inconsistent with the allegations against” the two men. Todd Lyons, acting director for ICE, said last month that the officers were being investigated for lying under oath.

Prosecutors do not normally give detailed reasons for dismissals in their motions. But in the local woman’s case, the dismissal came after her attorney argued that agents violated the woman’s constitutional rights by arresting her without probable cause and used “excessive mental and physical coercion,” causing the alleged assault.

The prosecutor initially pushed back in court against those claims, saying the woman was not under arrest and that agents’ conduct was reasonable. Weeks later, though, the office asked the judge to dismiss the charge, saying it was “unable to prosecute this case consistent with its legal obligations.” 

While the charge was ultimately dropped, the woman spent almost four months fighting her case after the arrest. 

‘Scared for his life’

Out of the 22 cases charging assault on a federal officer filed in Trump’s first year, only two did not involve immigration enforcement. The remaining 20 took place in San Diego, Escondido, National City, Calexico, at ports of entry in San Ysidro and Otay Mesa and across the rugged areas just north of the border fence. 

While a handful involved individuals who were protesting immigration enforcement, most cases were brought against people who themselves were immigrants, or who found themselves in front of federal authorities through more routine encounters. 

The woman subjected to a Taser by Border Patrol encountered them as she passed through a permanent immigration checkpoint set up on State Route 94 near Dulzura. 

In a separate case from June, Customs and Border Protection officers, who staff ports of entry, stopped a man driving south through the San Ysidro Port of Entry, and later accused him of rolling his driver side window up on an agent’s arm after they stopped his car.

The officer said the man refused to answer his questions and continued to be “uncooperative” as officers took him out of the vehicle and then fired a Taser at his back, according to court documents. 

Months after filing a complaint, the prosecutor dismissed the assault charge. The man’s attorney told inewsource his client’s car had a safety feature which would have prevented the window from rolling up onto something, and would have automatically rolled down. 

The most high-profile of the local cases reviewed by inewsource stemmed from an incident in early July when federal law enforcement in face coverings and unmarked cars staked out an apartment complex in Linda Vista with a warrant for a Guatemalan man. 

They were met by a group of protesters and nearby residents, and a struggle ensued that left four people including the Guatemalan man facing charges for assaulting a federal officer. 

Two of those cases were dismissed, one is ongoing, and a fourth ended in a plea deal. 

Jeane Wong, a prominent immigration enforcement protester in San Diego, was sentenced last month to 45 days of home detention after pleading guilty in the case stemming from the Linda Vista incident. Daylight San Diego reported that Wong, in asking for a lighter sentence, told the judge that she unmasked an agent who she said had assaulted someone else. 

The Guatemalan man was accused of striking a government vehicle as he reversed, backing up into a parking spot, his attorney said. His car was surrounded by law enforcement vehicles and an agent had just broken his window. 

Another man was accused of crossing a police perimeter and “(raising) his right arm and (bringing) it forcefully down on the left forearm” of an ICE agent, according to the complaint. Video footage captured by a protester that day and shared with the media shows a man, matching the agents’ description of the defendant, being wrestled by four agents and pulled under the police perimeter. 

In both cases, federal prosecutors dismissed the charges, saying in one request to dismiss that they “received additional information that has caused the pursuit of this prosecution to be reevaluated.”

In another case dismissed in December, ICE officers in unmarked vehicles and plain clothes followed a driver as he left his home early one morning in Escondido. The driver pulled over when agents turned on their sirens. They surrounded his car, opened his door and told him to get out of the car. Instead, he drove off. 

Agents say that the driver hit one of the government vehicles and struck “the lower left hip area” of an officer. They chased him to a residential street nearby where an agent blocked the road with his vehicle and the driver ran into him. The Escondido Police Department responded to the scene after an ICE agent called police for assistance.

It was only when agents extracted the driver from the vehicle that they realized he was not the person they were looking for, but his younger brother. 

Because of that, his attorney argued that agents had no reason to suspect he was violating immigration law when they pulled him over, thus violating his rights. The officer who organized the operation that day in August had arrested the driver’s older brother a year before, leading to his deportation, according to court records. 

After the driver’s case was dropped, he was also deported to Mexico, his father told inewsource. 

A nearby resident whose kids were playing in the living room in the front of the house said he ran out when he heard the sound of the crash. He said the driver looked “scared for his life.”