Texas Monthly on the Feb. 2005 Border Patrol shootings

This months issue of Texas Monthly has a detailed story about the case of Border Patrol Agents Ignacio Ramos and Jose Alonso Compean, who were convicted for their role in shooting  — and covering up the shooting of — an unarmed man on the Texas-Mexico Border (Pamela Coloff, “Badges of Dishonor”).  The victim of the shooting was later determined to have been attempting to smuggle  large quantities of drugs across the border, but this was not known to the agents at the time of the shooting.

Among other things, Coloff’s article provides another look at Lou Dobbs’ distorted reporting on this particular issue, providing another example of the ways in which he has relied upon lopsided reporting to inflame anti-immigrant sentiment and to dehumanize immigrants:

Two months before Ramos and Compean were set to be sentenced, Lou Dobbs introduced the case to a national audience ….Correspondent Casey Wian walked through the incident with Ramos, who recounted his version of events: hearing gunfire, finding his fellow agent lying on the ground, and then firing his weapon when the suspect pointed what appeared to be a gun. “[The public] entrusted me to stop a drug smuggler and I did,” he said. CNN’s viewers were never told that Ramos had failed to report the shooting, that Compean had tampered with key evidence, or that Aldrete-Davila had attempted to surrender—facts that were readily available to anyone who had read the indictment or newspaper coverage of the case.

Dobbs …. highlight[ed] the case on no fewer than 131 broadcasts in the eleven months that followed, including an hour-long special called “Border Betrayal.” Rather than delve into the specifics of the case, the show gave ample airtime to a rotation of family members, defense attorneys, lawmakers, and anti-illegal immigration activists who argued that the agents should never have been prosecuted. Dobbs injected his own nativist bent into the conversation, as when he reflected on whether the federal government had prosecuted Ramos and Compean because of “the influence of a powerful drug cartel”  or was “blighting the lives of these two outstanding Border Patrol agents to appease the government of Mexico.”

This is not the first time I’ve mentioned Dobbs’ heavily biased reporting, and I’m afraid it won’t be the last.  Perhaps giving people the facts won’t change their mind, but I agree with the NY Times’ David Leonhardt: if Dobbs’ stories about immigration are really so good, he shouldn’t be afraid to put the facts on the table.  He’s CNN!

-jmc