By Steve Neavling
ticklethewire.com
About 100 activists gathered Monday evening to protest the Justice Department’s decision not to file charges against Border Patrol agents in the death of Anastasio Hernandez Rojas, the San Diego Union Tribune reports.
Hernandez Rojas died in a clash with federal agents in May 2010.
On Friday, the Justice Department said it opted against charging law enforcement officials in the death, saying “a team of experienced federal prosecutors determined that the evidence was insufficient to pursue federal criminal civil rights charges… Neither accident, mistake, fear, negligence nor bad judgment is sufficient to establish a federal criminal civil rights violation.”
But local immigration rights groups counter that excessive force was used against a handcuffed Hernandez Rojas.
“After five years of investigating, with evidence and with witness accounts, with everything very clear, they come to tell us that there wasn’t enough evidence to bring these agents to trial,” said Maria Puga, the widow of Hernandez Rojas through a translator at the protest. “All of us here know that they’re culpable. They murdered my husband. Two autopsies ruled his death a homicide.”
