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TUCSON, Ariz. (AP) — Two U.S. Border Patrol agents are standing trial on federal charges of violating the civil rights of four men caught smuggling.
The Arizona Daily Star reports that the Tucson trial for Dario Castillo and Ramon Zuniga is expected to last two weeks.
According a federal indictment, the two men caught four smugglers in a remote stretch of the border on the Tohono O’odham Nation in 2008 and forced them to eat marijuana and to remove their outer clothing. The agents then set fire to the men’s belongings and told them to flee on a night when temperatures were about 40 degrees, the indictment said.
“‘Run, get out of here,’ these are the words of Border Patrol agents to four men caught breaking the law,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Karen Rolley told the jury in her opening statement Tuesday.
According to prosecutors, the men fled and dug a hole in a wash and covered themselves with branches and plastic until the following day, when they turned themselves in to tribal police and said they had been robbed by bandits. Once they were turned over to the Border Patrol, the smugglers said it had been Border Patrol agents.
Castillo and Zuniga were indicted in August 2011. Castillo is also being charged with tampering with a witness for allegedly asking one of the agents to lie about what he had seen.
Both agents are on administrative leave from the agency.
Defense attorneys said the charges are false and the smugglers lied about what happened. Attorney Sean Chapman, who represents Zuniga, said the account of what happened is fiction created by the two other Border Patrol agents at the scene. Chapman and Michael Bloom, who represents Castillo, also challenge the credibility of the prosecutor’s witnesses.
“They were high as a kite,” Bloom told the jury about the four smugglers, and they initially lied about what had happened to protect themselves.
The jury needs to ask themselves, “What does it tell me about these people?” Bloom said.
