This is the disturbing moment a law enforcement officer tasered a 16-year-old boy at a shelter for migrant children in Texas . Bexar Cou...
This is the disturbing moment a law enforcement officer tasered a 16-year-old boy at a shelter for migrant children in Texas.
Bexar County Sheriff's Deputy Patrick Divers responded to staff's 911 call at the Southwest Key Casa Blanca shelter in San Antonio on May 12, 2020 over reports the Honduran teen had broken two beds and some storage bins.
The footage, first obtained by Reveal News, shows Divers stepping out of his vehicle where he is met by a staffer outside the center who tells him, 'One of our youths (is) acting really crazy. He's been breaking stuff… He's super aggressive.'
The migrant boy, who is not being named as a minor, was sitting inside a bathroom when the deputy entered the building.
Ricardo Cisneros, the shelter's interim program director, can be seen talking to the teen, telling him Divers is 'not here to scare you. He is here to make sure everything is OK.'
The upset migrant teen then replied, 'Dude go the f*** away. I don't need no son of a b****. Go to hell, dude.'
Cisneros reassured the boy that Divers was not there to harm, but the boy snapped back, 'Let that son of a b**** touch me. I don't care Let him hit me.'
Moments later, Divers tells his partner Harold Schneider, 'I am going to taser his kid.'
Still image from a bodycam video provided by the Bexar County Sheriff's Office to Reveal News shows the moment deputy Patrick Divers points his taser at a then 16-year-old boy from Honduras at the Southwest Key Casa Blanca shelter in San Antonio on May 12, 2020. The officer tasered the migrant teen before taking him into custody. The shelter staff called 911 after the boy had broken two beds and plastic bins because he did not want to attend class that day
The migrant teen, who was 16 years old at the time of the incident, reacts as he is tasered
Bexar County Sheriff's Deputy Patrick Divers responded to a 911 call at the Southwest Key Casa Blanca shelter in San Antonio on May 12, 2020 over reports the Honduran teen had broken two beds and some storage bins.
Divers subsequently instructs the teen to 'stand up' and to 'turn around' before he shocked him on the right side of his body. He walked over to the boy and continued to taser him while he appeared to be kneeling on the bathroom floor.
He is later marched out the building.
'Where are you going to f******* take me? Tell me where you are going to take me?', the teen asked the cops as he was being led out of the immigrant children's shelter.
Schneider is then heard referring to the boy as 'El Estupido.'
The Honduran boy was 15 years old when crossed the border alone in 2019 after abandoning his native town where a gang had beaten him to rob the money he made selling coconut water in the street and threatened to kill him, Reveal reported.
Because he arrived in the country as an unaccompanied minor, he was placed in the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) and passed through a total of five migrant shelters in contracted by the ORR. He had only been at the Texas shelter for a week after spending most of his nine months at centers located in California and Virginia.
U.S. Representative JoaquÃn Castro told Reveal News he would be requesting the ORR to open an investigation into the incident.
Ricardo Cisneros, a director at Southwest Key Casa Blanca shelter in Texas, attempted to calm down the migrant teen from Honduras while assuring him that the police officer was not there to hurt him. Moments later, the cop tasered the boy and took him into custody
A worker at the Southwest Key Casa Blanca shelter in San Antonio, Texas, met Bexar County Sheriff's Deputy Patrick Divers outside the center and explained that 'One of our youths (is) acting really crazy. He's been breaking stuff … He's super aggressive.'
'Here you have a young man who's experienced incredible trauma,' said the Democratic politician who represents San Antonio. 'We've talked a lot in his country about over-policing in different situations, and this is clearly an example of over-policing with respect to asylum-seeking youth.'
DailyMail.com reached out to the Office of Refugee Resettlement, Southwest Key Programs and officer Divers for comment.
Data obtained by Reveal News shows that at least 84 migrant children between the ages of 11 to 17 were taken into police custody following incidents at the privately run immigrant shelters during the last six years.
Police reports and court documents showed that 19 of the minors were arrested for reportedly fighting, destroying property or due to mental health issues. In the majority of the incidents, the children were hit with misdemeanor charges while a child in the state of Washington was charged with a felony, but prosecutors did not proceed with the case.
Claudia Valenzuela, a lawyer for the Immigrant Legal Defense, slammed the Southwest Key Casa Blanca workers for calling the police.
'I'm kind of speechless at the fact that they were the ones that decided to press charges, which triggered the tasering,' she said.
U.S. Customs and Borders Protection last monthly report, released May 11, showed that Border agents detained 17,171 unaccompanied children in the southwestern border region in April, down nine percent from 18,890 in March when a record number of unaccompanied migrant children entered US custody.
Overall, Border Patrol agents encountered 178,622 undocumented immigrants seeking to enter the United States in April, surpassing March's total by 5,274.
A border southwestern border report for the month of May is scheduled to be released this week.
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