Rodney Scott, Donald Trump’s nominee to lead Customs and Border Protection (CBP), has been accused by a former top official of orchestrating a “cover-up” over the death of a man detained while trying to enter the country from Mexico, according to a letter obtained by the Guardian.
Scott is a former US border patrol chief who has supported the president’s vow to build a wall along the border with Mexico and criticized Joe Biden’s handling of immigration policy. As commissioner of CBP, Scott would lead one of the largest federal law enforcement agencies, which encompasses the border patrol and staffs ports of entry across the United States.
The Senate finance committee will consider Scott’s nomination on Wednesday. Before the hearing, James Wong, a former deputy assistant commissioner of CBP’s office of internal affairs, wrote to the committee’s top Democrat this week with “concern” about Scott’s handling of the investigation into the 2010 death of Anastasio Hernández Rojas in San Diego, after he was beaten and tased by CBP agents who were preparing to deport him.
His death was investigated by San Diego’s police department at a time when Scott was a top border patrol official in the city, which Wong said put him in a position to oversee a so-called critical incident team (CIT). The teams, which CBP disbanded in 2022, were created to investigate “use-of-force incidents” and “designed to mitigate liability for Border Patrol senior management and to present Border Patrol in the best possible light”, Wong wrote.
The CIT used a subpoena to obtain Hernández Rojas’s medical records “likely in an effort to spin information for their own PR”, Wong said. “The use of a CBP administrative subpoena for this purpose was blatantly unlawful, and anyone signing it should have known that.”
“By virtue of his position, Mr Scott would have overseen all CIT operations on the case, and all CIT information would have filtered through him to CBP headquarters,” Wong wrote in the letter, addressed to ranking member Ron Wyden.
“This was not an investigation, it was a cover-up – one Mr Scott supervised. This abuse of power disqualifies him from leading one of the largest law enforcement agencies in the country.”
Scott did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Wyden called Scott’s handling of the Hernández Rojas case “deeply troubling”, and asked the Department of Homeland Security for records related to the death and investigation.
“In the hands of someone who has allegedly repeatedly abused his position of power, the vast security apparatus for which CBP is responsible could be wielded for harm,” Wyden wrote in a letter to Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary.
A spokesperson for Wyden said he had not received a response from the department.
CBP employees are often the first to encounter immigrants, and as commissioner, Scott would be in a position to play a role in executing the president’s hardline approach to immigration policy.
Since taking office, Trump has blocked asylum seekers from entering the United States and authorized the US military to deploy along the border with Mexico. Earlier this month, border patrol agents in Arizona detained a US citizen for nearly 10 days in Arizona because they suspected he was undocumented.
Scott’s border patrol career ended in 2021, when the Biden administration forced him out of the job after rightwing news site Breitbart obtained a memo in which he objected to its orders not to use terms like “illegal alien”.
Later that year, a House oversight committee report found that Scott was a member of “I’m 10-15”, a private Facebook group for border patrol agents with more than 9,500 members whose name was a reference to the code for “aliens in custody”.
Participants in the group insulted members of Congress and posted “racist and sexually violent content” directed at them, particularly after lawmakers visited an immigrant detention facility in 2019, the report found.
In other instances, a border patrol agent shared in the group a picture of a drowned immigrant father and child and referred to them as “floaters”, while a supervisor posted an internal video of an immigrant fatally falling from a cliff.
According to the committee, Scott said that being in the group allowed him to “know what the workforce is talking about”.
Scott also sought to downplay the first Trump administration’s practice of forcibly separating immigrant children from their parents at the US-Mexico border. “The family separation being a policy is a lie,” he told Fox News in 2018, arguing that children were simply taken from parents who were facing prosecution for crossing the border unlawfully.
Republican senators whom Scott has met with have signaled support for his nomination, with John Cornyn of border state Texas calling him “a fantastic pick”.
