Something to watch this weekend: Friday 23 January
Two recent politically charged documentaries: Critical Incident - Death at the Border and Cover-Up.
It’s estimated that seven people have died in ICE custody in 2026 alone, with one of those (so far) already ruled a homicide by the coroner. This doesn’t count those, like Renee Good, whose deaths were caused by ICE or Border Patrol action when they weren’t in detention.
Yesterday, it was reported that a man in ICE custody on 8 January is suing ICE for refusing him medical treatment despite receiving “life-threatening” injuries while being detained by them:
The lawsuit says that Castaneda Mondragon, his lawyers and hospital staff don’t currently know how he was injured because “his memory and current ability to communicate are severely impacted by his condition.” But Castaneda Mondragon at one point reported to hospital staff that he was dragged and mistreated by federal agents, the lawsuit says.
According to the lawsuit, agents told hospital staff that Castaneda Mondragon was “laying down in handcuffs when he attempted to flee, and then, for unknown reasons, purposefully ran headfirst into a brick wall.”
When one ICE agent was asked by medical providers for more information on Castaneda Mondragon’s injuries, the agent said that “he got his shit rocked” and did not elaborate further, the lawsuit says.
It’s all awful beyond measure but Rick Rowley’s new documentary, Critical Incident: Death at the Border, makes clear that this behaviour does not start or end with ICE (an agency that has only existed since 2002).
Border Patrol celebrated its centenary in 2024 and is an organisation that is proud of its historical role in American security but it is also a rogue agency that resists oversight and insists on defining its own philosophy, boundaries and methods. The odious Greg Bovino, seen at various recent incendiary incidents wearing either combat fatigues or Gestapo cosplay, works for Border Patrol not ICE.
The incident at the centre of Rowley’s film is the death of Anastasio Hernandez Rojas while being escorted towards his deportation at San Ysidro in San Diego1. Border Patrol agents insisted that he had been resisting deportation and self-harming (bashing his own head against the ground — sound familiar?) requiring that he be restrained. Eye-witnesses — and later, cellphone camera footage — confirmed that he had been tased and beaten by dozens of agents while lying limp on the ground.
An investigation failed to bring any criminal charges and a civil case brought by the victim’s widow was eventually — and tamely — settled several years later.
Only in 2019 was it revealed that Border Patrol had a secret unit, officially unfunded, whose job it was to “investigate” incidents that were likely to cause the agency embarrassment or material loss (in the form of civil judgements), and clean them up so there was no evidence for local law enforcement to build a case on. Add to that, the agency’s ability to close ranks and the ability hold these thugs to account is almost negligible.
And because we are talking about undocumented migrants, until recently these have been victimless crimes.
A helpful context for what is going on in America now is to learn that Border Patrol proudly and publicly proclaims itself to be a “paramilitary” organisation — a sibling to the Army, Navy, Airforce and Marines, although without the recruitment standards, training or official oversight — and that their own rules of engagement and use of lethal force are much more offensive (in all senses of the word) than a police force.
They do not believe they are a “law enforcement” agency (despite the rhetoric from their current leadership). They think of themselves as warriors defending the United States and that rules do not apply to them.
Like the lawyers and journalists the film relies on, Critical Incident builds its shocking case carefully and methodically. Even though it was conceived in a very different climate than now, it makes clear that the rot set in decades ago. When Anastasio Hernandez Rojas was murdered, Barack Obama was president.
Another group of uniformed monsters who believed that the rules did not apply to them were the U.S. Army soldiers who murdered hundreds of Vietnamese villagers in March 1968 — the massacre at My Lai. That war crime was uncovered largely due to the investigative tenacity of journalist Seymour Hersh and there’s a new documentary about him by Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus called Cover-Up.
Hersh is in his late 80s now, but still writing and still trying to reveal what power would rather keep secret.
The film suffers from a lack of balance — not political balance, but narrative balance. It’s a two-hour feature film and its spends almost half of its time on My Lai — a crucial story but one that has been told plenty of times before. It then has to squeeze the next fifty years of Hersh’s career — a fascinatingly mixed bag it must be said — into the second hour meaning that too many questions go unanswered and too many interesting paths are closed off to us.
There’s also a manufactured conflict about the filmmakers’ potentially revealing some of Hersh’s sources, a diversion that reveals something about a testy old man’s character but is a distraction from the issues he has been banging away at for so long.
Where to watch Critical Incident: Death at the Border
