Stop Killing Mexicans! San Diego Students Demand

Stop Killing Mexicans! San Diego Students Demand
By Rocky Neptun, Radmedia San Diego

Sergio Adrian Hernandez Huereka was just 15, a student at a Secondaria school in Ciudad Juarez, when he was killed by a U.S. Border Patrol officer on June 8. Innocently standing in Mexico, near the pylon that supports a train bridge that crosses the Rio Grande River into El Paso, Texas, he was shot twice as the border guard allegedly fired indiscriminately into Mexico.

Tuesday, June 22, about 40 students from San Diego’s Lincoln High School gathered outside the Border Patrol’s Chula Vista regional headquarters to demand they stop killing Mexicans. Many were the same age as was the young Mexican student. They spoke of the need to remember him, to stand in solidarity with his family and to demand justice.

Joining the demonstration, some younger children carried a banner that asked for justice for Anastacio Hernandez, who was beaten and tasered by at least 20 border agents as he attempted to flee into Mexico at the San Ysidro gates, just two weeks before the shooting death in Ciudad Juarez. The San Diego County Coroner ruled his death a homicide.

One Lincoln High Student, David, pointed to the Border Patrol building behind him and asked “how can they justify what they do?” “We are not animals just because we are Mexicans, we are human beings,” he pleaded.

Then turning again toward the empty entrance, which seemed closed or deserted for the day, with nary a brown uniform in sight, his booming voice, laden with emotion, echoed by an portable amplifier, bounced against the glass and steel, “not only are they watching us, but we are watching them.”

Another student, Anna, asked “how can they justify what they do?” She called the death of her fellow 15 year-old student a “murder” and asked for justice for both Sergio and Anastacio Hernandez.

Others carried signs which read “no more deaths” and ‘we want peace.” One banner blazoned with a painting of the Statue of Liberty read “no human being is illegal.”

As the students chanted “we want justice,” the haunting, hurt-filled, voice of Sergio’s sister Rosario Hernandez, screaming “Damn Them! Damn Them” at a wake in the family's two-room adobe house on the outskirts of Ciudad Juarez, as shown on Mexican television, ricocheted in my ears.

One young man who was walking by the student’s protest, Brent Grayson, shook his head and said “we should be ashamed as a nation, what we represent to the rest of the world, killing children on the border.”