Estefania Escobar Castillo/ Reform Agency
Tuesday, February 07, 2023 | 19:05
Las Vegas, United States.- A United States Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agent who was accused by a group of Mexican women of seducing them after withdrawing their visas at the Las Vegas airport was fired, as reported Tuesday. the Univision network.
Thanks to videos that went viral on TikTok, three young Mexican women identified a pattern in July of last year in which, after severe interrogation and the retention of their visas, the officer contacted them on social networks with the intention of starting a relationship. They filed a complaint against the officer with the agency’s investigations unit “for using confidential information to have sex with young and vulnerable women,” but received no response for more than three months.
After REFORMA filed the case on Sunday, February 5, the immigration agency said in a statement that the agent no longer works for CBP.
“We do not tolerate corruption or abuse within our ranks, and we fully cooperate with any criminal or administrative investigation of suspected misconduct by any of our personnel, on duty or off duty.
“This complaint is being investigated internally. The agent involved no longer works for the agency,” says a CBP statement sent to Univision released this Tuesday.
One of those affected was Daniela, 19, whose visa was withdrawn upon arrival at the Las Vegas, Nevada airport on June 25 for having worked irregularly in the United States on a previous trip.
One of the immigration agents who questioned her threatened that she would go to jail if she did not find an immediate flight back to Mexico, but another, with a kinder manner, told her that he would help her.
This second officer took her visa but let her stay one day in Las Vegas. Five minutes later, already in an airport waiting room, he sent her a message on Instagram without her giving him her contact number, and half an hour later he was in front of her dressed as a civilian and inviting her to his apartment, the young woman explained to REFORM.
On June 30, five days later, the officer visited Daniela in Mexico City, met her family, and promised her a life together. He invited her to Puerto Vallarta for the following week, but shortly before that trip, she discovered some viral videos on TikTok where she realized there were similar stories.
“Storytime of when they took away my visa and the same officer who took it from me hooked me up,” Yanin Cabrera, 25, narrated in one of the videos about her experience last June in Las Vegas.
A third young woman, Paloma Sandoval, also had a similar story with the same agent, and, like Daniela and Yanin, she had invited them to Puerto Vallarta, meetings that ultimately did not materialize. They organized and with the help of a California-based attorney, filed a complaint with CBP about the officer’s abuse of power to “take women to bed.”
After months of receiving no response from the agency, Yanin posted a Twitter thread explaining the case again, and more complaints from other women surfaced.
“(Now that we know that the officer no longer works for the agency) I feel calmer knowing that the necessary measures are being taken so that all this stops and more women do not go through the same situation,” said Daniela yesterday, who preferred hide your true identity for security reasons.
“(What we hope) is that they investigate the entire CBP office in Las Vegas and get to the bottom of all this and stop these abuses because how is it possible that there are already several cases of different officers, this is incredible,” he said for his part dove
