The lawsuit seeks to require that the Border Patrol agents testify in the ongoing legal proceedings against former Uvalde CISD Police Chief Pete Arredondo.
SAN ANTONIO — A newly filed lawsuit claims Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officials have repeatedly prevented three Border Patrol agents from providing “extraordinarily significant” testimony in legal proceedings related to the 2022 Robb Elementary School shooting.
Uvalde County District Attorney Christina Mitchell’s office filed the lawsuit in district court Friday, claiming CBP has “persisted in declining to authorize the testimony of the agents” even after the June 2024 indictments of former Uvalde CISD Police Chief Pete Arredondo and former district Officer Adrian Gonzales. Their trials have not yet begun, but the suit says other information like written reports are no substitute for the firsthand accounts of the three agents who responded alongside to the mass shooting on May 24, 2022, alongside other personnel.
Two of those agents, the lawsuit says, “participated in the actual killing of the gunman,” who was 19 years old when he entered the Uvalde school and killed 21 people, including 19 children.
“The CBP’s administrative declination… was arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion and not in accordance with the applicable law,” the suit says. “These agents are uniquely situated to clarify how Arredondo’s actions, omissions and orders as incident commander influenced their actions.”
The lawsuit says the agents’ testimony is pivotal for both the defense and prosecution in Arredondo’s eventual trial, and seeks to force the Border Patrol agents to testify in court proceedings. Two of the agents whose testimony is being sought were members of the U.S. Border Patrol’s Border Patrol Tactical Unit; the third was a tactical commander who directed law enforcement’s delayed entry into Robb Elementary classrooms.
Arredondo and Gonzales are both facing numerous counts of child endangerment related to the Robb killings, but a trial date has not been definitively set as we near the three-year mark after the shooting. Both pleaded not guilty last summer, and a subsequent effort to quash Arredondo’s indictment was rejected by a judge.
In December, his attorney said he wouldn’t expect it start in October 2025, when it had been tentatively scheduled to begin.
This is a developing story.