Mexican police shot dead a 7-year-old American girl when they opened fire on her family’s vehicle from a helicopter during a drug enforcement operation, the state prosecutor confirmed Friday.
Police captured a local criminal in Matamoros, which borders Brownsville, Texas, on October 29, triggering a series of street blockades by gunmen in the area.
The Tamaulipas state prosecutor’s office said Friday that Aranza, a 7-year-old who was born in the United States, was hit in the head by police gunfire.
The girl’s mother told Mexican media she was traveling with five children and her husband in a pickup truck when they noticed a police helicopter was following them.
She said the family stopped the vehicle and her husband got out to say they were civilians with children but they were fired at anyway.
Tamaulipas Attorney General Jesus Govea told Mexico’s Milenio network the officers were responding to “an attack they allegedly came under” from the ground during the roadblocks.
The officers who opened fire remain free but “significant progress is being made in the course of the investigation,” Govea said.
KABB-TV in San Antonio reported that the violence erupted following the arrest of Alfredo Cárdenas Rodríguez, an alleged high-ranking member of the Ciclones faction of the Gulf Cartel.
Mexico’s Security Secretary Omar García Harfuch said on social media that Cárdenas Rodríguez – also known as “Axel” — was a linked to homicides, kidnappings, extortion and trafficking drugs, weapons and people into the United States.
The U.S. Consulate in Matamoros said at the time that it issued a shelter-in-place order for employees following the law enforcement operation.
Numerous civilians have died in the crossfire of drug-related violence in Mexico over the past two decades.
In 2024, human rights activists and relatives in the Mexican border city of Nuevo Laredo, across from Laredo, Texas, blamed the army and National Guard troops in the deaths of a nurse and an 8-year-old girl. The relatives said that the victims were apparently caught in the crossfire of gun battles with suspected drug cartel vehicles being pursued by military patrols.
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