They Locked Chop in a Bathroom for Safety. An Agent Let Him Out and Shot Him.

Chop was a seven-year-old Rottweiler, and on September 9, 2025, his family did everything cooperation asks of a citizen. U.S. Border Patrol agents had come to their home in El Paso's Upper Valley to investigate a tip alleging alien smuggling. The homeowner cooperated. That cooperation included securing Chop in a bathroom so the agents could do their work — and telling the agents exactly where the dog was.

An agent released the dog and shot him from about 18 feet.

Chop bled to death. No illegal activity was found.

Every step of that sequence is in the record, and the sequence is the story. The family complied with federal agents. The family contained their dog. The family told the agents where he was. An agent opened the door the family had closed, and fired at the dog he had just let out, from a distance of about eighteen feet. And the tip that brought federal agents to the house in the first place came to nothing: no illegal activity was found — only a dog dead inside his own home.

The family's response went through the channels available to a citizen wronged by a federal agency. They filed an SF-95 — the federal form for claiming damages from the government. They asked CBP's Office of Professional Responsibility to open an investigation. They sought animal cruelty charges against the agent. And U.S. Rep. Veronica Escobar called the shooting "inexcusable."

The accountability record

The agent who shot Chop has not been publicly named. No discipline has been reported. No animal cruelty charges have been reported filed. The family's damages claim and their request for an Office of Professional Responsibility investigation stood, as of the most recent reporting, as demands awaiting answers — and the federal government has offered no public explanation of why an agent opened a bathroom door that a cooperating homeowner had deliberately closed.

More than two months after Chop bled to death, what his family had was a claim form, a pending request for an internal investigation, an unanswered call for criminal charges, and a congresswoman's one-word verdict: "inexcusable." What the agent had, as far as the public record shows, was anonymity — the standard federal protection of a name the public is not permitted to know, attached to a shooting no one has been required to justify in public.