Pete Arredondo, the former Uvalde school police chief charged with 10 counts of endangering students in the 2022 Robb Elementary School massacre, is set to appear in a Texas courtroom Friday, more than four years after 19 children and two teachers were killed on his watch. The hearing comes as the judge weighs whether to move the trial out of Uvalde and confronts a problem that should trouble every American who believes in accountability: U.S. Customs and Border Protection has refused to cooperate with state prosecutors.
That refusal has ground the criminal case to a near-halt. And the families who buried their children are still waiting.
Judge Sid Harle will consider two major questions at the Uvalde hearing, ABC News reported. First, whether the trial should be moved out of Uvalde entirely. Second, how, or whether, the case can proceed while two separate federal lawsuits try to force CBP's Border Patrol Tactical Unit agents to testify.
Those agents are not minor witnesses. Uvalde District Attorney Christina Mitchell filed a federal lawsuit to compel their cooperation, describing three specific Border Patrol agents as essential to the prosecution. Two of them participated in killing the gunman. The third stood in the hallway during most of the incident.
Mitchell's lawsuit put it plainly:
"The three border patrol agents whose cooperation is now being sought by District Attorney Mitchell -- two of whom participated in the actual killing of the gunman and the third who was present in the hallway during most of the incident -- are essential to the pending Texas criminal prosecution."
This week, Mitchell filed a motion to schedule a status conference in that federal lawsuit. Earlier this year, a new judge was assigned to handle it. The wheels of justice, such as they are, continue to turn slowly.
CBP's legal team has pushed back hard against the request for testimony. An attorney for the agency wrote in a court filing that the request was unreasonable and unnecessary:
"It is unclear from your request how testimony from the identified CBP employees is genuinely necessary to the proceedings."
CBP attorneys went further. They argued that producing the agents for testimony "negatively impacts CBP operations and national security" by consuming resources and potentially disclosing sensitive information. They also contended the agency had already revealed enough through investigative summaries prepared by the Texas Rangers and a report released by CBP's own Office of Professional Responsibility.
Read that again. A federal agency is telling a local district attorney that eyewitness testimony from agents who were inside the building, who ended the attack, is unnecessary for a criminal trial about what happened inside that same building.
Whatever the merits of CBP's operational concerns, the practical result is clear: the prosecution of the man accused of failing to protect those children cannot proceed without the testimony of the men who ultimately did act. And the federal government is blocking the path.
Arredondo was charged in 2024 with 10 counts of endangering students. Prosecutors allege he ignored his training and waited roughly 77 minutes before agents finally stormed the classroom and killed the gunman who had attacked Robb Elementary School on May 24, 2022, the last day of school.
Arredondo has pleaded not guilty. He argues he followed his training and says he did not consider himself the incident commander that day.
His attorney, Paul Looney, has filed a separate federal lawsuit that largely mirrors Mitchell's effort to compel CBP cooperation. Looney told ABC News he believes the case against Arredondo is actually weaker than the prosecution the state already lost, the trial of former school police officer Adrian Gonzales.
A jury acquitted Gonzales on similar charges after a three-week trial earlier this year. That trial was held in Corpus Christi, moved there to find an impartial jury.
Looney framed the prosecution's position bluntly:
"They tried the one they thought that they had the best shot at, but now they're going to put everything they've got into doing this one, because they do want to win at least something."
Looney expects Judge Harle to grant a venue change for Arredondo's trial as well. He also anticipates the federal litigation over CBP cooperation will drag on another eight months to a year. He described the situation with what he called "no sense of urgency."
For the parents of the 19 children killed at Robb Elementary, the legal process has delivered one defeat after another. The Gonzales acquittal in January was the latest. Jacinto Cazares, whose 9-year-old daughter Jackie died in the attack, spoke after that verdict:
"We had a little hope, but it wasn't enough. Again, we are failed. I don't even know what to say."
Some families view Arredondo's trial as another chance at justice. But that chance keeps receding. The criminal case has stalled. The federal government won't cooperate. The defense attorney says the prosecution's case is weak. And the timeline stretches further into the future, potentially a year or more before the CBP litigation alone is resolved.
Consider the sequence. On May 24, 2022, a former student attacked Robb Elementary and murdered 21 people. Prosecutors say law enforcement on scene waited 77 minutes to breach the classroom. Charges were not filed until 2024. The first trial, of the officer prosecutors thought they had the strongest case against, ended in acquittal. Now the second defendant's case is frozen because a federal agency won't produce the agents who were there.
The CBP argument deserves scrutiny on its own terms. The agency claims that testimony from three agents would harm operations and national security. It points to existing documents, Texas Rangers investigative summaries and a CBP Office of Professional Responsibility report, as sufficient.
But documents are not testimony. A jury evaluating whether Pete Arredondo endangered children by failing to act needs to hear from the people who were in that hallway and in that classroom. Cross-examination matters. Credibility assessments matter. The agents who breached the room and killed the gunman can speak to what they saw, what they were told, and what decisions were or were not made in those 77 minutes.
The district attorney and the defense attorney, adversaries in every other respect, both filed lawsuits seeking the same thing: CBP cooperation. When both sides of a criminal case agree the federal government is obstructing the process, something has gone badly wrong.
CBP's posture raises a straightforward question of priorities. Is protecting the scheduling convenience of three agents really more important than a criminal trial arising from the murder of 19 children and two teachers? The agency's own internal report has already been released. The Texas Rangers have already produced investigative summaries. The agents' involvement is a matter of public record. The secrecy argument rings hollow.
Friday's hearing in Uvalde is unlikely to produce dramatic resolution. Judge Harle will weigh the venue question. He will assess the impact of the ongoing CBP litigation on the trial timeline. He may set new deadlines or simply acknowledge the delay.
What he cannot do is force a federal agency to comply. That fight is playing out in federal court, where a new judge was just assigned and where Mitchell is still trying to get a status conference on the calendar.
Arredondo's attorney expects the case to drag on. The families expect more disappointment. And the federal government, which deployed the agents who ended the attack, now stands as the single biggest obstacle to holding anyone criminally accountable for the response that preceded it.
Four years, two lawsuits, one acquittal, and a federal agency that won't return the district attorney's calls. If this is what justice looks like for 21 people killed in an elementary school, the system owes Uvalde more than a status conference.
