Arizona Republic
February 14, 2014
by Daniel Gonzalez
NOGALES, Ariz. — Nogales has been the epicenter for cross-border drug tunnels for years. U.S. authorities have found 100 drug tunnels in that city since 1990, more than any other location along the 2,000-mile United States-Mexico border.
But the tunnel found this week tops them all. At 481 feet, longer than 11/2 football fields, it is the longest ever discovered in Nogales, according to Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials.
The tunnel extended from a house in Nogales, Sonora, to a house in Nogales, Ariz., and was being used to smuggle marijuana and other drugs into the U.S., ICE officials said.
Federal authorities found a half pound of heroin and 46 pounds of marijuana inside.
They seized another 590 pounds of marijuana after stopping a vehicle federal agents saw driving away from the house in Nogales, Ariz., on Monday.
The house was under surveillance by a multiagency task force created in 2012 to find and dismantle drug tunnels.
The driver of the truck, Jesus Alberto Ramirez-Valencia, 22, a U.S. citizen from Nogales, Ariz., and two Mexican citizens, Jose Mario Armenta-Valdez, 41, and Jose Solorzano-Flores, 41, were charged with drug conspiracy.
The driver was apparently transporting the drugs to a second house where Solorzano-Flores was found outside, authorities say. Armenta-Valdez was arrested after federal agents raided the house, where an opening to the drug tunnel leading into the U.S. from Mexico was found.
Eric Balliet, assistant special agent in charge of ICE's Homeland Security Investigations in Nogales, said drug smugglers are resorting to tunnels because of tighter border security.
"If a drug-trafficking organization can establish a well-manufactured tunnel, the likelihood of a law-enforcement encounter is somewhat slim," Balliet said. "You don't run the risk of exposing your dope above ground, whether it's human backpackers or smuggling through the port or over the fence. It's completely concealed from start to finish."
The drug tunnel found Monday is the third uncovered in Nogales since December.
Since 1990, 169 tunnels have been found along the southern border, 100 of them in Nogales.
Last fiscal year, six of the seven tunnels found along the U.S.-Mexico border were found in Nogales.
In 2012, seven of the 16 tunnels found on the border were in Nogales, and 12 of the 18 the year before that, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
Nogales is popular for drug tunnels because smugglers can tap a vast underground drainage system that connects the border cities, Balliet said.
Once inside the drainage system, smugglers bore spider tunnels into the U.S., he said
The two cities also have large neighborhoods close to each other, making it easy for smugglers to dig tunnels from a house on the Mexican side to a house on the U.S. side, he said.
The tunnel found Monday stretched 70 feet from a house in Nogales, Sonora, to the U.S. border and then another 411 feet to a house in Nogales, Ariz., ICE officials said.
The passageway was roughly 2 feet wide and 3 feet high, and had wood shoring, electric lighting and ventilation fans, ICE officials said.
The tunnel task force includes officers from ICE, the Border Patrol, the Drug Enforcement Administration, Nogales police, and Mexican authorities.
http://www.wbir.com/story/news/nation/2014/02/14/largest-ever-drug-tunnel-in-nogales-found/5484031/
Showing posts with label drug smuggling. Show all posts
Showing posts with label drug smuggling. Show all posts
Thursday, February 20, 2014
Wednesday, December 12, 2012
Cans of pot launched over Mexico-Arizona border fence
USA Today
December 12, 2012
by Domenico Nicosia
Thirty-three marijuana-filled cans were found on the Arizona side of the Mexican border, apparently shot over the fence with an air-pressured cannon.
Weighing about 2-1/2 pounds each, the cans were found late last week scattered in a field here near the Colorado River, U.S. Border Patrol officials said Tuesday. The almost 85 pounds of contents were estimated to be worth $43,000.
Border officials said they believe that pneumatic cannons — similar to the guns that launch T-shirts and other items during sporting events — were used to shoot the cans about 500 feet over the border fence after drug smugglers had crossed the river. A carbon dioxide tank also was found in the area.
The find was "another unique but unsuccessful attempt" to smuggle drugs into the U.S., officials said. Smugglers try to come up with ways to counter authorities as border officials disrupt drug-smuggling patterns.
Mexican authorities also are looking into the incident.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2012/12/12/pot-cannon-arizona-mexico/1762949/
December 12, 2012
by Domenico Nicosia
Thirty-three marijuana-filled cans were found on the Arizona side of the Mexican border, apparently shot over the fence with an air-pressured cannon.
Weighing about 2-1/2 pounds each, the cans were found late last week scattered in a field here near the Colorado River, U.S. Border Patrol officials said Tuesday. The almost 85 pounds of contents were estimated to be worth $43,000.
Border officials said they believe that pneumatic cannons — similar to the guns that launch T-shirts and other items during sporting events — were used to shoot the cans about 500 feet over the border fence after drug smugglers had crossed the river. A carbon dioxide tank also was found in the area.
The find was "another unique but unsuccessful attempt" to smuggle drugs into the U.S., officials said. Smugglers try to come up with ways to counter authorities as border officials disrupt drug-smuggling patterns.
Mexican authorities also are looking into the incident.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2012/12/12/pot-cannon-arizona-mexico/1762949/
Tuesday, December 4, 2012
Arizona border agent arrested for alleged on-duty drug smuggling
Chicago Tribune / Reuters
December 4, 2012
by David Schwartz
PHOENIX (Reuters) - A U.S. Border Patrol agent has been arrested after he was spotted accepting bundles of marijuana from a suspected Mexican smuggler at an international border fence in Arizona, authorities said on Tuesday.
Aaron Anaya, 25, was taken into custody early on Monday by federal agents who seized 147 pounds (66.6 kg) of marijuana inside three duffle bags from his border patrol vehicle, authorities said in a criminal complaint in U.S. District Court in Phoenix.
Anaya, a U.S. Border Patrol agent since 2010, was charged with possession of a controlled substance with intent to distribute and firearm possession during a drug trafficking offense, according to the criminal complaint. Anaya had his service weapon with him at the time.
The controlled substance count carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison and the firearms count is punishable by up to 5 years behind bars.
Anaya's federal public defender could not immediately be reached for comment on Tuesday.
Stephen Martin, the Border Patrol's sector chief for Yuma, Arizona, said the agency was "sorely disappointed by the alleged conduct of one of our own."
"I appreciate the efforts by our law enforcement partners and our own agents to uncover those that violate their oath of office, and hold them accountable for their actions," Martin said in a statement released on Tuesday.
Anaya was arrested by agents from the FBI-led Southwest Border Corruption Task Force who were conducting surveillance with the help of aircraft in an area between Yuma and Wellton, about 185 miles southwest of Phoenix.
According to a probable cause statement filed with the complaint, agents say they watched as Anaya stopped his patrol vehicle along the border and picked up bales of marijuana tossed over the fence into Arizona from a man on Mexican side.
Anaya was then seen by the agents placing the load into his vehicle before he continued patrolling, the probable cause document said.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security reports that 129 agents were arrested on corruption charges from 2003 to 2009.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/sns-rt-us-usa-smuggling-borderagentbre8b4012-20121204,0,2545413.story
December 4, 2012
by David Schwartz
PHOENIX (Reuters) - A U.S. Border Patrol agent has been arrested after he was spotted accepting bundles of marijuana from a suspected Mexican smuggler at an international border fence in Arizona, authorities said on Tuesday.
Aaron Anaya, 25, was taken into custody early on Monday by federal agents who seized 147 pounds (66.6 kg) of marijuana inside three duffle bags from his border patrol vehicle, authorities said in a criminal complaint in U.S. District Court in Phoenix.
Anaya, a U.S. Border Patrol agent since 2010, was charged with possession of a controlled substance with intent to distribute and firearm possession during a drug trafficking offense, according to the criminal complaint. Anaya had his service weapon with him at the time.
The controlled substance count carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison and the firearms count is punishable by up to 5 years behind bars.
Anaya's federal public defender could not immediately be reached for comment on Tuesday.
Stephen Martin, the Border Patrol's sector chief for Yuma, Arizona, said the agency was "sorely disappointed by the alleged conduct of one of our own."
"I appreciate the efforts by our law enforcement partners and our own agents to uncover those that violate their oath of office, and hold them accountable for their actions," Martin said in a statement released on Tuesday.
Anaya was arrested by agents from the FBI-led Southwest Border Corruption Task Force who were conducting surveillance with the help of aircraft in an area between Yuma and Wellton, about 185 miles southwest of Phoenix.
According to a probable cause statement filed with the complaint, agents say they watched as Anaya stopped his patrol vehicle along the border and picked up bales of marijuana tossed over the fence into Arizona from a man on Mexican side.
Anaya was then seen by the agents placing the load into his vehicle before he continued patrolling, the probable cause document said.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security reports that 129 agents were arrested on corruption charges from 2003 to 2009.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/sns-rt-us-usa-smuggling-borderagentbre8b4012-20121204,0,2545413.story
Wednesday, October 31, 2012
Suspected drug smugglers try to leap border fence with Jeep, ramp
Los Angeles Times
October 31, 2012
by John M. Glionna
The rules of the smuggling game across the U.S.-Mexico border have been written unofficially for years: If a bad guy moving drugs or people encounters a border fence, you tunnel under it.
“That area is just west of the Arizona-California line,” spokesman Victor Brabble told the Times. “There’s a floating fence there that we move when the dunes move. I guess the only way to get past it is to scale it.”
In 2007, Border Patrol Agent Luis Aguilar was killed near the same area when he was deliberately struck by a vehicle while attempting to deploy a controlled tire deflation device.
The region, handled by the Border Patrol’s Yuma, Ariz., office, has been rife with underground tunnels allowing drug dealers to move product. This summer, U.S. authorities uncovered a 240-yard-long tunnel, which had been in use near Yuma for nearly three months. Agents characterize the bust as a "major" find, saying the tunnel included sophisticated work such as electricity and ventilation.
Authorities say that 156 tunnels have been uncovered along the U.S. Southwestern border since the early 1990s. Three out of four were discovered after 2001, the majority of which were incomplete.
Clever detective work and improved tunnel detection technology have made underground trafficking more difficult, authorities said. But the huge drug quantities heading across the border could also be explained by a surge in marijuana production in Mexico and, in particular, Baja California, where Mexico's Sinaloa drug cartel has been expanding its influence.
In eight years, the U.S. Border Patrol’s biggest find was a nearly half-mile-long tunnel south of San Diego in 2006 – that’s the length of seven football fields.
But like in the recent Jeep incident, sometimes the evidence is right there before your eyes.
Agents from the Yuma station had been patrolling the Imperial Sand Dunes area when they spotted the silver Jeep Cherokee attempting to scale the fence. What the smugglers left behind was a 2,000-pound vehicle perched precariously on the precipice of the boundary.
Authorities say they seized both the vehicle and the ramp, adding that it wasn’t clear if the smugglers were trying to spirit drugs, people or both into the U.S.
http://www.latimes.com/news/nation/nationnow/la-na-nn-smugglers-jeep-border-ramp-20121031,0,6959278.story
October 31, 2012
by John M. Glionna
The rules of the smuggling game across the U.S.-Mexico border have been written unofficially for years: If a bad guy moving drugs or people encounters a border fence, you tunnel under it.
But a group of enterprising – or desperate –
smugglers got caught trying an alternative method. They built a flimsy makeshift
ramp and tried to drive over a U.S. Border Patrol fence
near the Imperial Sand Dunes in Southern California.
A U.S. Border Patrol spokeswoman in Arizona told
the Los Angeles Times that a pair of suspected smugglers
tried to drive over a 14-foot-high fence in southeastern Arizona just after
midnight Tuesday but abandoned the vehicle and fled back into Mexico as agents
approached.
“That area is just west of the Arizona-California line,” spokesman Victor Brabble told the Times. “There’s a floating fence there that we move when the dunes move. I guess the only way to get past it is to scale it.”
In 2007, Border Patrol Agent Luis Aguilar was killed near the same area when he was deliberately struck by a vehicle while attempting to deploy a controlled tire deflation device.
The region, handled by the Border Patrol’s Yuma, Ariz., office, has been rife with underground tunnels allowing drug dealers to move product. This summer, U.S. authorities uncovered a 240-yard-long tunnel, which had been in use near Yuma for nearly three months. Agents characterize the bust as a "major" find, saying the tunnel included sophisticated work such as electricity and ventilation.
Authorities say that 156 tunnels have been uncovered along the U.S. Southwestern border since the early 1990s. Three out of four were discovered after 2001, the majority of which were incomplete.
Clever detective work and improved tunnel detection technology have made underground trafficking more difficult, authorities said. But the huge drug quantities heading across the border could also be explained by a surge in marijuana production in Mexico and, in particular, Baja California, where Mexico's Sinaloa drug cartel has been expanding its influence.
In eight years, the U.S. Border Patrol’s biggest find was a nearly half-mile-long tunnel south of San Diego in 2006 – that’s the length of seven football fields.
But like in the recent Jeep incident, sometimes the evidence is right there before your eyes.
Agents from the Yuma station had been patrolling the Imperial Sand Dunes area when they spotted the silver Jeep Cherokee attempting to scale the fence. What the smugglers left behind was a 2,000-pound vehicle perched precariously on the precipice of the boundary.
Authorities say they seized both the vehicle and the ramp, adding that it wasn’t clear if the smugglers were trying to spirit drugs, people or both into the U.S.
http://www.latimes.com/news/nation/nationnow/la-na-nn-smugglers-jeep-border-ramp-20121031,0,6959278.story
Smugglers try driving over US border fence, get stuck
Associated Press / MSN
October 31, 2012
YUMA, Ariz. — Suspected smugglers tried to use ramps to drive an SUV over a 14-foot fence along the U.S.-Mexico border, but they abandoned the effort when it got stuck on top.
U.S. Border Patrol spokesman Spencer Tippets says agents spotted the SUV perched atop the fence early Tuesday near the border between Arizona and California.
Two people on the Mexican side were trying to free the Jeep when the agents approached. They ran further into Mexico.
The Jeep was empty, but agents say it was probably filled with contraband like marijuana before it got stuck.
October 31, 2012
YUMA, Ariz. — Suspected smugglers tried to use ramps to drive an SUV over a 14-foot fence along the U.S.-Mexico border, but they abandoned the effort when it got stuck on top.
U.S. Border Patrol spokesman Spencer Tippets says agents spotted the SUV perched atop the fence early Tuesday near the border between Arizona and California.
Two people on the Mexican side were trying to free the Jeep when the agents approached. They ran further into Mexico.
The Jeep was empty, but agents say it was probably filled with contraband like marijuana before it got stuck.
The smugglers had built ramps that looked like long ladders to drive up and over the fence.
Thursday, October 18, 2012
Border Patrol scrutinized over teen's shooting death
Arizona Republic
October 18, 2012
by Bob Ortega
NOGALES, Ariz. - There was nothing unusual about the call to the Border Patrol and Nogales police on Oct. 10 to report two men climbing the border fence to bring drugs into the United States.
It also was not unusual that once Border Patrol agents arrived at the scene and attempted to arrest the men, who were now fleeing back to Mexico, one or more people began to hurl rocks over the fence at the agents from the Mexico side of the border.
The decision by one or more agents to open fire on the rock throwers, though, is another matter. It is the subject of furious disagreement between the Border Patrol and critics, including the American Civil Liberties Union and human-rights advocates, who say agents resort to deadly force too often. The Mexican government has condemned the shooting and called for a thorough investigation.
At least one Border Patrol agent fired shots through an opening in the fence. Moments later, Mexican police found the body of a 16-year-old boy on the ground in front of a medical office. Jose Antonio Elena Rodriguez had been shot eight times. Police investigators marked 11 bullet holes on the walls of the medical office.
Elena Rodriguez is the 18th person to be killed by Border Patrol agents since January 2010, with all but two of those deaths along the U.S.-Mexico border, says Vicki Gaubeca, director of the ACLU's Regional Center for Border Rights, in Las Cruces, N.M. Eight of those killed allegedly had been throwing rocks at Border Patrol officers.
In the most recent incident, there are discrepancies between the Border Patrol's version of events and accounts of witnesses on the Mexican side of the border. The Border Patrol said its agent fired at someone who was throwing rocks at the agents over the fence. Elena Rodriguez's family has said all the bullets entered the boy's body from behind.
The discrepancies may be resolved: A Border Patrol spokesman says video cameras on the border fence were in operation during the incident. Those recordings have been turned over to FBI investigators. Sonora's attorney general also has requested a copy from the Department of Justice, the attorney general's spokeswoman, Sandra Hurtado, said.
The FBI was on the scene hours after the incident and has collected reports from the agents and Nogales police officers. It is standard for the FBI to investigate deadly incidents involving the Border Patrol.
ACLU attorney Chris Rickerd has criticized agents' actions in several deaths involving border agents, including a March 21, 2011, incident in which a Border Patrol officer in Douglas shot a 19-year-old U.S. citizen, Carlos Lamadrid, three times in the back as Lamadrid fled into Agua Prieta, Mexico. Rickerd said the Border Patrol should explain what disciplinary actions it takes when agents violate use-of-force policies.
The Border Patrol didn't respond by deadline to questions from The Republic about what disciplinary actions, if any, have been taken related to the 18 deaths.
Customs and Border Protection spokesman Michael Friel said the agency's use of force is based on the Department of Justice's policy. "Law-enforcement personnel are trained to use deadly force in circumstances that pose a threat to their lives, the lives of their fellow law-enforcement partners and innocent third parties," he said.
CBP wouldn't provide additional details on its use-of-force policy. But rocks are considered potentially lethal, and the agency typically has not disciplined officers for firing at rock throwers.
The agency doesn't classify rock-throwing incidents separately from other assaults on agents, but Friel said that such incidents are the most common type of assault along the border, numbering in the hundreds over the past three years.
No agents have been killed in rock-throwing incidents. Since early 2010, seven Border Patrol agents have been killed on duty: five in vehicle accidents; one, Brian Terry, was shot by drug smugglers in 2010; and one, Nicholas Ivie, was shot in a friendly-fire incident two weeks ago near Bisbee.
Lt. Carlos Jimenez of the Nogales Police Department said it's common for drug cartels to hire people as border lookouts "and to tell them if something goes bad to throw rocks to distract or deter law-enforcement officers ... They'll pay anybody willing to do it, youths, old people. They don't discriminate by age or gender."
Elena Rodriguez's mother, Araceli Rodriguez, insisted that her son would not have been involved in drug activity and must have been walking in the area when he was shot less than four blocks from his home.
"He wasn't a bad boy," she said tearfully in an interview at her home in Nogales, Sonora. A framed photograph of her son surrounded by flowers stood on a nearby table.
"They killed my little boy, and I want to know why. I want to know why they shot him so many times, why they shot him in the back," she said. "We want justice."
The Border Patrol declined to discuss details of the Elena Rodriguez case, citing the FBI investigation.
Garcia said in a report that he saw two men carrying bundles of marijuana on their backs, jumping down from the fence onto the Arizona side and running toward houses on a street facing the fence. He chased them into a driveway and lost sight of them.
Moments later, he said, the first of several Border Patrol agents arrived, along with a police K-9 officer, John Zuniga.
In his report, Zuniga wrote that he spotted the two men, who had dropped their bundles, trying to climb back over the fence into Mexico. After Zuniga and Border Patrol agents yelled at them to get down from the fence, Zuniga reported that he "heard several rocks start hitting the ground, and I looked up and could see the rocks flying through the air."
As he took his dog back to his vehicle, Zuniga heard gunfire. When he looked up, he saw an agent standing by the fence.
Neither Zuniga nor Garcia reported seeing shots fired.
"I then heard an agent say, 'There is one 10-7,' which means out of service or no longer alive," Zuniga wrote in the report.
The Border Patrol initially told the public that an agent had fired and someone "appeared" to have been hit. The agency has not said whether more than one agent fired shots.
Across the fence, in his home and medical office on Calle Internacional, a street that runs along the border, Dr. Luis Contreras Sanchez was surfing the Internet when he heard someone run past his window, followed by at least eight shots, he said in an interview with The Republic.
"I turned out the light, dove down and called the police," he said. "I didn't hear anyone screaming or yelling outside, or I'd have gone out."
Minutes later, police arrived, Contreras Sanchez said. He looked out and saw the boy face down on the sidewalk.
While Border Patrol officials said that the agent fired after rock-throwers ignored repeated orders to stop, Contreras Sanchez said he didn't hear such orders. The Nogales Police Department's reports don't mention orders for the rock-throwers to stop.
"If you see photos of where he was standing and where he allegedly was throwing rocks, from that distance, how lethal could those rocks be? How defensible is it to shoot someone?" asks the ACLU's Gaubeca.
The fence where the incident occurred was rebuilt a year ago as part of a project to construct more than 650 miles of new barriers mandated by Congress to tighten border security.
The new fence covers a 2.8-mile stretch from one end of Nogales to the other. Built of parallel beams constructed from a triple layer of rebar, concrete and steel, the fence averages 18 to 20 feet in height and has an extra steel barrier on top to make it harder to scale.
When it was completed during the summer of 2011, officials said the fence would better protect border agents from rock-throwers because unlike the old sheet-metal fence, which was 10 to 12 feet high, agents can see through it.
It may have had an impact. Border Patrol officers in the Tucson Sector, which includes Nogales, reported 251 assaults for the fiscal year ending Sept. 30, 2011, a 40 percent drop from the previous fiscal year.
At the main border crossing in Nogales, the fence is at street level. Moving west, toward Contreras Sanchez's office, three blocks away, the fence climbs a steep hill on the U.S. side. Where Elena Rodriguez was shot, the base of the fence is 25 feet above street level; the top of the fence is roughly 45 feet above where the boy was shot.
The angle is such that it would be all but impossible for a rock-thrower to hit someone near the fence on the U.S. side.
Elena Rodriguez's family has hired a U.S. attorney, Luis Parra, to sue the Border Patrol.
Similar cross-border suits in recent years have been dismissed by U.S. courts. For example, 15-year-old Sergio Hernandez-Guereca was shot twice and killed by a Border Patrol officer in El Paso in June 2010, allegedly while throwing rocks as the agent arrested another youth.
The Department of Justice declined to prosecute the agent, saying he hadn't violated CBP's use-of-force policies or training. The department declined an extradition request by the state government of Chihuahua. Federal district courts twice dismissed suits by the family, alleging wrongful death and violation of the boy's rights. In both cases, U.S. District Judge David Briones ruled that U.S. constitutional protections don't apply because Hernandez-Guereca was a Mexican citizen and in Mexico at the time he was killed. An appeal to the 5th Circuit Court is pending.
David Shirk, director of the Trans-Border Institute at the University of San Diego, called the judge's ruling "a legitimate legal interpretation in the absence of any higher court ruling that suggests otherwise . . . It exposes one of the many challenges of the border region that are not well captured in national law."
He said firing a gun on one side of an international border doesn't necessarily create legal responsibility for the impact in the neighboring country.
Gaubeca said that while the Mexican government could ask to extradite the Border Patrol agent, the U.S. government can, as it has before, simply say no.
"How do you wrestle with the issue of causing harm on the other side of an international boundary, and what remedy is there for people who feel this is a wrongful shooting or an inappropriate use of lethal force?" Gaubeca asked.
This, she argues, is why it's particularly important for the Border Patrol to train its agents to defuse confrontations.
Since 2007, when the George W. Bush administration launched a major expansion, the Border Patrol has nearly doubled in size, to more than 21,000 agents. To recruit and quickly hire that many new agents, the Border Patrol reduced requirements, deferred background checks and omitted lie-detector tests that had been standard, and shortened training that officers receive, said John Carlos Frey, a filmmaker who this year produced a documentary on the patrol for the PBS program "Need to Know."
Rickerd, of the ACLU, said in a recent blog post that the Border Patrol should "make clear whether or not it abides by best law enforcement practices," in terms of the training it gives agents, whether it equips them with adequate protective gear that would reduce their need to use deadly force, and what plans it has to install dashboard-mounted and other cameras to record its agents' actions.
On Monday, as she waited to meet with state police for any news on the investigation, Araceli Rodriguez shared one of the many questions to which she'd like an answer: "Why didn't the Border Patrol agents just fire a warning shot in the air?"
http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/news/articles/2012/10/17/20121017border-patrol-scrutinized-teen-shooting-death.html
October 18, 2012
by Bob Ortega
NOGALES, Ariz. - There was nothing unusual about the call to the Border Patrol and Nogales police on Oct. 10 to report two men climbing the border fence to bring drugs into the United States.
It also was not unusual that once Border Patrol agents arrived at the scene and attempted to arrest the men, who were now fleeing back to Mexico, one or more people began to hurl rocks over the fence at the agents from the Mexico side of the border.
The decision by one or more agents to open fire on the rock throwers, though, is another matter. It is the subject of furious disagreement between the Border Patrol and critics, including the American Civil Liberties Union and human-rights advocates, who say agents resort to deadly force too often. The Mexican government has condemned the shooting and called for a thorough investigation.
At least one Border Patrol agent fired shots through an opening in the fence. Moments later, Mexican police found the body of a 16-year-old boy on the ground in front of a medical office. Jose Antonio Elena Rodriguez had been shot eight times. Police investigators marked 11 bullet holes on the walls of the medical office.
Elena Rodriguez is the 18th person to be killed by Border Patrol agents since January 2010, with all but two of those deaths along the U.S.-Mexico border, says Vicki Gaubeca, director of the ACLU's Regional Center for Border Rights, in Las Cruces, N.M. Eight of those killed allegedly had been throwing rocks at Border Patrol officers.
In the most recent incident, there are discrepancies between the Border Patrol's version of events and accounts of witnesses on the Mexican side of the border. The Border Patrol said its agent fired at someone who was throwing rocks at the agents over the fence. Elena Rodriguez's family has said all the bullets entered the boy's body from behind.
The discrepancies may be resolved: A Border Patrol spokesman says video cameras on the border fence were in operation during the incident. Those recordings have been turned over to FBI investigators. Sonora's attorney general also has requested a copy from the Department of Justice, the attorney general's spokeswoman, Sandra Hurtado, said.
The FBI was on the scene hours after the incident and has collected reports from the agents and Nogales police officers. It is standard for the FBI to investigate deadly incidents involving the Border Patrol.
Use of deadly force
Even before Elena Rodriguez's death, the ACLU, several members of Congress and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights had this year called for an independent, comprehensive investigation into Customs and Border Protection's policies on use of force.ACLU attorney Chris Rickerd has criticized agents' actions in several deaths involving border agents, including a March 21, 2011, incident in which a Border Patrol officer in Douglas shot a 19-year-old U.S. citizen, Carlos Lamadrid, three times in the back as Lamadrid fled into Agua Prieta, Mexico. Rickerd said the Border Patrol should explain what disciplinary actions it takes when agents violate use-of-force policies.
The Border Patrol didn't respond by deadline to questions from The Republic about what disciplinary actions, if any, have been taken related to the 18 deaths.
Customs and Border Protection spokesman Michael Friel said the agency's use of force is based on the Department of Justice's policy. "Law-enforcement personnel are trained to use deadly force in circumstances that pose a threat to their lives, the lives of their fellow law-enforcement partners and innocent third parties," he said.
CBP wouldn't provide additional details on its use-of-force policy. But rocks are considered potentially lethal, and the agency typically has not disciplined officers for firing at rock throwers.
The agency doesn't classify rock-throwing incidents separately from other assaults on agents, but Friel said that such incidents are the most common type of assault along the border, numbering in the hundreds over the past three years.
No agents have been killed in rock-throwing incidents. Since early 2010, seven Border Patrol agents have been killed on duty: five in vehicle accidents; one, Brian Terry, was shot by drug smugglers in 2010; and one, Nicholas Ivie, was shot in a friendly-fire incident two weeks ago near Bisbee.
Lt. Carlos Jimenez of the Nogales Police Department said it's common for drug cartels to hire people as border lookouts "and to tell them if something goes bad to throw rocks to distract or deter law-enforcement officers ... They'll pay anybody willing to do it, youths, old people. They don't discriminate by age or gender."
Elena Rodriguez's mother, Araceli Rodriguez, insisted that her son would not have been involved in drug activity and must have been walking in the area when he was shot less than four blocks from his home.
"He wasn't a bad boy," she said tearfully in an interview at her home in Nogales, Sonora. A framed photograph of her son surrounded by flowers stood on a nearby table.
"They killed my little boy, and I want to know why. I want to know why they shot him so many times, why they shot him in the back," she said. "We want justice."
The Border Patrol declined to discuss details of the Elena Rodriguez case, citing the FBI investigation.
Responding to the scene
Nogales, Ariz., police Officer Quinardo Garcia was the first of several officers to respond to a report, at 11:16 p.m. on Oct. 10, of two men climbing over the border fence from Mexico.Garcia said in a report that he saw two men carrying bundles of marijuana on their backs, jumping down from the fence onto the Arizona side and running toward houses on a street facing the fence. He chased them into a driveway and lost sight of them.
Moments later, he said, the first of several Border Patrol agents arrived, along with a police K-9 officer, John Zuniga.
In his report, Zuniga wrote that he spotted the two men, who had dropped their bundles, trying to climb back over the fence into Mexico. After Zuniga and Border Patrol agents yelled at them to get down from the fence, Zuniga reported that he "heard several rocks start hitting the ground, and I looked up and could see the rocks flying through the air."
As he took his dog back to his vehicle, Zuniga heard gunfire. When he looked up, he saw an agent standing by the fence.
Neither Zuniga nor Garcia reported seeing shots fired.
"I then heard an agent say, 'There is one 10-7,' which means out of service or no longer alive," Zuniga wrote in the report.
The Border Patrol initially told the public that an agent had fired and someone "appeared" to have been hit. The agency has not said whether more than one agent fired shots.
Across the fence, in his home and medical office on Calle Internacional, a street that runs along the border, Dr. Luis Contreras Sanchez was surfing the Internet when he heard someone run past his window, followed by at least eight shots, he said in an interview with The Republic.
"I turned out the light, dove down and called the police," he said. "I didn't hear anyone screaming or yelling outside, or I'd have gone out."
Minutes later, police arrived, Contreras Sanchez said. He looked out and saw the boy face down on the sidewalk.
While Border Patrol officials said that the agent fired after rock-throwers ignored repeated orders to stop, Contreras Sanchez said he didn't hear such orders. The Nogales Police Department's reports don't mention orders for the rock-throwers to stop.
Actions criticized
To some Border Patrol critics, even if Elena Rodriguez was throwing rocks, the agent's response was not justified."If you see photos of where he was standing and where he allegedly was throwing rocks, from that distance, how lethal could those rocks be? How defensible is it to shoot someone?" asks the ACLU's Gaubeca.
The fence where the incident occurred was rebuilt a year ago as part of a project to construct more than 650 miles of new barriers mandated by Congress to tighten border security.
The new fence covers a 2.8-mile stretch from one end of Nogales to the other. Built of parallel beams constructed from a triple layer of rebar, concrete and steel, the fence averages 18 to 20 feet in height and has an extra steel barrier on top to make it harder to scale.
When it was completed during the summer of 2011, officials said the fence would better protect border agents from rock-throwers because unlike the old sheet-metal fence, which was 10 to 12 feet high, agents can see through it.
It may have had an impact. Border Patrol officers in the Tucson Sector, which includes Nogales, reported 251 assaults for the fiscal year ending Sept. 30, 2011, a 40 percent drop from the previous fiscal year.
At the main border crossing in Nogales, the fence is at street level. Moving west, toward Contreras Sanchez's office, three blocks away, the fence climbs a steep hill on the U.S. side. Where Elena Rodriguez was shot, the base of the fence is 25 feet above street level; the top of the fence is roughly 45 feet above where the boy was shot.
The angle is such that it would be all but impossible for a rock-thrower to hit someone near the fence on the U.S. side.
Elena Rodriguez's family has hired a U.S. attorney, Luis Parra, to sue the Border Patrol.
Similar cross-border suits in recent years have been dismissed by U.S. courts. For example, 15-year-old Sergio Hernandez-Guereca was shot twice and killed by a Border Patrol officer in El Paso in June 2010, allegedly while throwing rocks as the agent arrested another youth.
The Department of Justice declined to prosecute the agent, saying he hadn't violated CBP's use-of-force policies or training. The department declined an extradition request by the state government of Chihuahua. Federal district courts twice dismissed suits by the family, alleging wrongful death and violation of the boy's rights. In both cases, U.S. District Judge David Briones ruled that U.S. constitutional protections don't apply because Hernandez-Guereca was a Mexican citizen and in Mexico at the time he was killed. An appeal to the 5th Circuit Court is pending.
David Shirk, director of the Trans-Border Institute at the University of San Diego, called the judge's ruling "a legitimate legal interpretation in the absence of any higher court ruling that suggests otherwise . . . It exposes one of the many challenges of the border region that are not well captured in national law."
He said firing a gun on one side of an international border doesn't necessarily create legal responsibility for the impact in the neighboring country.
Gaubeca said that while the Mexican government could ask to extradite the Border Patrol agent, the U.S. government can, as it has before, simply say no.
"How do you wrestle with the issue of causing harm on the other side of an international boundary, and what remedy is there for people who feel this is a wrongful shooting or an inappropriate use of lethal force?" Gaubeca asked.
This, she argues, is why it's particularly important for the Border Patrol to train its agents to defuse confrontations.
Since 2007, when the George W. Bush administration launched a major expansion, the Border Patrol has nearly doubled in size, to more than 21,000 agents. To recruit and quickly hire that many new agents, the Border Patrol reduced requirements, deferred background checks and omitted lie-detector tests that had been standard, and shortened training that officers receive, said John Carlos Frey, a filmmaker who this year produced a documentary on the patrol for the PBS program "Need to Know."
Rickerd, of the ACLU, said in a recent blog post that the Border Patrol should "make clear whether or not it abides by best law enforcement practices," in terms of the training it gives agents, whether it equips them with adequate protective gear that would reduce their need to use deadly force, and what plans it has to install dashboard-mounted and other cameras to record its agents' actions.
On Monday, as she waited to meet with state police for any news on the investigation, Araceli Rodriguez shared one of the many questions to which she'd like an answer: "Why didn't the Border Patrol agents just fire a warning shot in the air?"
http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/news/articles/2012/10/17/20121017border-patrol-scrutinized-teen-shooting-death.html
Monday, October 15, 2012
Mexican officials question border agent's use of force in boy's death in Nogales
Arizona Republic
October 13, 2012
by Bob Ortega
As more details emerge about the shooting death late Wednesday of a 16-year-old Mexican boy in Nogales, Sonora, by a Border Patrol agent, Mexican authorities increasingly are questioning whether lethal force was needed.
The FBI, and Mexican federal and state police, are carrying out parallel investigations into the incident.
Nogales Mayor Ramon Guzman Munoz told the Associated Press that Jose Antonio Elena Rodriguez was shot seven times. Various news reports by Sonora broadcasters and newspapers described anywhere from five to 14 bullet holes on the wall of the building beside which the body was found.
Elena Rodriguez's death - following more than a dozen similar incidents along the U.S.-Mexico border since 2010 - has provoked condemnation from Mexican authorities and outrage in Mexican news media, in particular over the number of times the youth allegedly was shot. Twitter messages and comments on Mexican news sites routinely condemned the shooting as an "asesinato," or murder.
This is the fifth incident in Nogales since mid-2010 in which Border Patrol officers resorted to force after youths threw rocks at them. In three of those cases, agents fired their guns, killing a 17-year-old boy in January 2011 and wounding a man in January of this year.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection spokesman Mike Friel said Saturday that the agency's "law-enforcement personnel are trained to use deadly force in circumstances that pose a threat to their lives, the lives of their fellow law-enforcement partners and innocent third parties."
Mexican officials have questioned the use of force before and filed diplomatic protests on several occasions, but Customs and Border Protection has not changed its policies on use of force in recent years, said Friel.
Sonora state police released a statement saying they found Elena Rodriguez's body, "with various gunshot wounds on different parts of the body," shortly after 11:30 p.m. Wednesday, lying next to the curb on Calle Internacional, a street that runs along the border fence. The body was found four blocks from the border crossing in downtown Nogales, at a spot where there is roughly a 10-foot vertical drop from the base of the fence to the street below.
According to the Border Patrol, several agents responded Wednesday night to reports that drug smugglers were carrying bundles into the U.S. As agents saw two men fleeing back into Mexico, people on the other side of the fence began to throw rocks at the agents. Agents ordered them to stop and when they didn't, an agent fired his weapon, hitting one of them, an agency spokesman said.
In interviews aired by several Mexican broadcasters, alleged witnesses said the youths were throwing rocks to prevent the Border Patrol from arresting the two men who were trying to climb back over the border fence after dropping bundles of drugs.
Ricardo Alday Gonzalez, a spokesman for Mexico's Embassy in Washington, D.C., said Friday that Mexican authorities will closely monitor the U.S. investigation into the incident, and cooperate with the FBI and other U.S. agencies, to "provide whatever support is necessary to ensure a transparent, exhaustive and accountable process in the United States."
He said Mexican federal and state law enforcement also "will not hesitate to request whatever assistance they require" from the FBI or other U.S. agencies.
The Border Patrol has declined to say what weapon the agent involved in Wednesday's incident fired. They also did not reply to queries about whether that agent is currently on leave.
The standard service firearm for Border Patrol agents is the .40-caliber Heckler & Koch pistol, which carries a 14-round magazine. Agents also have the option to carry an M-4 carbine identical to the one used by the U.S. Army, which has semiautomatic and automatic settings, Friel said. On the semiautomatic setting, the trigger must be pulled to fire each round; on the automatic setting, the rifle can fire multiple rounds with one pull of the trigger.
Border Patrol agents have access to non-lethal alternatives. In May of last year, for instance, a Nogales-based Border Patrol agent fired several rounds from a pepper-ball launcher at a suspected drug smuggler who was throwing rocks at him, and completed the drug seizure without injuries on either side.
http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/local/articles/2012/10/13/20121013border-agent-nogales-boy-death-shooting-questioned.html
October 13, 2012
by Bob Ortega
As more details emerge about the shooting death late Wednesday of a 16-year-old Mexican boy in Nogales, Sonora, by a Border Patrol agent, Mexican authorities increasingly are questioning whether lethal force was needed.
The FBI, and Mexican federal and state police, are carrying out parallel investigations into the incident.
Nogales Mayor Ramon Guzman Munoz told the Associated Press that Jose Antonio Elena Rodriguez was shot seven times. Various news reports by Sonora broadcasters and newspapers described anywhere from five to 14 bullet holes on the wall of the building beside which the body was found.
Elena Rodriguez's death - following more than a dozen similar incidents along the U.S.-Mexico border since 2010 - has provoked condemnation from Mexican authorities and outrage in Mexican news media, in particular over the number of times the youth allegedly was shot. Twitter messages and comments on Mexican news sites routinely condemned the shooting as an "asesinato," or murder.
This is the fifth incident in Nogales since mid-2010 in which Border Patrol officers resorted to force after youths threw rocks at them. In three of those cases, agents fired their guns, killing a 17-year-old boy in January 2011 and wounding a man in January of this year.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection spokesman Mike Friel said Saturday that the agency's "law-enforcement personnel are trained to use deadly force in circumstances that pose a threat to their lives, the lives of their fellow law-enforcement partners and innocent third parties."
Mexican officials have questioned the use of force before and filed diplomatic protests on several occasions, but Customs and Border Protection has not changed its policies on use of force in recent years, said Friel.
Sonora state police released a statement saying they found Elena Rodriguez's body, "with various gunshot wounds on different parts of the body," shortly after 11:30 p.m. Wednesday, lying next to the curb on Calle Internacional, a street that runs along the border fence. The body was found four blocks from the border crossing in downtown Nogales, at a spot where there is roughly a 10-foot vertical drop from the base of the fence to the street below.
According to the Border Patrol, several agents responded Wednesday night to reports that drug smugglers were carrying bundles into the U.S. As agents saw two men fleeing back into Mexico, people on the other side of the fence began to throw rocks at the agents. Agents ordered them to stop and when they didn't, an agent fired his weapon, hitting one of them, an agency spokesman said.
In interviews aired by several Mexican broadcasters, alleged witnesses said the youths were throwing rocks to prevent the Border Patrol from arresting the two men who were trying to climb back over the border fence after dropping bundles of drugs.
Ricardo Alday Gonzalez, a spokesman for Mexico's Embassy in Washington, D.C., said Friday that Mexican authorities will closely monitor the U.S. investigation into the incident, and cooperate with the FBI and other U.S. agencies, to "provide whatever support is necessary to ensure a transparent, exhaustive and accountable process in the United States."
He said Mexican federal and state law enforcement also "will not hesitate to request whatever assistance they require" from the FBI or other U.S. agencies.
The Border Patrol has declined to say what weapon the agent involved in Wednesday's incident fired. They also did not reply to queries about whether that agent is currently on leave.
The standard service firearm for Border Patrol agents is the .40-caliber Heckler & Koch pistol, which carries a 14-round magazine. Agents also have the option to carry an M-4 carbine identical to the one used by the U.S. Army, which has semiautomatic and automatic settings, Friel said. On the semiautomatic setting, the trigger must be pulled to fire each round; on the automatic setting, the rifle can fire multiple rounds with one pull of the trigger.
Border Patrol agents have access to non-lethal alternatives. In May of last year, for instance, a Nogales-based Border Patrol agent fired several rounds from a pepper-ball launcher at a suspected drug smuggler who was throwing rocks at him, and completed the drug seizure without injuries on either side.
http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/local/articles/2012/10/13/20121013border-agent-nogales-boy-death-shooting-questioned.html
Thursday, July 12, 2012
'Extraordinary' U.S.-Mexico drug tunnel may be Sinaloa cartel's
Los Angeles Times
July 12, 2012
by William C. Rempel
The “fully operational” tunnel is a 755-foot passageway, tall enough for a 6-foot person to walk through, that burrows under the border fence, a park and a water canal. It connects a small, nondescript warehouse on the U.S. side to an inoperative ice manufacturing plant behind a strip club in Mexico.
It is outfitted with lights, fans and a ventilation system. The vertical shafts on both sides of the border descend 57 feet, creating what officials said were significant engineering challenges.
“I would suspect that professional engineers were cooperating with the builders, if not working on site,” said Doug Coleman, special agent in charge of the DEA's Phoenix field office. He said construction might have taken at least a year and cost an estimated $1.5 million to $2 million.
Two couriers were arrested, one of them a U.S. citizen. A third person also has been arrested in a case that Coleman said was “only beginning.” Coleman declined to answer questions about the continuing investigation.
DEA investigators who searched the warehouse found tons of sandy soil stored in dozens of 55-gallon drums. The stored dirt “suggested there must be a tunnel,” Coleman said at a news conference Thursday.
Access to the tunnel was located under a 2,000-gallon water tank that could be moved only with the use of a forklift. Investigators found the vertical shaft lined with 4-by-6-inch wooden planks. The tunnel itself is lined with plywood and reinforced with the same planks. It is about 6 feet 6 high and 4 feet wide.
On the Mexico side, access was found in the ice house, where investigators also found stacks of 200-pound seed bags apparently filled with additional tons of excavated sand and dirt. Entry to the vertical shaft was underwater. Investigators had to drain a large tank to get to it.
Asked to compare the tunnel to nearly 140 others found along the Mexican border with Arizona and California in the past 10 years, Coleman said he had seen nothing like it. “It's an extraordinary piece of engineering,” he said.
The one-story warehouse, part of a strip mall only a few steps from the San Luis border crossing, had been under surveillance by DEA agents for several months as a suspected stash location. The ice house also had been a suspect site in the past, raided at various times in recent years by Mexican drug agents without anything suspicious turning up.
Coleman said that although the people behind the tunnel had yet to be identified, “it's a good guess” that it will be tied to the Sinaloa cartel and people employed by drug boss Joaquin “Chapo” Guzman.
DEA officials said estimates that the tunnel could have cost as much as $2 million were based on initial analysis of the materials used in construction. They speculated that sophisticated underground sensors and directional devices might have been used to assure that the tunnel from the Mexico side actually met the vertical shaft under the San Luis warehouse.
Also found at the warehouse were two vans formerly operated by the U.S. Postal Service, faded remnants of their identifying decals still visible. Investigators believe the cartel intended to disguise some of its drug shipments as U.S. mail.
Jay Crede of Homeland Security Investigations said the tunnel was of obvious concern to his department, but he celebrated its discovery. He called the loss of the tunnel “a blow to … traffickers.”
Another DEA veteran, Coleman aide Chris Feistl, went further. “As drug cases go, we didn't get a whole lot of dope in this seizure,” he said, “but when you think about how much cartel time and effort and money went into this tunnel — we really ruined somebody's day.”
The 39 pounds of methamphetamine has an estimated wholesale value to the cartel of nearly $700,000. Its street value is about five times higher.
http://www.latimes.com/news/nation/nationnow/la-na-nn-drug-tunnel-details-20120712,0,612829.story
July 12, 2012
by William C. Rempel
SAN LUIS, Ariz. — The powerful Sinaloa drug cartel
is believed to be behind one of the most sophisticated and well-engineered smuggling
tunnels ever found along the U.S.-Mexico border,
according to U.S. drug enforcement officials who announced the discovery
Thursday in Yuma.
The “fully operational” tunnel is a 755-foot passageway, tall enough for a 6-foot person to walk through, that burrows under the border fence, a park and a water canal. It connects a small, nondescript warehouse on the U.S. side to an inoperative ice manufacturing plant behind a strip club in Mexico.
It is outfitted with lights, fans and a ventilation system. The vertical shafts on both sides of the border descend 57 feet, creating what officials said were significant engineering challenges.
“I would suspect that professional engineers were cooperating with the builders, if not working on site,” said Doug Coleman, special agent in charge of the DEA's Phoenix field office. He said construction might have taken at least a year and cost an estimated $1.5 million to $2 million.
It was unclear how much, if any, contraband may
have been smuggled through the recently completed tunnel, but authorities said
its existence was exposed by the seizure last week of a 39-pound load of methamphetamine.
The drugs were found by state police during a traffic stop on the highway
between San Luis and Yuma and then traced back to the warehouse.
Two couriers were arrested, one of them a U.S. citizen. A third person also has been arrested in a case that Coleman said was “only beginning.” Coleman declined to answer questions about the continuing investigation.
DEA investigators who searched the warehouse found tons of sandy soil stored in dozens of 55-gallon drums. The stored dirt “suggested there must be a tunnel,” Coleman said at a news conference Thursday.
Access to the tunnel was located under a 2,000-gallon water tank that could be moved only with the use of a forklift. Investigators found the vertical shaft lined with 4-by-6-inch wooden planks. The tunnel itself is lined with plywood and reinforced with the same planks. It is about 6 feet 6 high and 4 feet wide.
On the Mexico side, access was found in the ice house, where investigators also found stacks of 200-pound seed bags apparently filled with additional tons of excavated sand and dirt. Entry to the vertical shaft was underwater. Investigators had to drain a large tank to get to it.
Asked to compare the tunnel to nearly 140 others found along the Mexican border with Arizona and California in the past 10 years, Coleman said he had seen nothing like it. “It's an extraordinary piece of engineering,” he said.
The one-story warehouse, part of a strip mall only a few steps from the San Luis border crossing, had been under surveillance by DEA agents for several months as a suspected stash location. The ice house also had been a suspect site in the past, raided at various times in recent years by Mexican drug agents without anything suspicious turning up.
Coleman said that although the people behind the tunnel had yet to be identified, “it's a good guess” that it will be tied to the Sinaloa cartel and people employed by drug boss Joaquin “Chapo” Guzman.
DEA officials said estimates that the tunnel could have cost as much as $2 million were based on initial analysis of the materials used in construction. They speculated that sophisticated underground sensors and directional devices might have been used to assure that the tunnel from the Mexico side actually met the vertical shaft under the San Luis warehouse.
Also found at the warehouse were two vans formerly operated by the U.S. Postal Service, faded remnants of their identifying decals still visible. Investigators believe the cartel intended to disguise some of its drug shipments as U.S. mail.
Jay Crede of Homeland Security Investigations said the tunnel was of obvious concern to his department, but he celebrated its discovery. He called the loss of the tunnel “a blow to … traffickers.”
Another DEA veteran, Coleman aide Chris Feistl, went further. “As drug cases go, we didn't get a whole lot of dope in this seizure,” he said, “but when you think about how much cartel time and effort and money went into this tunnel — we really ruined somebody's day.”
The 39 pounds of methamphetamine has an estimated wholesale value to the cartel of nearly $700,000. Its street value is about five times higher.
http://www.latimes.com/news/nation/nationnow/la-na-nn-drug-tunnel-details-20120712,0,612829.story
Monday, July 9, 2012
Mexico discovers drug tunnel under Arizona border
Associated Press / East Valley Tribune
July 8, 2012
MEXICO CITY (AP) — Mexico's army has uncovered a 755-foot (230-meter) tunnel running under the Sonora-Arizona border that was used to smuggle drugs into the United States.
Mexico's defense secretariat says the tunnel linked a soon-to-be-opened ice and purified water business in San Luis Rio Colorado, Sonora to a business in San Luis, Arizona.
Gen. Raul Guereca said Saturday that the tunnel was 4.25 feet (1.3 meters) high and reached a depth of almost 60 feet (18 meters) below ground. It had electricity, ventilation and small cars to transport the drugs through the tunnel.
Officials did not say which cartel they thought had built the tunnel. As U.S. authorities have tightened land crossings, tunnels have become a popular way for Mexico's cartels to smuggle drugs and people into the U.S.
http://www.eastvalleytribune.com/local/cop_shop/article_8b035a00-c942-11e1-be5c-0019bb2963f4.html
July 8, 2012
MEXICO CITY (AP) — Mexico's army has uncovered a 755-foot (230-meter) tunnel running under the Sonora-Arizona border that was used to smuggle drugs into the United States.
Mexico's defense secretariat says the tunnel linked a soon-to-be-opened ice and purified water business in San Luis Rio Colorado, Sonora to a business in San Luis, Arizona.
Gen. Raul Guereca said Saturday that the tunnel was 4.25 feet (1.3 meters) high and reached a depth of almost 60 feet (18 meters) below ground. It had electricity, ventilation and small cars to transport the drugs through the tunnel.
Officials did not say which cartel they thought had built the tunnel. As U.S. authorities have tightened land crossings, tunnels have become a popular way for Mexico's cartels to smuggle drugs and people into the U.S.
http://www.eastvalleytribune.com/local/cop_shop/article_8b035a00-c942-11e1-be5c-0019bb2963f4.html
Tuesday, May 1, 2012
Some see border security bill as threat to ecology, preservation
May 1, 2012
Houston Chronicle
by Tony Freemantle
Imagine sitting on a rock at Big Bend National Park gazing out over the Rio Grande at the Santa Elena Canyon on a clear day, Mexico so close you could reach out and touch it. Immemorial silence cloaks the soaring cliffs, broken only by the caw of a raven above and the rustle of the reeds in the river.
Then imagine the buzzy whine of a Customs and Border Protection four-wheeler patrolling the sandy banks, or the growl of a grader carving a road into the Chihuahuan Desert to a forward operating base, or a government helicopter bristling with surveillance equipment hovering overhead.
Hard to imagine?
A bill making its way through Congress would, in the interests of national security, bequeath to the Department of Homeland Security complete control of all federal lands in a coast-to-coast zone 100 miles south of the Canadian border and 100 miles north of the Mexican border from California to the Gulf of Mexico.
The bill, sponsored by U.S. Rep. Rob Bishop of Utah with strong Republican support, is being touted as a necessary step in securing the nation's borders. But it is also being roundly condemned as a thinly veiled attempt to "gut a century's worth" of environmental laws aimed at preserving public lands, historic sites and national monuments.
In essence, the National Security and Federal Lands Protection Act gives DHS, or more specifically U.S. Customs and Border Protection, authority to build fences, roads and operating bases, to use aircraft and to install surveillance equipment and sensors in some of the most pristine, environmentally sensitive lands in the nation - including Big Bend and Guadalupe national parks and Padre Island National Seashore in Texas.
And to clear the way for its stewardship of public lands, the agency would be exempt from compliance with more than 30 environmental laws - among them the National Environmental Protection Act, the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Air Act and the Safe Drinking Water Act.
The bill has cleared committees in the House and is on the calendar for a vote on the floor. There is not yet a companion bill in the Senate.
'Really unnecessary'
Bishop and the other sponsors, including Texas Rep. Lamar Smith, argue that CBP's mandate to secure the nation's borders is being "thwarted" by the need to consult with and obtain permission from federal land managers - chiefly the Department of the Interior and the Department of Agriculture - before conducting operations.
"The nonpartisan Government Accountability Office has found that less than half of the U.S.-Mexico border is under the operational control of the Border Patrol," Smith said in a statement. "At the same time, the Obama Administration prevents the Border Patrol from accessing federal lands in the name of environmental preservation. Because the Border Patrol is prohibited from securing federal lands, drug smugglers and human traffickers trample the earth and terrorize communities."
Opponents, including the Department of the Interior, CBP and national environmental organizations, charge that the proposed legislation is an "overreach," since a 2006 memorandum of understanding between border security agencies and federal land mangers already establishes the framework for cooperation between them.
"This is a solution looking for a problem," said Dan Millis, borderlands program coordinator for the Sierra Club. "There is already a framework in place for Border Patrol to work with public land management. If Border Patrol doesn't even have to try to work with managers, we will see a huge proliferation of roads, forward operating bases and fences on public lands."
The Coalition of National Parks Retirees is more blunt. The legislation would "gut a century's worth of land protection" laws and open up "millions of pristine acres of national parks" to unregulated intrusion.
"It's a really, really unnecessary bill," said Joan Anzelmo, a former superintendent of the Colorado National Monuments and board member of the organization. "It's an incredible assault on our national parks."
Other parks
In addition to Big Bend and Guadalupe parks in Texas, some of the other federal lands that fall within the 100-mile security zone, and hence under control of DHS, include Saguaro National Park in Arizona, Joshua Tree National Park in California, Olympic National Park in Washington, Glacier National Park in Montana, Boundary Waters Wilderness in Minnesota and Acadia National Park in Maine.
Bishop believes his bill will end a "turf war" between Border Patrol and federal land mangers who use environmental laws to block efforts to secure the nation's borders.
"What I want to do is get the Border Patrol what they need to secure the border," Bishop said, "and they tell me that what they need more than money and people is access. There are enormous swaths of public land that have effectively been ceded over to the drug cartels."
The DHS already has been granted waivers from a slew of environmental laws in order to build the controversial "fence" along certain sections of the U.S.-Mexico border, which environmentalists charge has already cause significant damage to Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument in Arizona and to the Lower Rio Grande Valley National Wildlife Refuge in South Texas.
Giving control of all lands within 100 miles of the borders to a single agency is unnecessary, they argue, and poses a significant danger.
"This is worse than misguided policy, although it is certainly misguided," said Kevin Dahl, the Arizona project manager for the National Parks Conservation Association. "It's a real danger to the parks because it means that the people who have made a career of public land management are not in control."
http://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/article/Some-see-border-security-bill-as-threat-to-3519901.php#page-1
Houston Chronicle
by Tony Freemantle
Imagine sitting on a rock at Big Bend National Park gazing out over the Rio Grande at the Santa Elena Canyon on a clear day, Mexico so close you could reach out and touch it. Immemorial silence cloaks the soaring cliffs, broken only by the caw of a raven above and the rustle of the reeds in the river.
Then imagine the buzzy whine of a Customs and Border Protection four-wheeler patrolling the sandy banks, or the growl of a grader carving a road into the Chihuahuan Desert to a forward operating base, or a government helicopter bristling with surveillance equipment hovering overhead.
Hard to imagine?
A bill making its way through Congress would, in the interests of national security, bequeath to the Department of Homeland Security complete control of all federal lands in a coast-to-coast zone 100 miles south of the Canadian border and 100 miles north of the Mexican border from California to the Gulf of Mexico.
The bill, sponsored by U.S. Rep. Rob Bishop of Utah with strong Republican support, is being touted as a necessary step in securing the nation's borders. But it is also being roundly condemned as a thinly veiled attempt to "gut a century's worth" of environmental laws aimed at preserving public lands, historic sites and national monuments.
In essence, the National Security and Federal Lands Protection Act gives DHS, or more specifically U.S. Customs and Border Protection, authority to build fences, roads and operating bases, to use aircraft and to install surveillance equipment and sensors in some of the most pristine, environmentally sensitive lands in the nation - including Big Bend and Guadalupe national parks and Padre Island National Seashore in Texas.
And to clear the way for its stewardship of public lands, the agency would be exempt from compliance with more than 30 environmental laws - among them the National Environmental Protection Act, the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Air Act and the Safe Drinking Water Act.
The bill has cleared committees in the House and is on the calendar for a vote on the floor. There is not yet a companion bill in the Senate.
'Really unnecessary'
Bishop and the other sponsors, including Texas Rep. Lamar Smith, argue that CBP's mandate to secure the nation's borders is being "thwarted" by the need to consult with and obtain permission from federal land managers - chiefly the Department of the Interior and the Department of Agriculture - before conducting operations.
"The nonpartisan Government Accountability Office has found that less than half of the U.S.-Mexico border is under the operational control of the Border Patrol," Smith said in a statement. "At the same time, the Obama Administration prevents the Border Patrol from accessing federal lands in the name of environmental preservation. Because the Border Patrol is prohibited from securing federal lands, drug smugglers and human traffickers trample the earth and terrorize communities."
Opponents, including the Department of the Interior, CBP and national environmental organizations, charge that the proposed legislation is an "overreach," since a 2006 memorandum of understanding between border security agencies and federal land mangers already establishes the framework for cooperation between them.
"This is a solution looking for a problem," said Dan Millis, borderlands program coordinator for the Sierra Club. "There is already a framework in place for Border Patrol to work with public land management. If Border Patrol doesn't even have to try to work with managers, we will see a huge proliferation of roads, forward operating bases and fences on public lands."
The Coalition of National Parks Retirees is more blunt. The legislation would "gut a century's worth of land protection" laws and open up "millions of pristine acres of national parks" to unregulated intrusion.
"It's a really, really unnecessary bill," said Joan Anzelmo, a former superintendent of the Colorado National Monuments and board member of the organization. "It's an incredible assault on our national parks."
Other parks
In addition to Big Bend and Guadalupe parks in Texas, some of the other federal lands that fall within the 100-mile security zone, and hence under control of DHS, include Saguaro National Park in Arizona, Joshua Tree National Park in California, Olympic National Park in Washington, Glacier National Park in Montana, Boundary Waters Wilderness in Minnesota and Acadia National Park in Maine.
Bishop believes his bill will end a "turf war" between Border Patrol and federal land mangers who use environmental laws to block efforts to secure the nation's borders.
"What I want to do is get the Border Patrol what they need to secure the border," Bishop said, "and they tell me that what they need more than money and people is access. There are enormous swaths of public land that have effectively been ceded over to the drug cartels."
The DHS already has been granted waivers from a slew of environmental laws in order to build the controversial "fence" along certain sections of the U.S.-Mexico border, which environmentalists charge has already cause significant damage to Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument in Arizona and to the Lower Rio Grande Valley National Wildlife Refuge in South Texas.
Giving control of all lands within 100 miles of the borders to a single agency is unnecessary, they argue, and poses a significant danger.
"This is worse than misguided policy, although it is certainly misguided," said Kevin Dahl, the Arizona project manager for the National Parks Conservation Association. "It's a real danger to the parks because it means that the people who have made a career of public land management are not in control."
http://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/article/Some-see-border-security-bill-as-threat-to-3519901.php#page-1
Monday, February 20, 2012
Pot-smuggling tunnels in Tijuana grow more elaborate
McClatchy / Boston Herald
February 20, 2012
by Tim Johnson
TIJUANA, Mexico _ When smuggling goes smoothly for the marijuana division of the huge Sinaloa Cartel, cross-border deliveries unfold with clockwork precision.
Harvested marijuana arrives in plastic-wrapped bales to a depot hidden among the rundown warehouses on the Mexican side of the concrete U.S. border fence.
Once enough marijuana is collected, workers drop the vacuum-packed bales through shafts leading to the ever-more-elaborate tunnels that cross underneath the border through the clay-laden soil.
U.S. agents have been waging war against the tunnels for years, using a range of high-tech devices from ground-penetrating radar to seismic sensors to find and destroy them. But despite the efforts, drug smugglers continue to build the tunnels, often spending $1 million to dig a single pathway equipped with lighting, forced-air ventilation, water pumps, shoring on walls and hydraulic elevators.
Lately, new tunnels have included railways. The bales move on electric mining carts with hand throttles that roll at up to 15 mph.
"A tunnel represents an incursion into the U.S., and it’s a national security event," said Jose M. Garcia, who oversees the federal multi-agency San Diego Tunnel Task Force.
The location of the tunnels helps explain why agents have such difficulty finding them. The area where the most advanced tunnels have been found is adjacent to the Tijuana international airport, where scores of planes take off and land daily. Nearby warehouses buzz with legitimate activity.
"All that noise from the airport is a great advantage to them," said Victor Clark Alfaro, an anthropologist and human rights activist in Tijuana who also lectures at San Diego State University. "This border is perforated like an anthill."
U.S. officials say they have found more than 160 tunnels since 1990 along the 1,954-mile border, mostly in the stretch of Mexico that borders Arizona and California. In the past 15 months, U.S. agents have busted increasingly sophisticated tunnels.
Geography and geology make the intensely urban Tijuana-San Diego corridor ideal for the tunnels. Tijuana is Mexico’s sixth largest city, with 1.3 million people, while San Diego is the eighth largest U.S. city, with several interstate highways. Moreover, soil here has a composition that’s easy to dig.
In a two-week span last November, U.S. agents shut down two sophisticated tunnels that led from an area near Tijuana’s airport to the Otay Mesa industrial park on the U.S. side. Some 49 tons of marijuana were seized. The discoveries marked the second year in a row in which elaborate tunnels were found within a mile of the busy Otay Mesa border crossing.
U.S. officials are sensitive about a public view that they aren’t finding the tunnels.
"Understandably, American citizens react to news stories about the discovery of a large tunnel, complete with plumbing, lights, ventilation and a rudimentary railway system, with a mixture of surprise, indignation, alarm and dismay," Laura E. Duffy, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of California, told the Senate drug caucus last June.
"How, they ask, can such a sophisticated illegal structure be constructed right under our noses?"
Part of the difficulty, she said, is that drug traffickers use horizontal drills that cost up to $75,000 and can cut without disturbing topsoil. The tunnels run anywhere from 30 to 90 feet deep, avoiding greater depths, which would hit underground water tables.
Drug traffickers also have been adept at setting up bogus U.S. companies to rent space in bustling Otay Mesa and its 600 warehouses and 12,000 businesses. Many firms are unaware of activities by their neighbors, perhaps noticing only if there’s truck traffic at unusual hours.
Garcia said that even with devices such as seismic sensors, a majority of tunnel busts came from tip-offs by informants or suspicious warehouse operators.
Big tunnels are thought to be the work of the Sinaloa Cartel, which has seized control of Tijuana from the local Arellano-Felix cartel after years of bloody conflict and now is operating in tandem with remnants of the group.
Sinaloa operatives employ mining engineers and architects to help construct their tunnels, while keeping knowledge of locations to as few people as possible.
Experts on the San Diego Tunnel Task Force say "some tunnel excavators in Mexico are killed when the job is done to prevent them from spreading the word on the location," Duffy told senators.
Marijuana growers are turning to ever-larger plantations to meet the capacity of bigger tunnels. Last July, soldiers found a 300-acre screened and irrigated marijuana plantation near San Quintin, 150 miles south of Tijuana, which was four times larger than any such site that had been seized before. Eight months earlier, soldiers seized 148 tons _ 134 metric tons _ of pot in Tijuana, a record.
U.S. and Mexican agents say that tunnel digging, using pneumatic spades, generally is limited to teams of six or seven men. They live at the Tijuana site where the tunnel begins, and excavation is timed to conclude with the harvesting of marijuana crops in late summer and early autumn, so there’s little time for the tunnel to sit idle and be detected.
"The process is tedious," Garcia said, involving working day and night and lugging bags of dirt along the shaft for removal.
But even with million-dollar investments, Garcia said, the tunnel builders "recoup that by making just one trip, given the value of the narcotics we’ve seized."
Most bales of marijuana carry stickers, often fanciful images such as Donald Duck, Captain America, Budweiser or Homer Simpson. The stickers indicate ownership and destination, U.S. agents said.
Tunnel operatives make sure to recoup their investments first.
"The way it works is the tunnel guys build it, so their stuff gets through first. Once it gets through, they start hiring out" to other drug organizations, said Louis Gomez, the supervisor of the San Diego Tunnel Task Force, which includes agents of Customs and Border Protection, the Drug Enforcement Administration, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the California Bureau of Narcotic Enforcement.
Tunnel shafts on the Tijuana side that a McClatchy Newspapers journalist visited included one hidden in the floor of a walk-in freezer in a warehouse that’s only two football fields away from warehouses on the U.S. side of the border.
Another shaft was hidden in a unique fashion: "It was the entire floor of a bathroom that went up and down, and they used a hydraulic lift like you’d see in a service station," Garcia said.
Tijuana Police Chief Alberto Capella Ibarra said the tunnels kept growing in sophistication.
"It speaks of the strength and economic power of the cartels, because these tunnels are a huge investment for them," Capella said.
http://news.bostonherald.com/news/international/americas/view.bg?&articleid=1405102&format=&page=1&listingType=intamer#articleFull
February 20, 2012
by Tim Johnson
TIJUANA, Mexico _ When smuggling goes smoothly for the marijuana division of the huge Sinaloa Cartel, cross-border deliveries unfold with clockwork precision.
Harvested marijuana arrives in plastic-wrapped bales to a depot hidden among the rundown warehouses on the Mexican side of the concrete U.S. border fence.
Once enough marijuana is collected, workers drop the vacuum-packed bales through shafts leading to the ever-more-elaborate tunnels that cross underneath the border through the clay-laden soil.
U.S. agents have been waging war against the tunnels for years, using a range of high-tech devices from ground-penetrating radar to seismic sensors to find and destroy them. But despite the efforts, drug smugglers continue to build the tunnels, often spending $1 million to dig a single pathway equipped with lighting, forced-air ventilation, water pumps, shoring on walls and hydraulic elevators.
Lately, new tunnels have included railways. The bales move on electric mining carts with hand throttles that roll at up to 15 mph.
"A tunnel represents an incursion into the U.S., and it’s a national security event," said Jose M. Garcia, who oversees the federal multi-agency San Diego Tunnel Task Force.
The location of the tunnels helps explain why agents have such difficulty finding them. The area where the most advanced tunnels have been found is adjacent to the Tijuana international airport, where scores of planes take off and land daily. Nearby warehouses buzz with legitimate activity.
"All that noise from the airport is a great advantage to them," said Victor Clark Alfaro, an anthropologist and human rights activist in Tijuana who also lectures at San Diego State University. "This border is perforated like an anthill."
U.S. officials say they have found more than 160 tunnels since 1990 along the 1,954-mile border, mostly in the stretch of Mexico that borders Arizona and California. In the past 15 months, U.S. agents have busted increasingly sophisticated tunnels.
Geography and geology make the intensely urban Tijuana-San Diego corridor ideal for the tunnels. Tijuana is Mexico’s sixth largest city, with 1.3 million people, while San Diego is the eighth largest U.S. city, with several interstate highways. Moreover, soil here has a composition that’s easy to dig.
In a two-week span last November, U.S. agents shut down two sophisticated tunnels that led from an area near Tijuana’s airport to the Otay Mesa industrial park on the U.S. side. Some 49 tons of marijuana were seized. The discoveries marked the second year in a row in which elaborate tunnels were found within a mile of the busy Otay Mesa border crossing.
U.S. officials are sensitive about a public view that they aren’t finding the tunnels.
"Understandably, American citizens react to news stories about the discovery of a large tunnel, complete with plumbing, lights, ventilation and a rudimentary railway system, with a mixture of surprise, indignation, alarm and dismay," Laura E. Duffy, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of California, told the Senate drug caucus last June.
"How, they ask, can such a sophisticated illegal structure be constructed right under our noses?"
Part of the difficulty, she said, is that drug traffickers use horizontal drills that cost up to $75,000 and can cut without disturbing topsoil. The tunnels run anywhere from 30 to 90 feet deep, avoiding greater depths, which would hit underground water tables.
Drug traffickers also have been adept at setting up bogus U.S. companies to rent space in bustling Otay Mesa and its 600 warehouses and 12,000 businesses. Many firms are unaware of activities by their neighbors, perhaps noticing only if there’s truck traffic at unusual hours.
Garcia said that even with devices such as seismic sensors, a majority of tunnel busts came from tip-offs by informants or suspicious warehouse operators.
Big tunnels are thought to be the work of the Sinaloa Cartel, which has seized control of Tijuana from the local Arellano-Felix cartel after years of bloody conflict and now is operating in tandem with remnants of the group.
Sinaloa operatives employ mining engineers and architects to help construct their tunnels, while keeping knowledge of locations to as few people as possible.
Experts on the San Diego Tunnel Task Force say "some tunnel excavators in Mexico are killed when the job is done to prevent them from spreading the word on the location," Duffy told senators.
Marijuana growers are turning to ever-larger plantations to meet the capacity of bigger tunnels. Last July, soldiers found a 300-acre screened and irrigated marijuana plantation near San Quintin, 150 miles south of Tijuana, which was four times larger than any such site that had been seized before. Eight months earlier, soldiers seized 148 tons _ 134 metric tons _ of pot in Tijuana, a record.
U.S. and Mexican agents say that tunnel digging, using pneumatic spades, generally is limited to teams of six or seven men. They live at the Tijuana site where the tunnel begins, and excavation is timed to conclude with the harvesting of marijuana crops in late summer and early autumn, so there’s little time for the tunnel to sit idle and be detected.
"The process is tedious," Garcia said, involving working day and night and lugging bags of dirt along the shaft for removal.
But even with million-dollar investments, Garcia said, the tunnel builders "recoup that by making just one trip, given the value of the narcotics we’ve seized."
Most bales of marijuana carry stickers, often fanciful images such as Donald Duck, Captain America, Budweiser or Homer Simpson. The stickers indicate ownership and destination, U.S. agents said.
Tunnel operatives make sure to recoup their investments first.
"The way it works is the tunnel guys build it, so their stuff gets through first. Once it gets through, they start hiring out" to other drug organizations, said Louis Gomez, the supervisor of the San Diego Tunnel Task Force, which includes agents of Customs and Border Protection, the Drug Enforcement Administration, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the California Bureau of Narcotic Enforcement.
Tunnel shafts on the Tijuana side that a McClatchy Newspapers journalist visited included one hidden in the floor of a walk-in freezer in a warehouse that’s only two football fields away from warehouses on the U.S. side of the border.
Another shaft was hidden in a unique fashion: "It was the entire floor of a bathroom that went up and down, and they used a hydraulic lift like you’d see in a service station," Garcia said.
Tijuana Police Chief Alberto Capella Ibarra said the tunnels kept growing in sophistication.
"It speaks of the strength and economic power of the cartels, because these tunnels are a huge investment for them," Capella said.
http://news.bostonherald.com/news/international/americas/view.bg?&articleid=1405102&format=&page=1&listingType=intamer#articleFull
Wednesday, November 30, 2011
Feds find 32 tons of pot in Calif. border tunnel
Associated Press / MSNBC
November 30, 2011
by Elliot Spagat
The discovery of a cross-border tunnel equipped with electric rail cars, a hydraulic lift and end-to-end wood floors has ended in seizures of more than 32 tons of marijuana, one of the largest pot busts in U.S. history, authorities said Wednesday.
The 600-yard passage linking warehouses in San Diego and Tijuana included a wooden staircase, lighting and ventilation, said Derek Benner, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement's special agent in charge of investigations in San Diego. It was tall and wide enough to move comfortably inside.
"This is an incredibly efficient tunnel designed to move a lot of narcotics," Benner told The Associated Press.
Authorities recovered nearly 17 tons of marijuana at the warehouse in San Diego's Otay Mesa area, nearly 12 tons inside a truck in Los Angeles and about 4 tons in Mexico, Benner said. Several arrests were made.
Tuesday's find was the latest in a spate of secret passages found to smuggle drugs underground from Mexico, a response to heightened enforcement on land. In an emerging seasonal trend, many are turning up shortly before the winter holidays in what authorities believe is an effort to take advantage of the Mexican harvest season.
Two weeks ago, authorities seized 17 tons of marijuana in connection with a tunnel linking warehouses in San Diego and Tijuana.
Raids last November on two tunnels linking warehouses in San Diego and Tijuana netted a combined 52 of marijuana on both sides of the border. Those secret passages were lined with rail tracks, and had lighting and ventilation.
Authorities believe the latest tunnel began operating recently but declined to provide details.
"I would say it's probably as sophisticated as any we've ever seen," William Sherman, acting special agent in charge of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration in San Diego told the AP.
More than 70 tunnels have been found on the border since October 2008, surpassing the number of discoveries in the previous six years. Many are clustered around San Diego, California's Imperial Valley and Nogales, Ariz.
California is popular because its clay-like soil is easy to dig with shovels. In Nogales, smugglers tap into vast underground drainage canals.
San Diego's Otay Mesa area has the added draw of plenty of warehouses on both sides of the border to conceal trucks getting loaded with drugs. Its streets hum with semitrailers by day and fall silent on nights and weekends.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/45496653/ns/us_news-crime_and_courts/
November 30, 2011
by Elliot Spagat
The discovery of a cross-border tunnel equipped with electric rail cars, a hydraulic lift and end-to-end wood floors has ended in seizures of more than 32 tons of marijuana, one of the largest pot busts in U.S. history, authorities said Wednesday.
The 600-yard passage linking warehouses in San Diego and Tijuana included a wooden staircase, lighting and ventilation, said Derek Benner, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement's special agent in charge of investigations in San Diego. It was tall and wide enough to move comfortably inside.
"This is an incredibly efficient tunnel designed to move a lot of narcotics," Benner told The Associated Press.
Authorities recovered nearly 17 tons of marijuana at the warehouse in San Diego's Otay Mesa area, nearly 12 tons inside a truck in Los Angeles and about 4 tons in Mexico, Benner said. Several arrests were made.
Tuesday's find was the latest in a spate of secret passages found to smuggle drugs underground from Mexico, a response to heightened enforcement on land. In an emerging seasonal trend, many are turning up shortly before the winter holidays in what authorities believe is an effort to take advantage of the Mexican harvest season.
Two weeks ago, authorities seized 17 tons of marijuana in connection with a tunnel linking warehouses in San Diego and Tijuana.
Raids last November on two tunnels linking warehouses in San Diego and Tijuana netted a combined 52 of marijuana on both sides of the border. Those secret passages were lined with rail tracks, and had lighting and ventilation.
Authorities believe the latest tunnel began operating recently but declined to provide details.
"I would say it's probably as sophisticated as any we've ever seen," William Sherman, acting special agent in charge of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration in San Diego told the AP.
More than 70 tunnels have been found on the border since October 2008, surpassing the number of discoveries in the previous six years. Many are clustered around San Diego, California's Imperial Valley and Nogales, Ariz.
California is popular because its clay-like soil is easy to dig with shovels. In Nogales, smugglers tap into vast underground drainage canals.
San Diego's Otay Mesa area has the added draw of plenty of warehouses on both sides of the border to conceal trucks getting loaded with drugs. Its streets hum with semitrailers by day and fall silent on nights and weekends.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/45496653/ns/us_news-crime_and_courts/
Thursday, November 17, 2011
14 Tons of Marijuana Seized After Border Tunnel Is Found
Associated Press / New York Times
November 17, 2011
SAN DIEGO (AP) — An estimated 14 tons of marijuana was seized after the discovery of a tunnel that the authorities said on Wednesday was one of the most significant drug smuggling passages ever found on the United States-Mexico border.
The tunnel stretched about 400 yards and linked warehouses in San Diego and Tijuana, Mexico, the authorities said.
The authorities in the United States seized 9 to 10 tons of marijuana on Tuesday inside a truck and at the warehouse in San Diego’s Otay Mesa area, said Derek Benner, Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s special agent in charge of investigations in San Diego. Mexican authorities recovered about five tons.
Photos taken by the Mexican authorities show an entry blocked by bundles that were most likely stuffed with marijuana, said Paul Beeson, chief of the Border Patrol’s San Diego sector. Wooden supports lined the walls, and power cords led to the Mexican entrance, suggesting lighting and ventilation systems.
The depth and the width of the tunnel were unknown. Several arrests were made. Mr. Benner declined to give details.
As the United States intensifies enforcement on land, more than 70 tunnels have been found on the border since October 2008, surpassing the number of discoveries in the previous six years.
Many are clustered in San Diego, California’s Imperial Valley and Nogales, Ariz. California is popular because its claylike soil is easy to dig. In Nogales, smugglers tap into vast underground drainage canals.
Raids last November on two tunnels linking San Diego and Tijuana netted a combined 50 tons of marijuana on both sides of the border, two of the largest such seizures in United States history. Those secret passages were lined with rail tracks, lighting and ventilation.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/17/us/us-mexico-tunnel-leads-to-tons-of-marijuana.html
November 17, 2011
SAN DIEGO (AP) — An estimated 14 tons of marijuana was seized after the discovery of a tunnel that the authorities said on Wednesday was one of the most significant drug smuggling passages ever found on the United States-Mexico border.
The tunnel stretched about 400 yards and linked warehouses in San Diego and Tijuana, Mexico, the authorities said.
The authorities in the United States seized 9 to 10 tons of marijuana on Tuesday inside a truck and at the warehouse in San Diego’s Otay Mesa area, said Derek Benner, Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s special agent in charge of investigations in San Diego. Mexican authorities recovered about five tons.
Photos taken by the Mexican authorities show an entry blocked by bundles that were most likely stuffed with marijuana, said Paul Beeson, chief of the Border Patrol’s San Diego sector. Wooden supports lined the walls, and power cords led to the Mexican entrance, suggesting lighting and ventilation systems.
The depth and the width of the tunnel were unknown. Several arrests were made. Mr. Benner declined to give details.
As the United States intensifies enforcement on land, more than 70 tunnels have been found on the border since October 2008, surpassing the number of discoveries in the previous six years.
Many are clustered in San Diego, California’s Imperial Valley and Nogales, Ariz. California is popular because its claylike soil is easy to dig. In Nogales, smugglers tap into vast underground drainage canals.
Raids last November on two tunnels linking San Diego and Tijuana netted a combined 50 tons of marijuana on both sides of the border, two of the largest such seizures in United States history. Those secret passages were lined with rail tracks, lighting and ventilation.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/17/us/us-mexico-tunnel-leads-to-tons-of-marijuana.html
Monday, November 14, 2011
If you build it, they'll still come: Border fence can't stem tide .
KENS Channel 5 San Antonio
November 13, 2011
by Angela Kocherga
The border fence is a hot topic on the Republican presidential campaign trail.
Herman Cain wants to electrify the fence.
Michelle Bachmann wants a double fence and Mitt Romney wants to extend the fence along the entire southwest border.
There are 649 miles of fence along the U.S./Mexico border. The tallest point is 30 feet high, and the longest stretch 300 miles in Douglas, Arizona.
The fence is a patchwork of materials that serves as a timeline showing the evolution of the barrier.
"Every time we implement any new type of fencing we learn from the limitations of the last fencing that we had in place," says U.S. Border Patrol agent Colleen Agle.
In Douglas construction crews are replacing the oldest fencing.
"The first generation was a lot shorter so people did have a lot easier time climbing over it, and it was also just sheet metal so it was very thin," Agle explains.
Over time smuggling organizations have figured out ways to go over, under and even through the fence.
"These bollards that were cut last night, they attempted to bring a vehicle north," says Agle.
That vehicle filled with drugs ended up turning back when border patrol agents arrived at the fence after spotting the smugglers.
"This high ground here will give me the advantage and get other agents to get on the traffic as they come north" says Border Patrol agent Jaime Leos.
The oldest barrier along a particular stretch of border is known as a "picket fence" because of the white bars. Mesh was added later because people used to stick their hands through the bars, using them to climb over the fence, and then it would take just a few minutes to make it into town.
"We know that over time they’re going to defeat this fencing, this brand new fencing as well. But as of right now this is the best stuff we’ve got and it’s doing a much better job for us," says Agle.
It's doing a better job of slowing down illegal border crossers, giving agents more time to catch those who are not deterred by the fence.
http://www.kens5.com/news/Border-fence-evolves-but-how-long-before--133781888.html
November 13, 2011
by Angela Kocherga
The border fence is a hot topic on the Republican presidential campaign trail.
Herman Cain wants to electrify the fence.
Michelle Bachmann wants a double fence and Mitt Romney wants to extend the fence along the entire southwest border.
There are 649 miles of fence along the U.S./Mexico border. The tallest point is 30 feet high, and the longest stretch 300 miles in Douglas, Arizona.
The fence is a patchwork of materials that serves as a timeline showing the evolution of the barrier.
"Every time we implement any new type of fencing we learn from the limitations of the last fencing that we had in place," says U.S. Border Patrol agent Colleen Agle.
In Douglas construction crews are replacing the oldest fencing.
"The first generation was a lot shorter so people did have a lot easier time climbing over it, and it was also just sheet metal so it was very thin," Agle explains.
Over time smuggling organizations have figured out ways to go over, under and even through the fence.
"These bollards that were cut last night, they attempted to bring a vehicle north," says Agle.
That vehicle filled with drugs ended up turning back when border patrol agents arrived at the fence after spotting the smugglers.
"This high ground here will give me the advantage and get other agents to get on the traffic as they come north" says Border Patrol agent Jaime Leos.
The oldest barrier along a particular stretch of border is known as a "picket fence" because of the white bars. Mesh was added later because people used to stick their hands through the bars, using them to climb over the fence, and then it would take just a few minutes to make it into town.
"We know that over time they’re going to defeat this fencing, this brand new fencing as well. But as of right now this is the best stuff we’ve got and it’s doing a much better job for us," says Agle.
It's doing a better job of slowing down illegal border crossers, giving agents more time to catch those who are not deterred by the fence.
http://www.kens5.com/news/Border-fence-evolves-but-how-long-before--133781888.html
Wednesday, October 5, 2011
Crossing Over, and Over
New York Times
October 2, 2011
by Damien Cave
AGUA PRIETA, Mexico — "My wife, my son — I have to get back to them," Daniel kept telling himself, from the moment he was arrested in Seattle for driving with an expired license, all the way through the deportation proceeding that delivered him to Mexico in June.
Nothing would deter him from crossing the border again. He had left his hometown at 24, he said. Twelve years later, he spoke nearly fluent English and had an American son, a wife and three brothers in the United States. "I’ll keep trying," he said, "until I’ll get there."
This is increasingly the profile of illegal immigration today. Migrant shelters along the Mexican border are filled not with newcomers looking for a better life, but with seasoned crossers: older men and women, often deportees, braving ever-greater risks to get back to their families in the United States — the country they consider home.
They present an enormous challenge to American policy makers, because they continue to head north despite obstacles more severe than at any time in recent history. It is not just that the American economy has little to offer; the border itself is far more threatening. On one side, fences have grown and American agents have multiplied; on the other, criminals haunt the journey at every turn.
And yet, while these factors — and better opportunities at home — have cut illegal immigration from Mexico to its lowest level in decades, they are not enough to scare off a sizable, determined cadre.
"We have it boiled down to the hardest lot," said Christopher Sabatini, senior director for policy at the Council of the Americas.
Indeed, 56 percent of apprehensions at the Mexican border in 2010 involved people who had been caught previously, up from 44 percent in 2005. A growing percentage of deportees in recent years have also been deported before, according to Department of Homeland Security figures.
For the Obama administration, these repeat offenders have become a high priority. Prosecutions for illegal re-entry have jumped by more than two-thirds since 2008. Officials say it is now the most prosecuted federal felony.
President Obama has already deported around 1.1 million immigrants — more than any president since Dwight D. Eisenhower — and officials say the numbers will not decline. But at a time when the dynamics of immigration are changing, experts and advocates on all sides are increasingly asking if the approach, which has defined immigration policy since 9/11, still makes sense.
Deportation is expensive, costing the government at least $12,500 per person, and it often does not work: between October 2008 and July 22 of this year, Immigration and Customs Enforcement spent $2.25 billion sending back 180,229 people who had been deported before and come back anyway. Many more have returned and stayed hidden.
Some groups favoring reduced immigration say that making life harder for illegal immigrants in this country would be far more efficient. They argue that along with eliminating work opportunities by requiring employers to verify the reported immigration status of new hires, Congress should also prohibit illegal immigrants from opening bank accounts, or even obtaining library cards.
"You’d reduce the number of people who keep coming back again and again," said Bob Dane, a spokesman for the Federation for American Immigration Reform. The alternative, says Doris Meissner, the country’s top immigration official in the mid-1990s, is to accept that illegal immigrants like Daniel "are people with fundamental ties to the United States, not where they came from."
"Our societies are so deeply connected," Ms. Meissner said, referring primarily to the United States and Mexico, the main source of illegal immigrants. "And that is not reflected at all in policy."
The administration acknowledges that immigrants like Daniel are rooted in the United States and typically have otherwise clean criminal records. But under its new plan introduced in August — suspending deportations for pending low-priority cases, including immigrants brought to the United States as children — repeat crossers are singled out for removal alongside "serious felons," "known gang members" and "individuals who pose a clear risk to national security."
Administration officials say they are trying to break the "yo-yo effect" of people bouncing back, as mandated by congress when it toughened laws related to illegal re-entry in the 1990s.
But some experts argue that this commingling actually undermines security. After a decade of record deportations, critics argue, it has become even harder to separate the two groups that now define the border: professional criminals and experienced migrants motivated by family ties in the United States.
"If you think drug dealers and terrorists are much more dangerous than maids and gardeners, then we should get as many visas as possible to those people, so we can focus on the real threat," said David Shirk, director of the Transborder Institute at the University of San Diego. "Widening the gates would strengthen the walls."
Crime and the Border
The border crossers pouring into Arizona a decade or two ago were more numerous, but less likely to be threatening. David Jimarez, a Border Patrol agent with years of experience south of Tucson, recalled that even when migrants outnumbered American authorities by 25 to 1, they did not resist. "They would just sit down and wait for us," he said.
Over the past few years, the mix has changed, with more drug smugglers and other criminals among the dwindling, but still substantial, ranks of migrants.
The impacts are far-reaching. In northern Mexico, less immigration means less business. Border towns like Agua Prieta, long known as a departure point, have gone from bustling to windblown. Taxis that ferried migrants to the mountains now gather dust. Restaurants and hotels, like the sunflower-themed Girasol downtown, are practically empty. On one recent afternoon, only 3 of the 50 rooms were occupied.
"In 2000, we were full every day," said Alejandro Rocha, the hotel’s manager.
New research from the University of California, San Diego, shows that crime is now the top concern for Mexicans thinking of heading north. As fear keeps many migrants home, many experienced border guides, or coyotes, have given up illegal migration for other jobs.
In Tijuana, across the border from San Diego, one well-known coyote is now selling tires. In Nogales, the largest Mexican city bordering Arizona, power has shifted to tattooed young men with expensive binoculars along the border fence, while here in Agua Prieta — where Mexican officials say traffic is one-thirthieth of what it once was — the only way to get across is to deal with gangs that sometimes push migrants to carry drugs.
It is even worse in Matamoros, across from Brownsville, Tex. Just standing at the border fence brings out drug cartel enforcers demanding $300 for the right to pass. Migrants and the organizations that assist them say cartel lieutenants roam the shelters, looking for deportees willing to work as lookouts, earning $400 a week until they have enough to pay for passage north.
"I was thinking about doing it, too," said Daniel, looking down. "But then I thought about my family."
American law enforcement officials say the matrix of drugs, migration and violence has become more visible at the border and along the trails and roads heading north, where more of the immigrants being caught carry drugs or guns — making them more likely to flee, resist arrest or commit other crimes.
"There’s less traffic, but traffic that’s there is more threatening," Mr. Jimarez, the border agent, said.
Larry Dever, the sheriff of Cochise County, Ariz., which sits north of Agua Prieta, agreed: "The guys smuggling people and narcotics now are more sinister."
His county, 6,169 square miles of scrub brush, ranches and tiny towns in the state’s southeast corner, has been an established crossing corridor since the mid-1990s. Since 2008, the police there have tracked every crime linked to illegal immigrants, in part because state and federal officials frequently requested data, treating the county as a bellwether of border security.
Indeed, when a Cochise rancher named Robert Krentz was killed in March 2010 after radioing to his brother that he was going to help a suspected illegal immigrant, the county quickly became a flash point for a larger debate that ultimately led to SB 1070, the polarizing Arizona bill giving the police more responsibility for cracking down on illegal immigrants.
Yet, crime involving illegal immigrants is relatively rare (5 percent of all local crime, Sheriff Dever said). Mostly it consists of burglaries involving stolen food. And, public records show, in 11 of the 18 violent crimes linked to illegal immigrants over 18 months, immigrants were both the victims and attackers.
This is not the portrait given by Republican border governors, including Rick Perry of Texas, a presidential candidate who recently said that "it is not safe on that border." But while Mexican drug cartels have increased their presence from Tucson to New York — sometimes engaging in brutal violence after entering the country illegally — Americans living near the border are generally safe.
A USA Today analysis of Texas, Arizona, New Mexico and California in July found that crime within 100 miles of the border is below both the national average and the average for each of those states — and has been declining for years. Several other independent researchers have come to the same conclusion.
But the border is not safe for people crossing or patrolling it. The number of immigrants found dead in the Arizona desert, from all causes, has failed to decline as fast as illegal immigration has, while assaults on Border Patrol agents grew by 41 percent from 2006 to 2010, almost entirely because of an increase in attacks with rocks. The heightened risks have stimulated a debate: Has the more aggressive approach — bigger fences, more agents and deportations — contributed to, or diminished, the danger?
Sheriff Dever, lionized as an "illegal immigration warrior" by immigration opponents, says that increased enforcement has made Americans safer and should continue until his neighbors tell him they are no longer afraid.
But some immigration advocates contend that the government’s approach is too broad to be effective. "We have to really separate out the guy who is coming to make a living with his family from the terrorist or the drug dealer," said Peter Siavelis, an editor of "Getting Immigration Right: What Every American Needs to Know."
Home Is Where the Children Are
Deportations have muddled that delineation. In a recent line of deportees piling off a bus on the San Diego side of a metal gate leading to Tijuana, all were equal: the criminal in prison garb with the wispy goatee; the mother averting her eyes; and longtime residents like Alberto Álvarez, 36, a janitor and father of five who said he was picked up for driving without a license.
"Look, I’ve been in the U.S. 18 years," he said, slinging a backpack over his Izod shirt. "Right now, my children are alone, my wife is alone caring for the kids by herself — they’ve separated us."
During the immigration wave that peaked around a decade ago, deportations often meant something different: many deportees had not been in the United States for long; they were going home.
But now that there are fewer new arrivals, the concept of home is changing. Of the roughly 11 million unauthorized immigrants in the United States, 48 percent arrived before 2000. For the 6.5 million Mexicans in the United States illegally, that figure is even higher — 55 percent, according to the Pew Hispanic Center. There are now also 4.5 million American-born children of unauthorized immigrant parents.
Experts on both sides of the debate say this large group of rooted immigrants presents the nation with a fundamental choice: Either make life in the United States so difficult for illegal immigrants that they leave on their own, or allow immigrants who pose no threat to public safety to remain with their families legally, though not necessarily as citizens.
Steven A. Camarota, a demographer at the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington, said the government should revoke automatic citizenship for children born to illegal immigrants, and seize assets from deported illegal immigrants so they have fewer incentives to return.
President Obama, having made no progress on getting his legalization plan through Congress, has instead been trying to make enforcement more surgical. Under the new guidelines, officials will use "prosecutorial discretion" to review the current docket of 300,000 deportation cases, suspending expulsions for a range of immigrants.
Several factors prompt "particular care and consideration" for a reprieve, including whether the person has been in the United States since childhood, or is pregnant, seriously ill, a member of the military or a minor, according to a June memo that initiated the change.
The issue of "whether the person has a U.S. citizen or permanent resident spouse, child or parent" appears in the memo’s secondary list of factors to consider. But it is not clear how broadly leniency will be applied. Repeat crossers are given a special black mark, and the administration has already deported hundreds of thousands of minor offenders, despite claiming to focus on "the worst of the worst."
Several Democratic governors and law enforcement officials are particularly angry about Secure Communities, a program to run the fingerprints of anyone booked by the police to check for federal immigration violations. A large proportion of those deported through this process — 79 percent, according to a recent report by the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University — were low-level offenders, often arrested for traffic violations.
Administration officials dispute that, saying the ratio of serious criminals is increasing, and that ultimately they must enforce immigration law against all violators. They have mandated that the program be used nationwide by 2013.
Mexico’s border cities offer a portrait of what that could mean. Nearly 950,000 Mexican immigrants have been deported since the start of fiscal 2008. And in Tijuana — a former hub for migrants heading north, which now receives more deportees than anywhere else — the pool of deportees preparing to cross again just keeps growing.
Maria García, 27, arrived here after being deported for a traffic violation. She said she had spent six years living in Fresno, Calif., with her two Mexico-born sons, 11 and 7. She was one of many who said that without a doubt, they would find their way back to the United States.
"They can’t stop us," she said.
The constant flow of deportees has become a growing concern for Mexican officials, who say the new arrivals are easy recruits, and victims, for drug cartels.
One former deportee was arrested this year for playing a major role in the deaths of around 200 people found in mass graves. In Tijuana, a homeless camp at the border has swollen from a cluster to a neighborhood, as deportees flow in, many carrying stories of being robbed or kidnapped by gangs who saw their American connections as a source for ransom.
Minutes after he arrived, Mr. Álvarez, the janitor, said he was worried about surviving — "you’re playing with your life being here," he said. But his twin sons would turn 2 in a few weeks, and like many others, he said that no matter how he was treated in the United States, he would find his way back.
"I feel bad being here, I feel bad," he said. "I’ve got my kids over there, my family, my whole life. Here" — he shook his head at the end of his first day in Tijuana — "no."
A version of this article appeared in print on October 3, 2011, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Crossing Over, and Over.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/03/world/americas/mexican-immigrants-repeatedly-brave-risks-to-resume-lives-in-united-states.html?_r=2
October 2, 2011
by Damien Cave
AGUA PRIETA, Mexico — "My wife, my son — I have to get back to them," Daniel kept telling himself, from the moment he was arrested in Seattle for driving with an expired license, all the way through the deportation proceeding that delivered him to Mexico in June.
Nothing would deter him from crossing the border again. He had left his hometown at 24, he said. Twelve years later, he spoke nearly fluent English and had an American son, a wife and three brothers in the United States. "I’ll keep trying," he said, "until I’ll get there."
This is increasingly the profile of illegal immigration today. Migrant shelters along the Mexican border are filled not with newcomers looking for a better life, but with seasoned crossers: older men and women, often deportees, braving ever-greater risks to get back to their families in the United States — the country they consider home.
They present an enormous challenge to American policy makers, because they continue to head north despite obstacles more severe than at any time in recent history. It is not just that the American economy has little to offer; the border itself is far more threatening. On one side, fences have grown and American agents have multiplied; on the other, criminals haunt the journey at every turn.
And yet, while these factors — and better opportunities at home — have cut illegal immigration from Mexico to its lowest level in decades, they are not enough to scare off a sizable, determined cadre.
"We have it boiled down to the hardest lot," said Christopher Sabatini, senior director for policy at the Council of the Americas.
Indeed, 56 percent of apprehensions at the Mexican border in 2010 involved people who had been caught previously, up from 44 percent in 2005. A growing percentage of deportees in recent years have also been deported before, according to Department of Homeland Security figures.
For the Obama administration, these repeat offenders have become a high priority. Prosecutions for illegal re-entry have jumped by more than two-thirds since 2008. Officials say it is now the most prosecuted federal felony.
President Obama has already deported around 1.1 million immigrants — more than any president since Dwight D. Eisenhower — and officials say the numbers will not decline. But at a time when the dynamics of immigration are changing, experts and advocates on all sides are increasingly asking if the approach, which has defined immigration policy since 9/11, still makes sense.
Deportation is expensive, costing the government at least $12,500 per person, and it often does not work: between October 2008 and July 22 of this year, Immigration and Customs Enforcement spent $2.25 billion sending back 180,229 people who had been deported before and come back anyway. Many more have returned and stayed hidden.
Some groups favoring reduced immigration say that making life harder for illegal immigrants in this country would be far more efficient. They argue that along with eliminating work opportunities by requiring employers to verify the reported immigration status of new hires, Congress should also prohibit illegal immigrants from opening bank accounts, or even obtaining library cards.
"You’d reduce the number of people who keep coming back again and again," said Bob Dane, a spokesman for the Federation for American Immigration Reform. The alternative, says Doris Meissner, the country’s top immigration official in the mid-1990s, is to accept that illegal immigrants like Daniel "are people with fundamental ties to the United States, not where they came from."
"Our societies are so deeply connected," Ms. Meissner said, referring primarily to the United States and Mexico, the main source of illegal immigrants. "And that is not reflected at all in policy."
The administration acknowledges that immigrants like Daniel are rooted in the United States and typically have otherwise clean criminal records. But under its new plan introduced in August — suspending deportations for pending low-priority cases, including immigrants brought to the United States as children — repeat crossers are singled out for removal alongside "serious felons," "known gang members" and "individuals who pose a clear risk to national security."
Administration officials say they are trying to break the "yo-yo effect" of people bouncing back, as mandated by congress when it toughened laws related to illegal re-entry in the 1990s.
But some experts argue that this commingling actually undermines security. After a decade of record deportations, critics argue, it has become even harder to separate the two groups that now define the border: professional criminals and experienced migrants motivated by family ties in the United States.
"If you think drug dealers and terrorists are much more dangerous than maids and gardeners, then we should get as many visas as possible to those people, so we can focus on the real threat," said David Shirk, director of the Transborder Institute at the University of San Diego. "Widening the gates would strengthen the walls."
Crime and the Border
The border crossers pouring into Arizona a decade or two ago were more numerous, but less likely to be threatening. David Jimarez, a Border Patrol agent with years of experience south of Tucson, recalled that even when migrants outnumbered American authorities by 25 to 1, they did not resist. "They would just sit down and wait for us," he said.
Over the past few years, the mix has changed, with more drug smugglers and other criminals among the dwindling, but still substantial, ranks of migrants.
The impacts are far-reaching. In northern Mexico, less immigration means less business. Border towns like Agua Prieta, long known as a departure point, have gone from bustling to windblown. Taxis that ferried migrants to the mountains now gather dust. Restaurants and hotels, like the sunflower-themed Girasol downtown, are practically empty. On one recent afternoon, only 3 of the 50 rooms were occupied.
"In 2000, we were full every day," said Alejandro Rocha, the hotel’s manager.
New research from the University of California, San Diego, shows that crime is now the top concern for Mexicans thinking of heading north. As fear keeps many migrants home, many experienced border guides, or coyotes, have given up illegal migration for other jobs.
In Tijuana, across the border from San Diego, one well-known coyote is now selling tires. In Nogales, the largest Mexican city bordering Arizona, power has shifted to tattooed young men with expensive binoculars along the border fence, while here in Agua Prieta — where Mexican officials say traffic is one-thirthieth of what it once was — the only way to get across is to deal with gangs that sometimes push migrants to carry drugs.
It is even worse in Matamoros, across from Brownsville, Tex. Just standing at the border fence brings out drug cartel enforcers demanding $300 for the right to pass. Migrants and the organizations that assist them say cartel lieutenants roam the shelters, looking for deportees willing to work as lookouts, earning $400 a week until they have enough to pay for passage north.
"I was thinking about doing it, too," said Daniel, looking down. "But then I thought about my family."
American law enforcement officials say the matrix of drugs, migration and violence has become more visible at the border and along the trails and roads heading north, where more of the immigrants being caught carry drugs or guns — making them more likely to flee, resist arrest or commit other crimes.
"There’s less traffic, but traffic that’s there is more threatening," Mr. Jimarez, the border agent, said.
Larry Dever, the sheriff of Cochise County, Ariz., which sits north of Agua Prieta, agreed: "The guys smuggling people and narcotics now are more sinister."
His county, 6,169 square miles of scrub brush, ranches and tiny towns in the state’s southeast corner, has been an established crossing corridor since the mid-1990s. Since 2008, the police there have tracked every crime linked to illegal immigrants, in part because state and federal officials frequently requested data, treating the county as a bellwether of border security.
Indeed, when a Cochise rancher named Robert Krentz was killed in March 2010 after radioing to his brother that he was going to help a suspected illegal immigrant, the county quickly became a flash point for a larger debate that ultimately led to SB 1070, the polarizing Arizona bill giving the police more responsibility for cracking down on illegal immigrants.
Yet, crime involving illegal immigrants is relatively rare (5 percent of all local crime, Sheriff Dever said). Mostly it consists of burglaries involving stolen food. And, public records show, in 11 of the 18 violent crimes linked to illegal immigrants over 18 months, immigrants were both the victims and attackers.
This is not the portrait given by Republican border governors, including Rick Perry of Texas, a presidential candidate who recently said that "it is not safe on that border." But while Mexican drug cartels have increased their presence from Tucson to New York — sometimes engaging in brutal violence after entering the country illegally — Americans living near the border are generally safe.
A USA Today analysis of Texas, Arizona, New Mexico and California in July found that crime within 100 miles of the border is below both the national average and the average for each of those states — and has been declining for years. Several other independent researchers have come to the same conclusion.
But the border is not safe for people crossing or patrolling it. The number of immigrants found dead in the Arizona desert, from all causes, has failed to decline as fast as illegal immigration has, while assaults on Border Patrol agents grew by 41 percent from 2006 to 2010, almost entirely because of an increase in attacks with rocks. The heightened risks have stimulated a debate: Has the more aggressive approach — bigger fences, more agents and deportations — contributed to, or diminished, the danger?
Sheriff Dever, lionized as an "illegal immigration warrior" by immigration opponents, says that increased enforcement has made Americans safer and should continue until his neighbors tell him they are no longer afraid.
But some immigration advocates contend that the government’s approach is too broad to be effective. "We have to really separate out the guy who is coming to make a living with his family from the terrorist or the drug dealer," said Peter Siavelis, an editor of "Getting Immigration Right: What Every American Needs to Know."
Home Is Where the Children Are
Deportations have muddled that delineation. In a recent line of deportees piling off a bus on the San Diego side of a metal gate leading to Tijuana, all were equal: the criminal in prison garb with the wispy goatee; the mother averting her eyes; and longtime residents like Alberto Álvarez, 36, a janitor and father of five who said he was picked up for driving without a license.
"Look, I’ve been in the U.S. 18 years," he said, slinging a backpack over his Izod shirt. "Right now, my children are alone, my wife is alone caring for the kids by herself — they’ve separated us."
During the immigration wave that peaked around a decade ago, deportations often meant something different: many deportees had not been in the United States for long; they were going home.
But now that there are fewer new arrivals, the concept of home is changing. Of the roughly 11 million unauthorized immigrants in the United States, 48 percent arrived before 2000. For the 6.5 million Mexicans in the United States illegally, that figure is even higher — 55 percent, according to the Pew Hispanic Center. There are now also 4.5 million American-born children of unauthorized immigrant parents.
Experts on both sides of the debate say this large group of rooted immigrants presents the nation with a fundamental choice: Either make life in the United States so difficult for illegal immigrants that they leave on their own, or allow immigrants who pose no threat to public safety to remain with their families legally, though not necessarily as citizens.
Steven A. Camarota, a demographer at the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington, said the government should revoke automatic citizenship for children born to illegal immigrants, and seize assets from deported illegal immigrants so they have fewer incentives to return.
President Obama, having made no progress on getting his legalization plan through Congress, has instead been trying to make enforcement more surgical. Under the new guidelines, officials will use "prosecutorial discretion" to review the current docket of 300,000 deportation cases, suspending expulsions for a range of immigrants.
Several factors prompt "particular care and consideration" for a reprieve, including whether the person has been in the United States since childhood, or is pregnant, seriously ill, a member of the military or a minor, according to a June memo that initiated the change.
The issue of "whether the person has a U.S. citizen or permanent resident spouse, child or parent" appears in the memo’s secondary list of factors to consider. But it is not clear how broadly leniency will be applied. Repeat crossers are given a special black mark, and the administration has already deported hundreds of thousands of minor offenders, despite claiming to focus on "the worst of the worst."
Several Democratic governors and law enforcement officials are particularly angry about Secure Communities, a program to run the fingerprints of anyone booked by the police to check for federal immigration violations. A large proportion of those deported through this process — 79 percent, according to a recent report by the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University — were low-level offenders, often arrested for traffic violations.
Administration officials dispute that, saying the ratio of serious criminals is increasing, and that ultimately they must enforce immigration law against all violators. They have mandated that the program be used nationwide by 2013.
Mexico’s border cities offer a portrait of what that could mean. Nearly 950,000 Mexican immigrants have been deported since the start of fiscal 2008. And in Tijuana — a former hub for migrants heading north, which now receives more deportees than anywhere else — the pool of deportees preparing to cross again just keeps growing.
Maria García, 27, arrived here after being deported for a traffic violation. She said she had spent six years living in Fresno, Calif., with her two Mexico-born sons, 11 and 7. She was one of many who said that without a doubt, they would find their way back to the United States.
"They can’t stop us," she said.
The constant flow of deportees has become a growing concern for Mexican officials, who say the new arrivals are easy recruits, and victims, for drug cartels.
One former deportee was arrested this year for playing a major role in the deaths of around 200 people found in mass graves. In Tijuana, a homeless camp at the border has swollen from a cluster to a neighborhood, as deportees flow in, many carrying stories of being robbed or kidnapped by gangs who saw their American connections as a source for ransom.
Minutes after he arrived, Mr. Álvarez, the janitor, said he was worried about surviving — "you’re playing with your life being here," he said. But his twin sons would turn 2 in a few weeks, and like many others, he said that no matter how he was treated in the United States, he would find his way back.
"I feel bad being here, I feel bad," he said. "I’ve got my kids over there, my family, my whole life. Here" — he shook his head at the end of his first day in Tijuana — "no."
A version of this article appeared in print on October 3, 2011, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Crossing Over, and Over.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/03/world/americas/mexican-immigrants-repeatedly-brave-risks-to-resume-lives-in-united-states.html?_r=2
Wednesday, September 28, 2011
Creative pot smugglers try 'a little bit of everything'
Arizona Daily Star
September 28, 2011
by Brenna Goth
Nogales smugglers are trying new tricks to get their product through the border fence built this summer.
Capitalizing on the 4-inch openings between steel bars in the fence, pot bundles have been found molded into long, thin tubes that can slip between the slats, law enforcement officials say.
Tossing large, football-shaped bundles over the fence has also become prevalent since the new construction, said Santa Cruz County Sheriff Tony Estrada. Estrada has worked in law enforcement at the border for more than 40 years and said smugglers have tried "a little bit of everything."
With the football bundles, smugglers tape the packages before throwing or launching them from Mexico.
"There are quarterbacks in Mexico and receivers in the U.S.," said Lt. Gerardo Castillo, who works for the Santa Cruz County Metro Task Force. "We try to intercept, obviously."
The thin bundles of pot were first found during a July seizure and were likely passed through a space, Castillo said. He said the tubular bundles were about 20 inches long and about a half-inch thinner than the new border-fence gaps.
The 2.8-mile border fence completed this summer aimed to provide more security through increased height and strength.
But smugglers find tactics to address any new challenges a fence provides, Castillo said.
"It's a cat-and-mouse game," he said. "If we build a wall, they're going to climb it. Whatever barrier exists, they're going to overcome it."
Increased Border Patrol manpower and technology have forced smugglers to bring across smaller loads in recent months, said Agent Jason Rheinfrank.
Rheinfrank recalled other unusual smuggling tactics, like a colleague who found a man wading through the Douglas sewage system with a scuba mask and bundle of marijuana, and the time someone used the lighting system at a baseball field in Douglas to attach fishing line from Mexico to a house.
"They'd zip-lined it (marijuana) down across the border," Rheinfrank said. "They come up with all different methods."
Though it is possible for people to pass things between spaces in the new fence, the visibility provided by the openings is beneficial, Rheinfrank said.
"If you're up to no good? Boom. We can instantly respond to that area," Rheinfrank said.
Estrada said he did not envision any changes being made to the fence to prevent the package-passing. Opportunity will remain despite prevention efforts, he said.
"It just makes cartels more creative," Estrada said. "That's the nature of the beast down here in Nogales."
http://azstarnet.com/news/local/crime/article_2330a339-707b-50a4-9ad3-dc2265e7ebfd.html
September 28, 2011
by Brenna Goth
Nogales smugglers are trying new tricks to get their product through the border fence built this summer.
Capitalizing on the 4-inch openings between steel bars in the fence, pot bundles have been found molded into long, thin tubes that can slip between the slats, law enforcement officials say.
Tossing large, football-shaped bundles over the fence has also become prevalent since the new construction, said Santa Cruz County Sheriff Tony Estrada. Estrada has worked in law enforcement at the border for more than 40 years and said smugglers have tried "a little bit of everything."
With the football bundles, smugglers tape the packages before throwing or launching them from Mexico.
"There are quarterbacks in Mexico and receivers in the U.S.," said Lt. Gerardo Castillo, who works for the Santa Cruz County Metro Task Force. "We try to intercept, obviously."
The thin bundles of pot were first found during a July seizure and were likely passed through a space, Castillo said. He said the tubular bundles were about 20 inches long and about a half-inch thinner than the new border-fence gaps.
The 2.8-mile border fence completed this summer aimed to provide more security through increased height and strength.
But smugglers find tactics to address any new challenges a fence provides, Castillo said.
"It's a cat-and-mouse game," he said. "If we build a wall, they're going to climb it. Whatever barrier exists, they're going to overcome it."
Increased Border Patrol manpower and technology have forced smugglers to bring across smaller loads in recent months, said Agent Jason Rheinfrank.
Rheinfrank recalled other unusual smuggling tactics, like a colleague who found a man wading through the Douglas sewage system with a scuba mask and bundle of marijuana, and the time someone used the lighting system at a baseball field in Douglas to attach fishing line from Mexico to a house.
"They'd zip-lined it (marijuana) down across the border," Rheinfrank said. "They come up with all different methods."
Though it is possible for people to pass things between spaces in the new fence, the visibility provided by the openings is beneficial, Rheinfrank said.
"If you're up to no good? Boom. We can instantly respond to that area," Rheinfrank said.
Estrada said he did not envision any changes being made to the fence to prevent the package-passing. Opportunity will remain despite prevention efforts, he said.
"It just makes cartels more creative," Estrada said. "That's the nature of the beast down here in Nogales."
http://azstarnet.com/news/local/crime/article_2330a339-707b-50a4-9ad3-dc2265e7ebfd.html
Border fence fails to end drug smuggling
UPI
September 28, 2011
NOGALES, Ariz., Sept. 28 (UPI) -- A new border fence in Nogales, Ariz., is no barrier to drug smugglers who simply make narcotics hand-offs between the fence's re-enforced bars, officials said.
The Santa Cruz County Metro Task Force says its investigators discovered a number of oddly shaped bundles of marijuana during a recent drug seizure, the Nogales International reported Tuesday.
Forty-eight pounds of marijuana had been wrapped in thin tubular packages investigators say they believe were slipped through the fence, which has interconnected, concrete-filled steel tubes with an approximately 4-inch open space between them.
Task force Lt. Gerry Castillo dubbed the transfers "boom-boom" hand-offs in which someone on the Mexico side quickly pushes a package through to a person on the U.S. side before fleeing.
Passing contraband through the fence is nothing new and smugglers use "any method they can conceive of," Border Patrol Agent Eric Cantu said.
The $11.6-million, 2.8-mile border fence was completed this summer following a groundbreaking in March.
http://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2011/09/28/Border-fence-fails-to-end-drug-smuggling/UPI-31191317233868/?spt=hts&or=2
September 28, 2011
NOGALES, Ariz., Sept. 28 (UPI) -- A new border fence in Nogales, Ariz., is no barrier to drug smugglers who simply make narcotics hand-offs between the fence's re-enforced bars, officials said.
The Santa Cruz County Metro Task Force says its investigators discovered a number of oddly shaped bundles of marijuana during a recent drug seizure, the Nogales International reported Tuesday.
Forty-eight pounds of marijuana had been wrapped in thin tubular packages investigators say they believe were slipped through the fence, which has interconnected, concrete-filled steel tubes with an approximately 4-inch open space between them.
Task force Lt. Gerry Castillo dubbed the transfers "boom-boom" hand-offs in which someone on the Mexico side quickly pushes a package through to a person on the U.S. side before fleeing.
Passing contraband through the fence is nothing new and smugglers use "any method they can conceive of," Border Patrol Agent Eric Cantu said.
The $11.6-million, 2.8-mile border fence was completed this summer following a groundbreaking in March.
http://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2011/09/28/Border-fence-fails-to-end-drug-smuggling/UPI-31191317233868/?spt=hts&or=2
Tuesday, September 27, 2011
Smugglers making hand-offs through bars of border fence
Nogales International
September 27, 2011
by JB Miller
In another change of tactics precipitated by the new Nogales border fence, smugglers appear to be making narcotics hand-offs from Mexico to the U.S. through the bars of the barrier, authorities say.
Lt. Gerry Castillo of the Santa Cruz County Metro Task Force said his office is looking into a case that began in July when investigators discovered a number of oddly shaped bundles of marijuana during a seizure at an undisclosed location.
He said the investigators at first thought the 48 pounds of marijuana that had been wrapped in thin tubular packages might be "tunnel bundles." However, upon closer examination, they discovered that the bundles were not dirty.
That's when investigators decided that the packages had likely been passed through the fence, which features interconnected, concrete-filled steel tubes with an approximately 4-inch open space between them.
"Boom-boom," is how Castillo described the suspected hand-offs, in which someone on the Mexico side quickly hands a bundle to a person on the U.S. side before taking off.
"We block them for awhile and they come up with another plan," Castillo said of the cat-and-mouse game between drug smugglers and law enforcement.
Castillo said no arrests have been made in the ongoing investigation, but authorities have identified three people of interest.
No change
The new $11.6-million, 2.8-mile border fence was completed this past summer following a groundbreaking in March. At the time of construction, Border Patrol officials said the taller, stronger, more secure barrier would allow it to station fewer agents at the fence and deploy more of them to outlying trouble spots.
However, Agent Eric Cantu, spokesman for the Border Patrol's Tucson Sector, said there has been no change of staffing at the fence area. He added that passing contraband through the fence is nothing new and smugglers use "any method they can conceive of."
Cantu said blocking the space between the bars with material like steel mesh would be unproductive because smugglers would just cut through it.
"We have to be aware of all techniques currently used and try to mitigate through the increase of infrastructure, manpower, and technology and also through our cooperation with other law-enforcement partners," Cantu said.
http://www.nogalesinternational.com/news/smugglers-making-hand-offs-through-bars-of-border-fence/article_68277168-e920-11e0-8e81-001cc4c03286.html
September 27, 2011
by JB Miller
In another change of tactics precipitated by the new Nogales border fence, smugglers appear to be making narcotics hand-offs from Mexico to the U.S. through the bars of the barrier, authorities say.
Lt. Gerry Castillo of the Santa Cruz County Metro Task Force said his office is looking into a case that began in July when investigators discovered a number of oddly shaped bundles of marijuana during a seizure at an undisclosed location.
He said the investigators at first thought the 48 pounds of marijuana that had been wrapped in thin tubular packages might be "tunnel bundles." However, upon closer examination, they discovered that the bundles were not dirty.
That's when investigators decided that the packages had likely been passed through the fence, which features interconnected, concrete-filled steel tubes with an approximately 4-inch open space between them.
"Boom-boom," is how Castillo described the suspected hand-offs, in which someone on the Mexico side quickly hands a bundle to a person on the U.S. side before taking off.
"We block them for awhile and they come up with another plan," Castillo said of the cat-and-mouse game between drug smugglers and law enforcement.
Castillo said no arrests have been made in the ongoing investigation, but authorities have identified three people of interest.
No change
The new $11.6-million, 2.8-mile border fence was completed this past summer following a groundbreaking in March. At the time of construction, Border Patrol officials said the taller, stronger, more secure barrier would allow it to station fewer agents at the fence and deploy more of them to outlying trouble spots.
However, Agent Eric Cantu, spokesman for the Border Patrol's Tucson Sector, said there has been no change of staffing at the fence area. He added that passing contraband through the fence is nothing new and smugglers use "any method they can conceive of."
Cantu said blocking the space between the bars with material like steel mesh would be unproductive because smugglers would just cut through it.
"We have to be aware of all techniques currently used and try to mitigate through the increase of infrastructure, manpower, and technology and also through our cooperation with other law-enforcement partners," Cantu said.
http://www.nogalesinternational.com/news/smugglers-making-hand-offs-through-bars-of-border-fence/article_68277168-e920-11e0-8e81-001cc4c03286.html
Tuesday, September 20, 2011
Higher border fence causes smugglers to go airborne
Nogales International
September 20, 2011
by JB Miller
Like a football team with a faltering ground game, drug smugglers are turning to an air attack in an effort to get their product past the new border fence in Nogales.
Lt. Carlos Jimenez of the Nogales Police Department said that due to the increased height and strength of the new barrier, smugglers are having a hard time climbing or cutting through it. As a result, they are coming up with new ways of launching their product over the fence - including tossing football-shaped bundles of marijuana.
"We have seen different shapes and sizes from football-type to large 5-gallon-can-size, cylinder-shaped bundles," Jimenez said.
In one case, a police canine unit responded to the vicinity of East Nelson Avenue on the night of Sept. 9 after someone reported a suspicious amount of car traffic in the area.
An NPD officer checked several parked vehicles and came across a car with fictitious license plates, which "heightened the officer's attention to it," Jimenez said.
"The officer deployed his police canine and the canine alerted to the car interior," Jimenez said. "The car was unsecured and abandoned so when the officer opened the door to the car in plain sight he saw the black football-shape marijuana bundles."
In all, police seized 39 bundles with a total weight of 39.7 pounds and impounded the car.
The incident sparked a series of football-related jokes and puns when Sheriff Antonio Estrada mentioned during the Sept. 14 County Board of Supervisors that NPD had "intercepted" the football-sized bundles.
"There were no receivers," he said after noting that no arrests had been made. As for the smugglers, "Their timing was off," he suggested.
Catapults also suspected
Jimenez said he believes that smugglers are also be using catapult-type devices to launch heavier bundles over the fence.
For example, on the night of Aug. 5, an anonymous caller reported that packages were being thrown over the border fence near Escalada Drive. A few minutes later, as officers were checking out the scene, another anonymous caller reported that there were bundles being heaved over the fence at West International Street.
The officer who responded to Escalada Drive eventually found five "cylinder-shaped" bundles of marijuana with a total weight of 62 pounds - an average of more than 12 pounds each - and NPD asked Border Patrol to use its cameras along the fence in hopes finding the location and device from which the bundles were being tossed. However, no further discoveries or arrests were made.
Meanwhile at West International Street, officers managed to arrest two men and seize five bundles of pot totaling 117 pounds. Several other men reportedly carrying bundles on their backs escaped into Mexico.
While most cases like these are turned over to the Santa Cruz County Metro Task Force, Jimenez said, NPD also shares information with law enforcement on the Mexico side in an effort to catch suspects and contraband.
The new $11.6-million, 2.8-mile border fence, completed this past summer, ranges from 23 to 30 feet in height and is topped by a 5-foot high, south-facing metal sheet to discourage climbers. It's made of six-inch-square metal tubes, filled with concrete with a strand of rebar running down the middle to thwart cutting.
The landing mat fence that it replaced measured approximately 10 feet tall, and was easier to cut through and burrow under.
http://www.nogalesinternational.com/news/higher-border-fence-causes-smugglers-to-go-airborne/article_2dd7d806-e39c-11e0-a8d0-001cc4c002e0.html
September 20, 2011
by JB Miller
Like a football team with a faltering ground game, drug smugglers are turning to an air attack in an effort to get their product past the new border fence in Nogales.
Lt. Carlos Jimenez of the Nogales Police Department said that due to the increased height and strength of the new barrier, smugglers are having a hard time climbing or cutting through it. As a result, they are coming up with new ways of launching their product over the fence - including tossing football-shaped bundles of marijuana.
"We have seen different shapes and sizes from football-type to large 5-gallon-can-size, cylinder-shaped bundles," Jimenez said.
In one case, a police canine unit responded to the vicinity of East Nelson Avenue on the night of Sept. 9 after someone reported a suspicious amount of car traffic in the area.
An NPD officer checked several parked vehicles and came across a car with fictitious license plates, which "heightened the officer's attention to it," Jimenez said.
"The officer deployed his police canine and the canine alerted to the car interior," Jimenez said. "The car was unsecured and abandoned so when the officer opened the door to the car in plain sight he saw the black football-shape marijuana bundles."
In all, police seized 39 bundles with a total weight of 39.7 pounds and impounded the car.
The incident sparked a series of football-related jokes and puns when Sheriff Antonio Estrada mentioned during the Sept. 14 County Board of Supervisors that NPD had "intercepted" the football-sized bundles.
"There were no receivers," he said after noting that no arrests had been made. As for the smugglers, "Their timing was off," he suggested.
Catapults also suspected
Jimenez said he believes that smugglers are also be using catapult-type devices to launch heavier bundles over the fence.
For example, on the night of Aug. 5, an anonymous caller reported that packages were being thrown over the border fence near Escalada Drive. A few minutes later, as officers were checking out the scene, another anonymous caller reported that there were bundles being heaved over the fence at West International Street.
The officer who responded to Escalada Drive eventually found five "cylinder-shaped" bundles of marijuana with a total weight of 62 pounds - an average of more than 12 pounds each - and NPD asked Border Patrol to use its cameras along the fence in hopes finding the location and device from which the bundles were being tossed. However, no further discoveries or arrests were made.
Meanwhile at West International Street, officers managed to arrest two men and seize five bundles of pot totaling 117 pounds. Several other men reportedly carrying bundles on their backs escaped into Mexico.
While most cases like these are turned over to the Santa Cruz County Metro Task Force, Jimenez said, NPD also shares information with law enforcement on the Mexico side in an effort to catch suspects and contraband.
The new $11.6-million, 2.8-mile border fence, completed this past summer, ranges from 23 to 30 feet in height and is topped by a 5-foot high, south-facing metal sheet to discourage climbers. It's made of six-inch-square metal tubes, filled with concrete with a strand of rebar running down the middle to thwart cutting.
The landing mat fence that it replaced measured approximately 10 feet tall, and was easier to cut through and burrow under.
http://www.nogalesinternational.com/news/higher-border-fence-causes-smugglers-to-go-airborne/article_2dd7d806-e39c-11e0-a8d0-001cc4c002e0.html
Friday, September 9, 2011
Ex-Border Security Chief Calls Fence a Dumb Idea
US News and World Reports
September 9, 2011
by Mallie Jane Kim
Fencing off the entire U.S.-Mexico border was one of the "dumbest" ideas former Customs and Border Protection Commissioner W. Ralph Basham was presented with during his tenure, he said Friday. The comments, given at an event on border security since 9/11 at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, fly in the face of claims by 2012 GOP candidates Mitt Romney and Michele Bachmann, who have both emphasized their support for a border fence, and lend credence to candidates Rick Perry and Ron Paul, who both oppose it.
"You can't just pick up the phone and call Long Fence," Basham joked, pointing out a 10-foot fence would inspire would-be border crossers to get an 11-foot ladder. When he became commissioner in 2006 under President Bush, the fence idea was all the rage, and he said congressional mandates from lawmakers who didn't understand the challenges had CBP "chasing our tail" trying to keep up. "We all knew that [the fence] wasn't the answer. That wasn't the solution."
On a tour of the Southwest border, Basham says, then House Speaker Dennis Hastert continually insisted the fence was the only way to seal it. The tour passed a penitentiary surrounded by a chain-link fence with barbed wire. "He said, 'That's what we need right there,'" Basham remembers of Hastert. "And I said, 'With all due respect, no.'"
After three days of briefings and a tour of the harsh border terrain, though, Hastert changed his tune. At a press conference in Nogales, Ariz., the speaker stood up and endorsed Basham's three-pronged approach: some infrastructure (like a fence), better technology, and the right level of staffing.
Current CBP Commissioner Alan Bersin, who was also at Friday's event, chimed in, diplomatically assuring the crowd he didn't blame Congress, but adding, "I'm still waiting for that call from Long Fence."
The commissioners expressed frustration that some members of Congress and others continue to say the border region is insecure and crime-riddled. The fight against organized crime in Mexico is seeing little seepage over the border, they said, and Bersin pointed out that the border is the safest it has been in 30 years. Though border patrol agents do put their lives at risk in their line of work, crime rates in El Paso and San Diego are far lower than those of Detroit or Philadelphia. "Part of the aftermath of 9/11," Bersin said, is that "the vulnerability we felt that day in regards to our borders is taken advantage of by those who would exploit fear."
To those people, Bersin says he offers two bits of wisdom: To paraphrase Mark Twain, "First, let's get our facts straight. Then you can distort them as much as you like"; and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, "The only thing the American people have to fear is fear itself."
http://www.usnews.com/news/blogs/washington-whispers/2011/09/09/ex-border-security-chief-calls-fence-a-dumb-idea
September 9, 2011
by Mallie Jane Kim
Fencing off the entire U.S.-Mexico border was one of the "dumbest" ideas former Customs and Border Protection Commissioner W. Ralph Basham was presented with during his tenure, he said Friday. The comments, given at an event on border security since 9/11 at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, fly in the face of claims by 2012 GOP candidates Mitt Romney and Michele Bachmann, who have both emphasized their support for a border fence, and lend credence to candidates Rick Perry and Ron Paul, who both oppose it.
"You can't just pick up the phone and call Long Fence," Basham joked, pointing out a 10-foot fence would inspire would-be border crossers to get an 11-foot ladder. When he became commissioner in 2006 under President Bush, the fence idea was all the rage, and he said congressional mandates from lawmakers who didn't understand the challenges had CBP "chasing our tail" trying to keep up. "We all knew that [the fence] wasn't the answer. That wasn't the solution."
On a tour of the Southwest border, Basham says, then House Speaker Dennis Hastert continually insisted the fence was the only way to seal it. The tour passed a penitentiary surrounded by a chain-link fence with barbed wire. "He said, 'That's what we need right there,'" Basham remembers of Hastert. "And I said, 'With all due respect, no.'"
After three days of briefings and a tour of the harsh border terrain, though, Hastert changed his tune. At a press conference in Nogales, Ariz., the speaker stood up and endorsed Basham's three-pronged approach: some infrastructure (like a fence), better technology, and the right level of staffing.
Current CBP Commissioner Alan Bersin, who was also at Friday's event, chimed in, diplomatically assuring the crowd he didn't blame Congress, but adding, "I'm still waiting for that call from Long Fence."
The commissioners expressed frustration that some members of Congress and others continue to say the border region is insecure and crime-riddled. The fight against organized crime in Mexico is seeing little seepage over the border, they said, and Bersin pointed out that the border is the safest it has been in 30 years. Though border patrol agents do put their lives at risk in their line of work, crime rates in El Paso and San Diego are far lower than those of Detroit or Philadelphia. "Part of the aftermath of 9/11," Bersin said, is that "the vulnerability we felt that day in regards to our borders is taken advantage of by those who would exploit fear."
To those people, Bersin says he offers two bits of wisdom: To paraphrase Mark Twain, "First, let's get our facts straight. Then you can distort them as much as you like"; and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, "The only thing the American people have to fear is fear itself."
http://www.usnews.com/news/blogs/washington-whispers/2011/09/09/ex-border-security-chief-calls-fence-a-dumb-idea
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