Arizona Daily Star
October 24, 2010
by Brady McCombs
From congressional races to the gubernatorial showdown, border issues have taken center stage in many campaigns this election season.
If you are dizzy from all the talk and rhetoric, you're not alone. So today, we sort out some of the most popular election-season facts, myths and half-truths:
Is the border more dangerous than ever?
Answer: For people illegally crossing it, yes. For people living near it in Mexico, probably. For people living on the U.S. side of the border, probably not.
Some will vehemently disagree with that last statement, pointing to the March killing of Cochise County rancher Robert Krentz and an increase in burglaries in the Portal area as evidence that the level of danger on the U.S. side of the border has increased. But while Cochise County investigators say they tracked footprints back to Mexico, the Krentz crime is unsolved.
The FBI's uniform crime reports show violent crime is no more prevalent in border cities than in nonborder cities.
Since 2001, the average violent-crime rate in eight border cities declined, and it has remained below the national violent-crime rate since 2005, said an August 2010 report by the Congressional Research Center, which reviewed FBI crime reports from 1998 to 2008.
In Tucson and Phoenix - the two largest cities on the smuggling route through Arizona - murder and violent crime decreased from 2005 to 2009, FBI data show.
The ratio of assaults on Border Patrol agents dipped 36 percent across the Southwest border from 2007 to 2010. But that ratio increased by 70 percent in the Tucson Sector over the same period. Most of the reported assaults are when rocks are thrown at agents.
The danger of crossing the border illegally has increased, though. Illegal immigrants are dying at greater rates than ever in Arizona, likely because the border buildup has prompted smugglers to lead crossers into more remote and dangerous areas.
The 252 illegal border crossers found dead along Arizona's stretch of the U.S.-Mexico border excluding Yuma in fiscal 2010 broke the previous record of 234, set in 2007.
Is Arizona the epicenter for illegal immigration?
Answer: Yes and no.
Arizona's stretch of the U.S.-Mexico border is the busiest for illegal immigration, drug smuggling and border deaths, accounting for more than half of all arrests and marijuana seizures. But the state is more of a transit point than a destination.
The estimate of 375,000 illegal immigrants living in Arizona puts the state eighth in the U.S. behind California, Texas, Florida, New York, Illinois, New Jersey and Georgia, a September report from the Pew Hispanic Center found.
And the number of illegal immigrants living in Arizona dropped from an estimated 475,000 in 2008, the Pew report found.
But Arizona has thrust itself into the national spotlight on this issue due to the numerous immigration-enforcement laws passed by the state, including SB 1070.
Has the federal government really done nothing to secure the border?
Answer: You can question the effectiveness of the billions spent, but there's no denying the massive buildup of border enforcement over the last five to 10 years:
• The budget for Customs and Border Protection - the Department of Homeland Security agency responsible for border security - soared to $11.4 billion in fiscal 2010, up 90 percent from $6 billion in fiscal year 2004. That's nearly twice the growth of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) budget, which increased 54 percent to $5.7 billion in fiscal 2010, up from $3.7 billion in 2004. ICE is responsible for immigration enforcement at worksites and across the interior of the country.
• The number of Border Patrol agents on the U.S.-Mexico border has increased to 17,500, up from 9,700 in 2004. The Tucson Sector, which stretches from New Mexico to Yuma County, now has 3,300 agents, up from 2,100 in 2004 and 1,500 in 2000.
• The miles of fencing along the border have grown exponentially. There are now 350 miles of pedestrian fence and 299 miles of vehicle barriers along the U.S.-Mexico border, for a total of 649 miles of barriers. That's up from 143 miles of barriers in 2006.
The Tucson Sector has 71 miles of pedestrian fences and 139 miles of vehicle barriers. In 2000, it had 11 miles of pedestrian fences and two miles of vehicle barriers.
Pedestrian fences are 12- to 18-foot-high barriers designed to stop, or at least slow down, people. Vehicle barriers are waist- to chest-high and are designed to stop cars.
• The agency has spent more than $1 billion since 2006 developing the SBInet "virtual fence," which tracks movement using a network of towers mounted with cameras, sensors and radar. But the program has been plagued by delays and glitches.
• In the past five years, the feds have twice sent the National Guard to the border to assist the Border Patrol. In Operation Jump Start, from 2006 to 2008, the government spent $1.2 billion to send 6,000 National Guard troops. In the current Operation Copper Cactus, the government is spending $135 million to send 1,200 troops.
• Homeland Security has devoted $225 million to border law enforcement agencies through Operation Stonegarden, including about $51 million to Arizona agencies. The program gives agencies money to pay officers who work overtime shifts aimed at securing the border. The money also buys four-wheel-drive trucks, radios and night-vision goggles.
Has the buildup of agents, fences and technology made the border more secure?
Answer: Probably, but to what degree is uncertain.
Fewer illegal immigrants are crossing the Southwest border, but it's difficult to determine how much of that is attributed to the buildup, because the decrease has coincided with the worst U.S. recession since the Depression.
The number of apprehensions by Border Patrol agents on the U.S.-Mexico border plummeted to 447,500 in fiscal year 2010, down from 1.1 million in fiscal year 2004.
Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano acknowledges that the weak economy helps explain why fewer people are getting caught crossing the border illegally, and she also credited crackdowns on employers who hire illegal workers. But she said a big reason is enforcement.
"The manpower, the technology, the infrastructure all has enabled us to be able to really slow that flow of illegal-immigrant traffic," she said at a news conference last week near San Diego.
Citing the seizures of more drugs, weapons and illicit cash along the Mexican border, Napolitano said: "We now have a border more secure than ever before."
But using the same rationale the feds apply to apprehensions - the lower the better - the buildup has not slowed the smuggling of drugs. Marijuana seizures along the U.S.-Mexico border by Border Patrol agents have increased to 2.5 million pounds in fiscal year 2009, up from 1.3 million in 2004.
So many people say, 'Build more fence.' Does it work?
Answer: Nobody knows for sure.
A 2009 report from the Government Accountability Office found that "despite a $2.4 billion investment to build 264 miles of fencing and 226 miles of vehicle barriers in the last five years, the impact of these barriers on border security is unknown because it has not been measured."
Proponents of border fencing point to double-layer fencing in San Diego and Yuma as proof that barriers work. Apprehensions dipped there after the fences went up, but the smugglers simply moved their routes.
The Border Patrol's 262-mile-long Tucson Sector has 71 miles of fencing, but it remains the busiest people- and drug-smuggling route on the border, accounting for nearly half of all arrests and marijuana seizures.
The problem with fences is that motivated smugglers and border crossers find ways over, through and around them. Critics call them nothing more than a speed bump. And the international border's diverse terrain, which includes mountains, canyons and rivers, makes a 2,000-mile fence impossible.
Border Patrol officials acknowledge that the barriers are not a panacea. But they say they deter, slow and funnel traffic, helping agents gain the upper hand in the ongoing cat-and-mouse game with smugglers.
The government has spent $2.4 billion on new fences, and the GAO estimates the life-cycle cost of all the barriers to be $6.5 billion.
The buildup of fences and roads along the border could have environmental consequences, too. Fencing has caused flooding and erosion, and it could be fragmenting wildlife habitat.
Virtual fences are better for the environment, but despite more than $1 billion spent over five years, the SBInet program has been plagued by glitches and major delays, and has yet to produce a working system. The GAO has questioned whether the time and money spent are a prudent use of limited resources.
Has violence from Mexico's raging drug wars spilled over the border?
Answer: It's not entirely clear, but most indicators say no.
The public shootouts, beheadings and killings that are part of life in northern Mexico due to the ongoing turf battles between drug cartels do not occur in Arizona. But some violence in Arizona may be associated with the illegal smuggling of people and drugs.
And there's no way to say spillover violence won't happen.
"Currently, U.S. federal officials deny that the recent increase in drug-trafficking-related violence in Mexico has resulted in a spillover into the United States," said an August 2010 report from the Congressional Research Center. "But they acknowledge that the prospect is a serious concern."
Is it possible to seal the border?
Answer: Probably not.
There are some who believe it's possible, such as the Border Patrol agents' union. But even the commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection says the focus should be on controlling the border, not sealing it.
"This is not about sealing the border," Commissioner Alan Bersin said in September while in Tucson. "Until we have a legitimate labor market between Mexico and the United States, people will attempt to come here to work."
History shows that as long as better-paying jobs await in the U.S., people from Mexico and Latin America will continue to find a way around, through, under and over the gantlet of enforcement.
Not even the worst U.S. recession since the Depression has stopped the stream of illegal immigrants.
On StarNet: Find extensive coverage of immigration issues at azstarnet.com/border
http://azstarnet.com/news/local/border/article_dc909571-05b9-5f70-be39-bfa148091380.html
Showing posts with label spillover. Show all posts
Showing posts with label spillover. Show all posts
Sunday, October 24, 2010
Tuesday, August 3, 2010
El Paso murders, crime rate overall fall
El Paso Times
August 3, 2010
by Daniel Borunda
EL PASO -- About 1,700 homicides have occurred in Juárez this year. El Paso has had one.
Despite the rampant bloodshed in Mexico, the overall crime rate in El Paso has decreased slightly this year.
The drop in murders comes as the El Paso City Council mulls raising taxes or furloughing police officers. Neighborhood Watch groups this evening will get together for block parties as part of the anti-crime National Night Out.
Police officials said crime is down 1 percent citywide with decreases in the number of murders, burglaries, auto thefts and vehicle break-ins. Assaults are up 4 percent and robberies have remained the same.
One homicide this year is unusual even for a city that normally has few slayings. El Paso, estimated population of 751,000, had seven homicides at this time last year. The year ended with 13 homicides.
"It almost defies explanation," said Jack Levin, one of the nation's best known criminologists. "I can't think of another city in the U.S., another large city, that has only had one homicide. It's absolutely outstanding."
Homicides in recent years have been declining nationally with the aging of the baby boomer generation, said Levin, a professor at Northeastern University in Boston.
Levin, in a telephone interview, said cities with large Latino immigrant populations, such as El Paso, San Diego and San Jose, Calif., tend to have low crime rates.
"Immigrants -- whether from Mexico, Italy, or Poland -- have often left family and friends to have a new life and begin anew," Levin said. "They are very success oriented, middle class. They simply have a very low crime rate."
But Levin said that while the immigrant factor helps explain El Paso's low crime numbers, it doesn't explain why murders would plummet one year to the next.
"I've actually said to the reporters in other cities, 'If you want to be safe from murder, move to El Paso,' " Levin said.
However, Levin cautioned, killings tend to occur in clusters and the rest of the year could be different.
Detective Mike Baranyay, an El Paso police spokesman, said the credit for the drop in crime goes to police working with residents who are willing to report suspicious activity.
"The community, I believe, is really taking an active role in keeping their community safe," Baranyay said.
Tina Gianes, president of the Neighborhood Watch Association of El Paso, said most of the complaints she hears are about cars speeding on residential streets or shady door-to-door salesmen.
Gianes said one of the reasons El Paso has a reputation as a safe city is because crime is kept from escalating because residents will report suspicious activity.
"I think more people are getting involved. They are not afraid to speakup," she said.
The contrast is Juárez. The city of 1.3 million has been described as the murder capital of Mexico and one of the most dangerous cities in the world. A two-year war between the Sinaloa and Juárez drug cartels has escalated to the use of car bombs, explosives and frequent attacks on police.
Levin said the drug violence in Mexico has its roots in extreme poverty, powerful organized crime gangs and a "tremendous amount of corruption."
The violence in Juárez is the backdrop as the city of El Paso struggles with its budget and a contract dispute with the police union that could lead to higher property taxes, the canceling of a police academy class or furloughs for police officers.
The El Paso police union last week voted against reopening contract negotiations.
The city wanted to delay a 2 percent cost of living raise that is due Sept. 1. The city has made $3.5 million in cuts to its budget and is looking to cut $1 million more.
A crime is committed in El Paso every 16.1 minutes, according to a "crime clock" in the police budget presentation using data from last year. A murder occurred every 28 days.
Ron Martin, president of the El Paso Municipal Police Officers Association, said taking officers off the street will affect services.
"If you are already stretched thin, how are you going to furlough officers and not affect response times?" Martin said.
Some members of the City Council have argued that further budget cuts to other public services are not feasible.
"City Council can say whatever they want," Martin said. "They are not the ones who reduce crime. It is the police officers. Crime has been reduced because officers are out there every day."
Levin, the criminologist, said other cities face the same dilemma.
"El Paso may save money by reducing the size of the police force, perhaps reducing programs for children, but in the long term it will be very costly," Levin said.
"Part of the reason the crime rate is low is El Paso has been willing to spend the money to keep youngsters busy and supervised and keeping police on the streets," Levin said. "You can pay now or you can pay later. But one way or another, you pay."
http://www.elpasotimes.com/news/ci_15663742?source=email
August 3, 2010
by Daniel Borunda
EL PASO -- About 1,700 homicides have occurred in Juárez this year. El Paso has had one.
Despite the rampant bloodshed in Mexico, the overall crime rate in El Paso has decreased slightly this year.
The drop in murders comes as the El Paso City Council mulls raising taxes or furloughing police officers. Neighborhood Watch groups this evening will get together for block parties as part of the anti-crime National Night Out.
Police officials said crime is down 1 percent citywide with decreases in the number of murders, burglaries, auto thefts and vehicle break-ins. Assaults are up 4 percent and robberies have remained the same.
One homicide this year is unusual even for a city that normally has few slayings. El Paso, estimated population of 751,000, had seven homicides at this time last year. The year ended with 13 homicides.
"It almost defies explanation," said Jack Levin, one of the nation's best known criminologists. "I can't think of another city in the U.S., another large city, that has only had one homicide. It's absolutely outstanding."
Homicides in recent years have been declining nationally with the aging of the baby boomer generation, said Levin, a professor at Northeastern University in Boston.
Levin, in a telephone interview, said cities with large Latino immigrant populations, such as El Paso, San Diego and San Jose, Calif., tend to have low crime rates.
"Immigrants -- whether from Mexico, Italy, or Poland -- have often left family and friends to have a new life and begin anew," Levin said. "They are very success oriented, middle class. They simply have a very low crime rate."
But Levin said that while the immigrant factor helps explain El Paso's low crime numbers, it doesn't explain why murders would plummet one year to the next.
"I've actually said to the reporters in other cities, 'If you want to be safe from murder, move to El Paso,' " Levin said.
However, Levin cautioned, killings tend to occur in clusters and the rest of the year could be different.
Detective Mike Baranyay, an El Paso police spokesman, said the credit for the drop in crime goes to police working with residents who are willing to report suspicious activity.
"The community, I believe, is really taking an active role in keeping their community safe," Baranyay said.
Tina Gianes, president of the Neighborhood Watch Association of El Paso, said most of the complaints she hears are about cars speeding on residential streets or shady door-to-door salesmen.
Gianes said one of the reasons El Paso has a reputation as a safe city is because crime is kept from escalating because residents will report suspicious activity.
"I think more people are getting involved. They are not afraid to speakup," she said.
The contrast is Juárez. The city of 1.3 million has been described as the murder capital of Mexico and one of the most dangerous cities in the world. A two-year war between the Sinaloa and Juárez drug cartels has escalated to the use of car bombs, explosives and frequent attacks on police.
Levin said the drug violence in Mexico has its roots in extreme poverty, powerful organized crime gangs and a "tremendous amount of corruption."
The violence in Juárez is the backdrop as the city of El Paso struggles with its budget and a contract dispute with the police union that could lead to higher property taxes, the canceling of a police academy class or furloughs for police officers.
The El Paso police union last week voted against reopening contract negotiations.
The city wanted to delay a 2 percent cost of living raise that is due Sept. 1. The city has made $3.5 million in cuts to its budget and is looking to cut $1 million more.
A crime is committed in El Paso every 16.1 minutes, according to a "crime clock" in the police budget presentation using data from last year. A murder occurred every 28 days.
Ron Martin, president of the El Paso Municipal Police Officers Association, said taking officers off the street will affect services.
"If you are already stretched thin, how are you going to furlough officers and not affect response times?" Martin said.
Some members of the City Council have argued that further budget cuts to other public services are not feasible.
"City Council can say whatever they want," Martin said. "They are not the ones who reduce crime. It is the police officers. Crime has been reduced because officers are out there every day."
Levin, the criminologist, said other cities face the same dilemma.
"El Paso may save money by reducing the size of the police force, perhaps reducing programs for children, but in the long term it will be very costly," Levin said.
"Part of the reason the crime rate is low is El Paso has been willing to spend the money to keep youngsters busy and supervised and keeping police on the streets," Levin said. "You can pay now or you can pay later. But one way or another, you pay."
http://www.elpasotimes.com/news/ci_15663742?source=email
Thursday, July 29, 2010
Arizona's Immigrant Death Spiral
The Daily Beast
July 29, 2010
by Bryan Curtis
Diego Gutierrez, a 25-year-old man Mexican man, illegally crossed the border into Arizona sometime around last Friday. Gutierrez was handsome and well built, with big eyes and a head of thick, black hair. In a photo taken by a Pima County medical examiner, he appeared to have a Roman nose. After trudging through the desert on days when temperatures at a nearby airfield reached 106 degrees, Gutierrez began to complain of stomach cramps. He vomited. Gutierrez’s father, who had crossed the border with him, left his son and flagged down a Border Patrol officer. The officer later reported that he and the father found Gutierrez’s body in the wee hours of Monday morning, July 26. Gutierrez was lying on his back under a tree; his head, fittingly enough, was pointed north.
Until a federal judge intervened Wednesday, Arizona's Senate Bill 1070 was set to go into effect with much talk of death. Explaining why the state’s police officers should ask anyone they deem suspicious to produce proof of citizenship, Gov. Jan Brewer spoke vividly of immigrant crime, drug cartels, “bodies in the desert.” In fact, authorities are finding many dead bodies in the Arizona desert these days, but they are not the victims of immigrant murderers. They are the immigrants themselves. What 1070 misses is that it’s far more dangerous to sneak into Arizona than it is to live here.
This month, there have been 58 dead migrants, including Diego Gutierrez, delivered to the medical examiner of Pima County, the large southern Arizona county that stretches from Tucson south to the border. One hundred and fifty-two dead border crossers have turned up in the office since January. To compare that number to much-fussed about immigrant crime statistics, 152 is more than the total number of people murdered in Phoenix, by anyone, in all of 2009. And if July’s migrant death toll won't reach the record total of July 2005, when the remains of 68 dead border-crossers turned up, Dr. Bruce Parks, the county’s chief medical examiner, told me he was concerned enough that he ordered a refrigerated truck to be parked outside his office to store the overflowing bodies.
Parks is a trim, balding man, and when I met him in his office Tuesday he was listening to jazz standards. When he performed on autopsy on Gutierrez's body the day before, Parks found him sadly unremarkable. Gutierrez had on blue jeans, a t-shirt, and sneakers, and he was carrying a Mexican voter registration card. He had scratches on his wrist, maybe from a cholla cactus or from sleeping under a mesquite tree. Parks showed me two photographs of Gutierrez’s body. The first was taken out in the desert, a body bag unzipped to reveal Gutierrez’s still-vital face. The second photo was taken by Parks himself some hours later at his office. Gutierrez’s face had turned a greenish-red color, and his chest and shoulders were marbled with blue lines. When Parks touched Gutierrez’s skin, he recalled, it gave way easily, because his body had filled with gas. There were no signs of trauma, which means Gutierrez had almost certainly died of hyperthermia. He was too hot.
Gutierrez is far away from the debate over 1070, but maybe he shouldn’t be. It’s a longstanding gambit of politicians—especially Arizona politicians—to say it’s easy for an immigrant to cross into the United States. But it’s probably harder to cross into Arizona and stay here than ever. After border-security pushes in California and Texas redirected migrant traffic to Arizona, the feds beefed up defenses in border cities like Nogales, built parts of a border wall—and Barack Obama has ordered more than 500 National Guardsmen sent to the Arizona border on August 1. Those measures, in turn, have pushed the migrant traffic into remote desert, into the Altar Valley to the east or the sprawling Tohono O’odham Indian Reservation to the west. It's telling that while the number of border crossers into Arizona has decreased in recent years due to the recession, the number of migrant deaths has gone up.
For an Arizona politician, the border is everything. For an immigrant, it is merely a starting line. After crossing the border, an immigrant in Arizona enters a dangerous neutral zone full of Border Patrol agents, jittery locals, and dangerous plants and reptiles. According to Dan Millis, a volunteer with No More Deaths, a group that provides water and food for immigrants in the desert, this zone can stretch for 30 miles depending on which of the spider web of migrant trails the immigrant follows toward a city or a highway.
Diego Gutierrez died in the neutral zone, and Millis and I drove out to the spot where his father flagged down the Border Patrol to get a sense of what he experienced. The Sonoran Desert has become such a reliable morgue that No More Deaths volunteers are always prepared to stumble upon bodies, Mills said, and “everybody thinks about it.” Millis is tall and bearded with twinkling eyes that disguise a thoughtful demeanor. He told me that he, too, discovered a body. In 2008, Millis and three friends were taking food to a migrant trail in the Altar Valley when they came upon the decomposing remains of a 14-year-old Mexican girl. The girl was lying on her back and her feet were floating in a puddle.
The remains matched the description of a girl named Josseline Janiletha Hernandez Quinteros who had gone missing three weeks before. She was easily identified because her sweatpants had “Hollywood” written on the seat. It had pleased Mills to provide closure for Hernandez’s family, some of whom would later come to the site to mark it as a memorial. But the act of discovery also weighed heavily on him. “It’s sort of a curse to find somebody dead,” he said.
After a two-hour drive through the reservation, past border patrolmen peeking into cars and scanning the horizon with binoculars, we came to the appointed spot, the 15th milepost on Route 21. Despite the lingering pall of death, the place was quite beautiful. The sun was making its final approach in the west, turning that part of the sky chalk-white and the eastern sky a deep, marine blue. Millis and I could hear bullfrogs burbling in some distant pool. The desert was both more ordinary and more cartoonish than what you see in the movies—an ugly, dusty track would be interrupted by a towering Saguaro cactus. You only had to take a few steps away from the car to feel desperately alone.
To think about the dreadful final moments of migrants like Gutierrez was to remove Arizona's immigration debate from rhetorical abstraction. There is no wave of immigrant crime in Arizona. Phoenix, according to the FBI, has one of the lowest rates of violent crime in the country. No Arizona county coroner has reported a beheaded crime victim in the desert, as Jan Brewer ominously charged. And yet when confronted with a bona fide epidemic in its southern desert, Arizona has chosen to punt.
As we looked around, I recalled something Bruce Parks, the medical examiner, had told me. When the truck bearing Gutierrez’s body came into his office, it was also carrying the bodies of three Guatemalan immigrants. Two of them had probably died like Diego, due to the hyperthermia. According to the field report, the third immigrant, adrift in a vast, hot desert, had hanged himself.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-07-28/arizonas-real-immigration-problem-migrant-deaths/
July 29, 2010
by Bryan Curtis
Diego Gutierrez, a 25-year-old man Mexican man, illegally crossed the border into Arizona sometime around last Friday. Gutierrez was handsome and well built, with big eyes and a head of thick, black hair. In a photo taken by a Pima County medical examiner, he appeared to have a Roman nose. After trudging through the desert on days when temperatures at a nearby airfield reached 106 degrees, Gutierrez began to complain of stomach cramps. He vomited. Gutierrez’s father, who had crossed the border with him, left his son and flagged down a Border Patrol officer. The officer later reported that he and the father found Gutierrez’s body in the wee hours of Monday morning, July 26. Gutierrez was lying on his back under a tree; his head, fittingly enough, was pointed north.
Until a federal judge intervened Wednesday, Arizona's Senate Bill 1070 was set to go into effect with much talk of death. Explaining why the state’s police officers should ask anyone they deem suspicious to produce proof of citizenship, Gov. Jan Brewer spoke vividly of immigrant crime, drug cartels, “bodies in the desert.” In fact, authorities are finding many dead bodies in the Arizona desert these days, but they are not the victims of immigrant murderers. They are the immigrants themselves. What 1070 misses is that it’s far more dangerous to sneak into Arizona than it is to live here.
This month, there have been 58 dead migrants, including Diego Gutierrez, delivered to the medical examiner of Pima County, the large southern Arizona county that stretches from Tucson south to the border. One hundred and fifty-two dead border crossers have turned up in the office since January. To compare that number to much-fussed about immigrant crime statistics, 152 is more than the total number of people murdered in Phoenix, by anyone, in all of 2009. And if July’s migrant death toll won't reach the record total of July 2005, when the remains of 68 dead border-crossers turned up, Dr. Bruce Parks, the county’s chief medical examiner, told me he was concerned enough that he ordered a refrigerated truck to be parked outside his office to store the overflowing bodies.
Parks is a trim, balding man, and when I met him in his office Tuesday he was listening to jazz standards. When he performed on autopsy on Gutierrez's body the day before, Parks found him sadly unremarkable. Gutierrez had on blue jeans, a t-shirt, and sneakers, and he was carrying a Mexican voter registration card. He had scratches on his wrist, maybe from a cholla cactus or from sleeping under a mesquite tree. Parks showed me two photographs of Gutierrez’s body. The first was taken out in the desert, a body bag unzipped to reveal Gutierrez’s still-vital face. The second photo was taken by Parks himself some hours later at his office. Gutierrez’s face had turned a greenish-red color, and his chest and shoulders were marbled with blue lines. When Parks touched Gutierrez’s skin, he recalled, it gave way easily, because his body had filled with gas. There were no signs of trauma, which means Gutierrez had almost certainly died of hyperthermia. He was too hot.
Gutierrez is far away from the debate over 1070, but maybe he shouldn’t be. It’s a longstanding gambit of politicians—especially Arizona politicians—to say it’s easy for an immigrant to cross into the United States. But it’s probably harder to cross into Arizona and stay here than ever. After border-security pushes in California and Texas redirected migrant traffic to Arizona, the feds beefed up defenses in border cities like Nogales, built parts of a border wall—and Barack Obama has ordered more than 500 National Guardsmen sent to the Arizona border on August 1. Those measures, in turn, have pushed the migrant traffic into remote desert, into the Altar Valley to the east or the sprawling Tohono O’odham Indian Reservation to the west. It's telling that while the number of border crossers into Arizona has decreased in recent years due to the recession, the number of migrant deaths has gone up.
For an Arizona politician, the border is everything. For an immigrant, it is merely a starting line. After crossing the border, an immigrant in Arizona enters a dangerous neutral zone full of Border Patrol agents, jittery locals, and dangerous plants and reptiles. According to Dan Millis, a volunteer with No More Deaths, a group that provides water and food for immigrants in the desert, this zone can stretch for 30 miles depending on which of the spider web of migrant trails the immigrant follows toward a city or a highway.
Diego Gutierrez died in the neutral zone, and Millis and I drove out to the spot where his father flagged down the Border Patrol to get a sense of what he experienced. The Sonoran Desert has become such a reliable morgue that No More Deaths volunteers are always prepared to stumble upon bodies, Mills said, and “everybody thinks about it.” Millis is tall and bearded with twinkling eyes that disguise a thoughtful demeanor. He told me that he, too, discovered a body. In 2008, Millis and three friends were taking food to a migrant trail in the Altar Valley when they came upon the decomposing remains of a 14-year-old Mexican girl. The girl was lying on her back and her feet were floating in a puddle.
The remains matched the description of a girl named Josseline Janiletha Hernandez Quinteros who had gone missing three weeks before. She was easily identified because her sweatpants had “Hollywood” written on the seat. It had pleased Mills to provide closure for Hernandez’s family, some of whom would later come to the site to mark it as a memorial. But the act of discovery also weighed heavily on him. “It’s sort of a curse to find somebody dead,” he said.
After a two-hour drive through the reservation, past border patrolmen peeking into cars and scanning the horizon with binoculars, we came to the appointed spot, the 15th milepost on Route 21. Despite the lingering pall of death, the place was quite beautiful. The sun was making its final approach in the west, turning that part of the sky chalk-white and the eastern sky a deep, marine blue. Millis and I could hear bullfrogs burbling in some distant pool. The desert was both more ordinary and more cartoonish than what you see in the movies—an ugly, dusty track would be interrupted by a towering Saguaro cactus. You only had to take a few steps away from the car to feel desperately alone.
To think about the dreadful final moments of migrants like Gutierrez was to remove Arizona's immigration debate from rhetorical abstraction. There is no wave of immigrant crime in Arizona. Phoenix, according to the FBI, has one of the lowest rates of violent crime in the country. No Arizona county coroner has reported a beheaded crime victim in the desert, as Jan Brewer ominously charged. And yet when confronted with a bona fide epidemic in its southern desert, Arizona has chosen to punt.
As we looked around, I recalled something Bruce Parks, the medical examiner, had told me. When the truck bearing Gutierrez’s body came into his office, it was also carrying the bodies of three Guatemalan immigrants. Two of them had probably died like Diego, due to the hyperthermia. According to the field report, the third immigrant, adrift in a vast, hot desert, had hanged himself.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-07-28/arizonas-real-immigration-problem-migrant-deaths/
Wednesday, July 28, 2010
US border violence: Myth or reality?
BBC News
July 28, 2010
by Katie Connolly
Once upon a time, Spanish settlers named the crossing El Paso Del Norte - the pass to the north.
The border city of El Paso, Texas, lies along the Rio Grande, in the chasm between two inhospitable mountains.
Each day, thousands of people in cars, buses and on foot cross the short bridge that connects El Paso with its Mexican sister city, Juarez, one of the world's most dangerous places.
In the past two years, more than 5,000 people have been murdered in Juarez as drug-related crime has soared.
Politicians, including Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott, tend to portray border towns as being pushed to crisis point.
"We see this crime on a daily basis. The federal government must respond more effectively, step up their enforcement and protection of the border before more American blood is shed," Mr Abbott told Fox News.
"It is more dangerous to walk the streets of Juarez, a few blocks from El Paso, than it is to walk the streets of Baghdad. There is a very serious problem that is beginning to bulge at our borders and put American lives at risk."
In mid-July, President Barack Obama ordered 1,200 National Guard troops to patrol the border, just days after a car bomb exploded in northern Juarez, very near El Paso.
Texas Governor Rick Perry called that deployment "grossly insufficient". Many politicians are calling for even more troops.
But the mayor of El Paso, John Cook, isn't one of them.
Second safest city
"The reality is we really don't need the help on this side of the border. We probably have every kind of federal law enforcement agency that you can think of. We're an extremely safe community," Mr Cook says.
Despite Juarez's murder toll, in El Paso, local authorities have recorded just two murders this year. In 2009 there were 11.
"Logically it would seem that if you have violence on one side of the border then you're going to have spillover on the other side," says Mr Cook. "But the reality is that we don't."
According to FBI crime statistics, El Paso is the second safest city in America. Crime rates there have dropped 36% over the past 10 years.
Other cities close to the border, including San Diego in California and Phoenix in Arizona, have similarly experienced declines in violent crime.
Over the same period, federal agencies have beefed up their presence along the border, and a 2,000-mile fence is slowly being constructed.
The fence near El Paso is 16-18 feet (4.9-5.5m) high, made of rust-coloured steel mesh. There are 2,700 border police in this sector, monitoring the border day and night, and a raft of FBI, CIA and drug enforcement agents.
Mr Cook questions the need for more troops, given that current border security levels appear to have been effective at containing drug violence south of the border.
Additionally, both he and local border enforcement officials believe that the leaders of drug cartels do not believe it is in their interest to bring the violence north.
Drug barons know that the response from the US government would be swift and heavy, and further hinder their ability to smuggle drugs into the lucrative American market.
Locals worry that with an even heavier security presence in town, El Paso risks becoming like Cold War Berlin, a riven city, its character disrupted by an imposing divider wall.
They believe politicians who don't live on the border fail to appreciate the deep interconnectedness of cities like Juarez and El Paso, which Mr Cook describes as "one city joined by a border".
So with crime rates declining and the border stable, how has this relatively safe Texan city found itself in the centre of a political firestorm over border violence, and the Obama administration's plans to deal with it?
Politics and fear
Border historian David Romo says it is a pattern. He's seen politicians fanning fears about the border before.
The first calls to build a border fence in El Paso to secure the city came in 1908. Back then, the fear was Chinese immigrants. In World War II, politicians worried about Germans streaming across.
These days, it's Mexicans who fuel unease. Mr Romo says that during times of economic distress, the border and the immigrants who cross it are used as scapegoats. He believes history is repeating itself, and politicians are using the same rhetoric they have for decades.
"It happens that every time an election year comes up, they know that creating fear and hysteria about the border will drive a wedge," Mr Romo says.
"In some ways it's cheap vote-getting. There is this cycle of kind of nativist hysteria that is very profitable for politicians. Nothing gets votes like the politics of fear."
Mr Romo says he's not seen evidence of violence infiltrating the El Paso community. He argues that the immigrants who make a new life across the border are motivated to act within the law because they fear being deported.
While Arizona Governor Jan Brewer blames immigrants, illegal and otherwise, for violent crimes and burglaries, Mr Romo says that, ironically, those immigrants have the most incentive to be law-abiding. They don't want to draw attention.
Bleak outlook
Although fears of spillover violence aren't substantiated by crime data, they are having a real impact on the economy of El Paso.
"From an economic development perspective, it's been very negative for us," Mr Cook said.
He has difficulty convincing new businesses to set up in El Paso because of the violence in Juarez. The first question he gets asked in business meetings is usually "is it safe?"
"They don't pay attention to the fact that we are the second safest large city in the United States," he says.
"We've had people who have looked to locating here with their companies and we have to convince them that it's a safe place. They almost don't believe you."
The longer the violence continues in Juarez, the bleaker the outlook becomes for El Paso, despite its impressive safety record.
For now, there's little more Mayor Cook can do but wait.
America's safest cities, 2009
1.Honolulu, Hawaii
2.El Paso, Texas
3.New York City, New York
4.San Jose, California
5.Austin, Texas
6.San Diego, California
7.Seattle, Washington
8.Portland, Oregon
9.Denver, Colorado
10.Los Angeles, California
Source: CQ Press City Crime Rankings 2009-2010
Cities with highest crime, 2009
1.Detroit, Michigan
2.Memphis, Tennessee
3.Baltimore, Maryland
4.Washington, DC
5.Atlanta, Georgia
6.Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
7.Indianapolis, Indiana
8.Columbus, Ohio
9.Milwaukee, Wisconsin
10.Dallas, Texas
Source: CQ Press City Crime Rankings 2009-2010
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-10779151
July 28, 2010
by Katie Connolly
Once upon a time, Spanish settlers named the crossing El Paso Del Norte - the pass to the north.
The border city of El Paso, Texas, lies along the Rio Grande, in the chasm between two inhospitable mountains.
Each day, thousands of people in cars, buses and on foot cross the short bridge that connects El Paso with its Mexican sister city, Juarez, one of the world's most dangerous places.
In the past two years, more than 5,000 people have been murdered in Juarez as drug-related crime has soared.
Politicians, including Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott, tend to portray border towns as being pushed to crisis point.
"We see this crime on a daily basis. The federal government must respond more effectively, step up their enforcement and protection of the border before more American blood is shed," Mr Abbott told Fox News.
"It is more dangerous to walk the streets of Juarez, a few blocks from El Paso, than it is to walk the streets of Baghdad. There is a very serious problem that is beginning to bulge at our borders and put American lives at risk."
In mid-July, President Barack Obama ordered 1,200 National Guard troops to patrol the border, just days after a car bomb exploded in northern Juarez, very near El Paso.
Texas Governor Rick Perry called that deployment "grossly insufficient". Many politicians are calling for even more troops.
But the mayor of El Paso, John Cook, isn't one of them.
Second safest city
"The reality is we really don't need the help on this side of the border. We probably have every kind of federal law enforcement agency that you can think of. We're an extremely safe community," Mr Cook says.
Despite Juarez's murder toll, in El Paso, local authorities have recorded just two murders this year. In 2009 there were 11.
"Logically it would seem that if you have violence on one side of the border then you're going to have spillover on the other side," says Mr Cook. "But the reality is that we don't."
According to FBI crime statistics, El Paso is the second safest city in America. Crime rates there have dropped 36% over the past 10 years.
Other cities close to the border, including San Diego in California and Phoenix in Arizona, have similarly experienced declines in violent crime.
Over the same period, federal agencies have beefed up their presence along the border, and a 2,000-mile fence is slowly being constructed.
The fence near El Paso is 16-18 feet (4.9-5.5m) high, made of rust-coloured steel mesh. There are 2,700 border police in this sector, monitoring the border day and night, and a raft of FBI, CIA and drug enforcement agents.
Mr Cook questions the need for more troops, given that current border security levels appear to have been effective at containing drug violence south of the border.
Additionally, both he and local border enforcement officials believe that the leaders of drug cartels do not believe it is in their interest to bring the violence north.
Drug barons know that the response from the US government would be swift and heavy, and further hinder their ability to smuggle drugs into the lucrative American market.
Locals worry that with an even heavier security presence in town, El Paso risks becoming like Cold War Berlin, a riven city, its character disrupted by an imposing divider wall.
They believe politicians who don't live on the border fail to appreciate the deep interconnectedness of cities like Juarez and El Paso, which Mr Cook describes as "one city joined by a border".
So with crime rates declining and the border stable, how has this relatively safe Texan city found itself in the centre of a political firestorm over border violence, and the Obama administration's plans to deal with it?
Politics and fear
Border historian David Romo says it is a pattern. He's seen politicians fanning fears about the border before.
The first calls to build a border fence in El Paso to secure the city came in 1908. Back then, the fear was Chinese immigrants. In World War II, politicians worried about Germans streaming across.
These days, it's Mexicans who fuel unease. Mr Romo says that during times of economic distress, the border and the immigrants who cross it are used as scapegoats. He believes history is repeating itself, and politicians are using the same rhetoric they have for decades.
"It happens that every time an election year comes up, they know that creating fear and hysteria about the border will drive a wedge," Mr Romo says.
"In some ways it's cheap vote-getting. There is this cycle of kind of nativist hysteria that is very profitable for politicians. Nothing gets votes like the politics of fear."
Mr Romo says he's not seen evidence of violence infiltrating the El Paso community. He argues that the immigrants who make a new life across the border are motivated to act within the law because they fear being deported.
While Arizona Governor Jan Brewer blames immigrants, illegal and otherwise, for violent crimes and burglaries, Mr Romo says that, ironically, those immigrants have the most incentive to be law-abiding. They don't want to draw attention.
Bleak outlook
Although fears of spillover violence aren't substantiated by crime data, they are having a real impact on the economy of El Paso.
"From an economic development perspective, it's been very negative for us," Mr Cook said.
He has difficulty convincing new businesses to set up in El Paso because of the violence in Juarez. The first question he gets asked in business meetings is usually "is it safe?"
"They don't pay attention to the fact that we are the second safest large city in the United States," he says.
"We've had people who have looked to locating here with their companies and we have to convince them that it's a safe place. They almost don't believe you."
The longer the violence continues in Juarez, the bleaker the outlook becomes for El Paso, despite its impressive safety record.
For now, there's little more Mayor Cook can do but wait.
America's safest cities, 2009
1.Honolulu, Hawaii
2.El Paso, Texas
3.New York City, New York
4.San Jose, California
5.Austin, Texas
6.San Diego, California
7.Seattle, Washington
8.Portland, Oregon
9.Denver, Colorado
10.Los Angeles, California
Source: CQ Press City Crime Rankings 2009-2010
Cities with highest crime, 2009
1.Detroit, Michigan
2.Memphis, Tennessee
3.Baltimore, Maryland
4.Washington, DC
5.Atlanta, Georgia
6.Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
7.Indianapolis, Indiana
8.Columbus, Ohio
9.Milwaukee, Wisconsin
10.Dallas, Texas
Source: CQ Press City Crime Rankings 2009-2010
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-10779151
Thursday, June 3, 2010
US-Mexico border isn't so dangerous
Associated Press
June 3, 2010
by Martha Mendoza
It's one of the safest parts of America, and it's getting safer.
It's the U.S.-Mexico border, and even as politicians say more federal troops are needed to fight rising violence, government data obtained by The Associated Press show it actually isn't so dangerous after all.
The top four big cities in America with the lowest rates of violent crime are all in border states: San Diego, Phoenix, El Paso and Austin, according to a new FBI report. And an in-house Customs and Border Protection report shows that Border Patrol agents face far less danger than street cops in most U.S. cities.
The Customs and Border Protection study, obtained with a Freedom of Information Act request, shows 3 percent of Border Patrol agents and officers were assaulted last year, mostly when assailants threw rocks at them. That compares with 11 percent of police officers and sheriff's deputies assaulted during the same period, usually with guns or knives.
In addition, violent attacks against agents declined in 2009 along most of the border for the first time in seven years. So far this year assaults are slightly up, but data is incomplete.
"The border is safer now than it's ever been," said U.S. Customs and Border Protection spokesman Lloyd Easterling.
He said one factor is that with fewer jobs available amid the U.S. recession, illegal immigration has dropped. And responding to security concerns after 9-11, the Border Patrol has doubled the number of agents in the region since 2004.
Nonetheless, border lawmakers and governors say their region is under siege and needs more troops.
"Violence in the vicinity of the U.S.-Mexico border continues to increase at an alarming rate. We believe that this violence represents a serious threat to the national security of the United States as well as a serious threat to U.S. citizens that live along the 1,969-mile long border," a dozen bipartisan members of Congress from border states wrote President Obama.
In Arizona, a stringent new immigration law takes effect next month, requiring police to question suspects' immigration status if officers believe they're in the country illegally. Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer said in a televised interview last weekend: "We are out here on the battlefield getting the impact of all this illegal immigration, and all the crime that comes with it."
In response to the concerns from the border states, Obama pledged to send 1,200 National Guard troops to help and spend an extra $500 million on border security.
His one-time rival for the presidency, Arizona Sen. John McCain, said he should send at least 6,000 troops, which are needed because he said Arizona leads the nation in marijuana seizures, suffered 368 kidnappings in 2008 and has the highest property crime rates in the U.S.
But FBI crime reports for 2009 says violent crime in Arizona declined. And violent crimes in southwest border counties are among the lowest in the nation per capita — they've dropped by more than 30 percent in the last two decades. Of America's 25 largest cities, San Diego — with one out of four residents an immigrant — has the lowest number of violent crimes per capita.
Opponents of increased border security are frustrated by descriptions of a wave of violence when the statistics show the region to be relatively safe.
"Politicians are hyping up this incredible fear across the country about the border, but these numbers show these are lies being perpetrated on the American public," said immigrant advocate Isabel Garcia at Tucson-based Derechos Humanos. "The warnings about violence are just an excuse to crack down on migrants who want to work and be with their families."
Even residents of the border region who want more security are surprised by the talk of violence.
"I have to say, a lot of this is way overblown," said Gary Brasher of Tuboc, Arizona, who is president of the Coalition for a Safe and Secure Border.
So why send troops to the region?
"That's really something to ask the White House," Easterling said.
White House spokesman Mike Hammer said "there are other rationales for why those border deployments are occurring" but declined to name any of them. "I would really put this to the Department of Homeland Security," he said.
Homeland Security spokesman Matthew Chandler would not answer the question on the record during a telephone interview with the AP. He later sent a written statement that said more help is needed to build upon "the unprecedented resources the Administration has dedicated over the past 16 months and will serve to expand long-term the successes that have been realized to date."
Governors along the border say improved crime rates don't counter their concerns about risk.
"The federal government currently does not know who is entering our country and when, which obviously creates tremendous security concerns," said Brewer's spokesman Paul Senseman.
And in Texas, "we respond to threats based on risk, not occurrence," said Gov. Rick Perry's spokeswoman Katherine Cesinger. Thus Perry has activated a secret state border protection emergency plan.
"With the safety of Texans on the line, we can't afford to wait," he said.
New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, who ordered the National Guard to patrol the border in his state six weeks ago, is concerned about "the potential for drug cartel violence spilling over the border," spokesman Gilbert Gallegos said.
California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger spokesman Francisco Castillo said that while "we've seen some success," troops are needed "to provide more security along our borders."
Concerns about danger come, in part, from Mexico, where raging cartel violence has taken 23,000 lives in three years, often within view of the U.S. border. There's frequent talk of the potential for that violence to spread across the border, although so far it hasn't happened to any significant degree.
Several high-profile and frightening incidents have added to the fears: Authorities suspect an illegal immigrant working for drug smugglers killed Arizona rancher Robert Krentz in March, and last year Border Patrol agent Robert Rosas, 30, was murdered while on patrol near San Diego.
"Agents now have to question if they will be ambushed," U.S. District Judge M. James Lorenz said as he sentenced a 17-year-old Mexican to 40 years for killing Rosas.
In fact, agents in the San Diego region are less likely to be attacked these days.
"Agent Rosas' death changed the way we do business. Agents are on high alert, we have to be ready. But if you just look at the numbers, assaults here are down 27 percent," said Border Patrol spokesman Jerry Conley, who worked with Rosas. He said that since Rosas' death, officers don't venture into potentially dangerous situations without backup. Solo patrols are rare, and they emphasize safety precautions.
There are exceptions to the trend: Assaults on agents in the Laredo, Texas, region increased from 44 in 2008 to 118 in 2009, and they increased in the neighboring Rio Grande Valley as well. Agents also fired their guns on 49 separate occasions in 2009, a 50 percent increase from 2008.
Customs spokesman Easterling said that while fewer people are trying to sneak across the border, those who do are more likely "engaged in activity other than illegal entry, such as drug smuggling, and are more likely to use violence as a means to help them escape apprehension."
But the bigger picture is one of increased safety. In fiscal year 2009, there were 1,073 violent attacks — mostly thrown rocks, bottles and sticks but also 48 incidents in which a gun was fired — against the 20,119 Border Patrol agents, down from 1,097 violent incidents against 17,819 agents in 2008.
In addition to those agents, another 22,000 officers work at the nation's border crossings and airports, checking people as they enter and exit the country.
It's one of the safest jobs in law enforcement: Last year 17 of them were assaulted, a 74 percent decrease from 2008.
Edward Alden, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, said it's time for lawmakers to reconsider what they'd like to see happening in the region.
"Border security has become the most overused, and least understood, concept in the struggle over what to do about our broken immigration system," he said. "While an election year may not be the best time, the United States finally needs an honest debate over what it means to secure the country's borders."
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5gr25xbV37mkGaC8-iRa16HHp5FlwD9G3SEA01
June 3, 2010
by Martha Mendoza
It's one of the safest parts of America, and it's getting safer.
It's the U.S.-Mexico border, and even as politicians say more federal troops are needed to fight rising violence, government data obtained by The Associated Press show it actually isn't so dangerous after all.
The top four big cities in America with the lowest rates of violent crime are all in border states: San Diego, Phoenix, El Paso and Austin, according to a new FBI report. And an in-house Customs and Border Protection report shows that Border Patrol agents face far less danger than street cops in most U.S. cities.
The Customs and Border Protection study, obtained with a Freedom of Information Act request, shows 3 percent of Border Patrol agents and officers were assaulted last year, mostly when assailants threw rocks at them. That compares with 11 percent of police officers and sheriff's deputies assaulted during the same period, usually with guns or knives.
In addition, violent attacks against agents declined in 2009 along most of the border for the first time in seven years. So far this year assaults are slightly up, but data is incomplete.
"The border is safer now than it's ever been," said U.S. Customs and Border Protection spokesman Lloyd Easterling.
He said one factor is that with fewer jobs available amid the U.S. recession, illegal immigration has dropped. And responding to security concerns after 9-11, the Border Patrol has doubled the number of agents in the region since 2004.
Nonetheless, border lawmakers and governors say their region is under siege and needs more troops.
"Violence in the vicinity of the U.S.-Mexico border continues to increase at an alarming rate. We believe that this violence represents a serious threat to the national security of the United States as well as a serious threat to U.S. citizens that live along the 1,969-mile long border," a dozen bipartisan members of Congress from border states wrote President Obama.
In Arizona, a stringent new immigration law takes effect next month, requiring police to question suspects' immigration status if officers believe they're in the country illegally. Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer said in a televised interview last weekend: "We are out here on the battlefield getting the impact of all this illegal immigration, and all the crime that comes with it."
In response to the concerns from the border states, Obama pledged to send 1,200 National Guard troops to help and spend an extra $500 million on border security.
His one-time rival for the presidency, Arizona Sen. John McCain, said he should send at least 6,000 troops, which are needed because he said Arizona leads the nation in marijuana seizures, suffered 368 kidnappings in 2008 and has the highest property crime rates in the U.S.
But FBI crime reports for 2009 says violent crime in Arizona declined. And violent crimes in southwest border counties are among the lowest in the nation per capita — they've dropped by more than 30 percent in the last two decades. Of America's 25 largest cities, San Diego — with one out of four residents an immigrant — has the lowest number of violent crimes per capita.
Opponents of increased border security are frustrated by descriptions of a wave of violence when the statistics show the region to be relatively safe.
"Politicians are hyping up this incredible fear across the country about the border, but these numbers show these are lies being perpetrated on the American public," said immigrant advocate Isabel Garcia at Tucson-based Derechos Humanos. "The warnings about violence are just an excuse to crack down on migrants who want to work and be with their families."
Even residents of the border region who want more security are surprised by the talk of violence.
"I have to say, a lot of this is way overblown," said Gary Brasher of Tuboc, Arizona, who is president of the Coalition for a Safe and Secure Border.
So why send troops to the region?
"That's really something to ask the White House," Easterling said.
White House spokesman Mike Hammer said "there are other rationales for why those border deployments are occurring" but declined to name any of them. "I would really put this to the Department of Homeland Security," he said.
Homeland Security spokesman Matthew Chandler would not answer the question on the record during a telephone interview with the AP. He later sent a written statement that said more help is needed to build upon "the unprecedented resources the Administration has dedicated over the past 16 months and will serve to expand long-term the successes that have been realized to date."
Governors along the border say improved crime rates don't counter their concerns about risk.
"The federal government currently does not know who is entering our country and when, which obviously creates tremendous security concerns," said Brewer's spokesman Paul Senseman.
And in Texas, "we respond to threats based on risk, not occurrence," said Gov. Rick Perry's spokeswoman Katherine Cesinger. Thus Perry has activated a secret state border protection emergency plan.
"With the safety of Texans on the line, we can't afford to wait," he said.
New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, who ordered the National Guard to patrol the border in his state six weeks ago, is concerned about "the potential for drug cartel violence spilling over the border," spokesman Gilbert Gallegos said.
California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger spokesman Francisco Castillo said that while "we've seen some success," troops are needed "to provide more security along our borders."
Concerns about danger come, in part, from Mexico, where raging cartel violence has taken 23,000 lives in three years, often within view of the U.S. border. There's frequent talk of the potential for that violence to spread across the border, although so far it hasn't happened to any significant degree.
Several high-profile and frightening incidents have added to the fears: Authorities suspect an illegal immigrant working for drug smugglers killed Arizona rancher Robert Krentz in March, and last year Border Patrol agent Robert Rosas, 30, was murdered while on patrol near San Diego.
"Agents now have to question if they will be ambushed," U.S. District Judge M. James Lorenz said as he sentenced a 17-year-old Mexican to 40 years for killing Rosas.
In fact, agents in the San Diego region are less likely to be attacked these days.
"Agent Rosas' death changed the way we do business. Agents are on high alert, we have to be ready. But if you just look at the numbers, assaults here are down 27 percent," said Border Patrol spokesman Jerry Conley, who worked with Rosas. He said that since Rosas' death, officers don't venture into potentially dangerous situations without backup. Solo patrols are rare, and they emphasize safety precautions.
There are exceptions to the trend: Assaults on agents in the Laredo, Texas, region increased from 44 in 2008 to 118 in 2009, and they increased in the neighboring Rio Grande Valley as well. Agents also fired their guns on 49 separate occasions in 2009, a 50 percent increase from 2008.
Customs spokesman Easterling said that while fewer people are trying to sneak across the border, those who do are more likely "engaged in activity other than illegal entry, such as drug smuggling, and are more likely to use violence as a means to help them escape apprehension."
But the bigger picture is one of increased safety. In fiscal year 2009, there were 1,073 violent attacks — mostly thrown rocks, bottles and sticks but also 48 incidents in which a gun was fired — against the 20,119 Border Patrol agents, down from 1,097 violent incidents against 17,819 agents in 2008.
In addition to those agents, another 22,000 officers work at the nation's border crossings and airports, checking people as they enter and exit the country.
It's one of the safest jobs in law enforcement: Last year 17 of them were assaulted, a 74 percent decrease from 2008.
Edward Alden, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, said it's time for lawmakers to reconsider what they'd like to see happening in the region.
"Border security has become the most overused, and least understood, concept in the struggle over what to do about our broken immigration system," he said. "While an election year may not be the best time, the United States finally needs an honest debate over what it means to secure the country's borders."
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5gr25xbV37mkGaC8-iRa16HHp5FlwD9G3SEA01
Saturday, May 22, 2010
Quiet border towns don't live up to their notoriety
Los Angeles Times
May 13, 2010
by Nicholas Riccardi
Reporting from Nogales, Ariz. — On the other side of the metal barrier that separates this town from its namesake in Mexico, there have already been more than 120 homicides this year, including the assassination of the assistant police chief.
In this sleepy town of 21,000, there hasn't been a killing in three years.
"If you look at it statistically, if you look at the community as a whole, it's very, very safe," said Police Chief Jeffrey Kirkham.
Despite the drug war that has claimed thousands of lives in Mexico, communities along the U.S. side of the 2,000-mile southern border have shown virtually no increase in crime for several years.
There are dozens of towns, counties and cities along the border and no single measure of crime along the whole frontier. But a review of crime statistics for the largest communities and interviews with law enforcement officials from Texas to California show that, despite a widespread perception that the violence in Mexico has spread north, U.S. border communities are fairly secure. Some have even become safer.
"It's not spilling over to our side of the border," said William Lansdowne, police chief in San Diego, where violent crime has dropped 8% in the last three years. "We police it really well."
At a Senate hearing last month, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano — who, as Arizona governor, called for the deployment of National Guard troops to control the border — said the border was "as secure now as it has ever been."
That's not to say that border towns like Nogales are Mayberry RFD. The police tend to the same car accidents and domestic disputes as many small-town departments, but they also spend time chasing down 25-pound bales of marijuana that smugglers hoist over the border fence.
Plenty of tension remains along the border as well. Highly armed Mexican drug cartels continue to smuggle narcotics through the vast desert, especially in lightly populated southern Arizona. There are occasional eruptions of violence, such as the slaying of a Border Patrol agent tracking illegal immigrants outside San Diego last year and the fatal shooting of an Arizona rancher in March, possibly by a drug smuggler.
The latter incident is often cited by supporters of Arizona's controversial new anti-illegal immigration law. Opponents of the law say it could lead to widespread racial profiling, but Republican Gov. Jan Brewer voiced the views of many of the measure's supporters when she signed it into law last month.
"We cannot delay while the destruction happening south of our international border creeps its way north," she said.
At a recent forum in San Diego, U.S. Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Alan Bersin said politicians and the media exaggerated the dangers along the border.
"I think people on the border are becoming increasingly dissatisfied with the kind of political reaction that can generate a law like the Arizona law," Bersin said. "People on the border are periodically the subject of media attention that focuses on a border that most of us instinctively know is not out of control."
Laredo, Texas, has had two homicides this year, neither of which was related to the drug war across the border. Police spokesman Joe Baeza said the city had a hard time convincing people from outside the area of the relative calm.
"We get so many phone calls from people all over the country worried to come down here and do business because they think [the drug war] is happening on our side — and it's not," Baeza said. He added that Laredo saw a rise in violence earlier in the decade, but additional federal agents and smart policing stamped it out.
"The law enforcement community are really busting their backs to make sure that doesn't happen on this side, and the proof is in the pudding," Baeza said.
The Mexican border metropolis of Ciudad Juarez now has a higher murder rate than Baghdad as drug cartels battle for turf. Its neighbor on the U.S. side, El Paso, has long been one of the nation's safest big cities, with more than 600,000 people. Last year it was ranked second-safest behind Honolulu.
"Life in El Paso is good," said police spokesman Michael Baranyay, citing the one homicide the city has logged this year. "I don't think their issues over there are the same. They're not trying to get territory over here, they're trying to get territory over there."
In Yuma County, on the southwestern edge of Arizona, smugglers used to shoot at sheriff's deputies from across the Colorado River. But an influx of border patrol agents — there are now 18,500 on the entire border, more than ever before — chased crime away, said Capt. Eben Bratcher.
"It's tapered off to close to nothing now," he said.
There may be a cost to success, according to those who fight crime here.
"As the ports of entry and some of the other choke points have locked down, that's raised the stakes," said Lt. Jeff Palmer, head of the Pima County Sheriff's Border Crime Unit, which patrols the deserts between Tucson and Mexico. "People are more willing to commit violent acts to get their materials across."
That may be what's happening in Cochise County, a swath of rugged desert in the southeastern corner of the state that has been a favorite path for illegal immigrants and drug smugglers since the federal government fortified the California border in the 1990s.
Robert Krentz, a devout Catholic known for giving food and water to migrants who crossed his ranch near the border, was found shot to death in March. Footprints from the scene led into Mexico.
Crime statistics have been flat in Cochise County for a decade. But Carol Capas, a spokeswoman for the county sheriff's office, said that obscured a rise in border violence.
Burglaries in the rural area where Krentz lived have nearly doubled in the last year. Nearby, one man was tied up at gunpoint when he went to help apparently stranded migrants. "The crime is spilling over," she said. "I don't know that we're going to catch a break here."
When Kirkham left law enforcement agencies in Phoenix's suburbs to become chief in Nogales, his colleagues thought he was crazy and entering a war zone. Now Kirkham laughs. The dark side of immigration and drug trafficking is more visible near Phoenix, 180 miles north, where migrants are often held for ransom by smugglers.
"All those issues don't hang by the border," Kirkham said. The smugglers "want to get away from it as fast as possible."
Indeed, the cartels have an interest in the peace and quiet of the U.S. side of the border — sometimes they use it as a safe zone for their operations. For several months, Kirkham said, his department monitored three suspected hit men from Mexico who stayed in a posh suburb just north of town, journeying back to Nogales' southern neighbor, apparently to perform assassinations.
The men, who were eventually arrested in Mexico, were on their best behavior in the U.S., he said.
http://articles.latimes.com/2010/may/13/nation/la-na-border-crime-20100514
May 13, 2010
by Nicholas Riccardi
Reporting from Nogales, Ariz. — On the other side of the metal barrier that separates this town from its namesake in Mexico, there have already been more than 120 homicides this year, including the assassination of the assistant police chief.
In this sleepy town of 21,000, there hasn't been a killing in three years.
"If you look at it statistically, if you look at the community as a whole, it's very, very safe," said Police Chief Jeffrey Kirkham.
Despite the drug war that has claimed thousands of lives in Mexico, communities along the U.S. side of the 2,000-mile southern border have shown virtually no increase in crime for several years.
There are dozens of towns, counties and cities along the border and no single measure of crime along the whole frontier. But a review of crime statistics for the largest communities and interviews with law enforcement officials from Texas to California show that, despite a widespread perception that the violence in Mexico has spread north, U.S. border communities are fairly secure. Some have even become safer.
"It's not spilling over to our side of the border," said William Lansdowne, police chief in San Diego, where violent crime has dropped 8% in the last three years. "We police it really well."
At a Senate hearing last month, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano — who, as Arizona governor, called for the deployment of National Guard troops to control the border — said the border was "as secure now as it has ever been."
That's not to say that border towns like Nogales are Mayberry RFD. The police tend to the same car accidents and domestic disputes as many small-town departments, but they also spend time chasing down 25-pound bales of marijuana that smugglers hoist over the border fence.
Plenty of tension remains along the border as well. Highly armed Mexican drug cartels continue to smuggle narcotics through the vast desert, especially in lightly populated southern Arizona. There are occasional eruptions of violence, such as the slaying of a Border Patrol agent tracking illegal immigrants outside San Diego last year and the fatal shooting of an Arizona rancher in March, possibly by a drug smuggler.
The latter incident is often cited by supporters of Arizona's controversial new anti-illegal immigration law. Opponents of the law say it could lead to widespread racial profiling, but Republican Gov. Jan Brewer voiced the views of many of the measure's supporters when she signed it into law last month.
"We cannot delay while the destruction happening south of our international border creeps its way north," she said.
At a recent forum in San Diego, U.S. Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Alan Bersin said politicians and the media exaggerated the dangers along the border.
"I think people on the border are becoming increasingly dissatisfied with the kind of political reaction that can generate a law like the Arizona law," Bersin said. "People on the border are periodically the subject of media attention that focuses on a border that most of us instinctively know is not out of control."
Laredo, Texas, has had two homicides this year, neither of which was related to the drug war across the border. Police spokesman Joe Baeza said the city had a hard time convincing people from outside the area of the relative calm.
"We get so many phone calls from people all over the country worried to come down here and do business because they think [the drug war] is happening on our side — and it's not," Baeza said. He added that Laredo saw a rise in violence earlier in the decade, but additional federal agents and smart policing stamped it out.
"The law enforcement community are really busting their backs to make sure that doesn't happen on this side, and the proof is in the pudding," Baeza said.
The Mexican border metropolis of Ciudad Juarez now has a higher murder rate than Baghdad as drug cartels battle for turf. Its neighbor on the U.S. side, El Paso, has long been one of the nation's safest big cities, with more than 600,000 people. Last year it was ranked second-safest behind Honolulu.
"Life in El Paso is good," said police spokesman Michael Baranyay, citing the one homicide the city has logged this year. "I don't think their issues over there are the same. They're not trying to get territory over here, they're trying to get territory over there."
In Yuma County, on the southwestern edge of Arizona, smugglers used to shoot at sheriff's deputies from across the Colorado River. But an influx of border patrol agents — there are now 18,500 on the entire border, more than ever before — chased crime away, said Capt. Eben Bratcher.
"It's tapered off to close to nothing now," he said.
There may be a cost to success, according to those who fight crime here.
"As the ports of entry and some of the other choke points have locked down, that's raised the stakes," said Lt. Jeff Palmer, head of the Pima County Sheriff's Border Crime Unit, which patrols the deserts between Tucson and Mexico. "People are more willing to commit violent acts to get their materials across."
That may be what's happening in Cochise County, a swath of rugged desert in the southeastern corner of the state that has been a favorite path for illegal immigrants and drug smugglers since the federal government fortified the California border in the 1990s.
Robert Krentz, a devout Catholic known for giving food and water to migrants who crossed his ranch near the border, was found shot to death in March. Footprints from the scene led into Mexico.
Crime statistics have been flat in Cochise County for a decade. But Carol Capas, a spokeswoman for the county sheriff's office, said that obscured a rise in border violence.
Burglaries in the rural area where Krentz lived have nearly doubled in the last year. Nearby, one man was tied up at gunpoint when he went to help apparently stranded migrants. "The crime is spilling over," she said. "I don't know that we're going to catch a break here."
When Kirkham left law enforcement agencies in Phoenix's suburbs to become chief in Nogales, his colleagues thought he was crazy and entering a war zone. Now Kirkham laughs. The dark side of immigration and drug trafficking is more visible near Phoenix, 180 miles north, where migrants are often held for ransom by smugglers.
"All those issues don't hang by the border," Kirkham said. The smugglers "want to get away from it as fast as possible."
Indeed, the cartels have an interest in the peace and quiet of the U.S. side of the border — sometimes they use it as a safe zone for their operations. For several months, Kirkham said, his department monitored three suspected hit men from Mexico who stayed in a posh suburb just north of town, journeying back to Nogales' southern neighbor, apparently to perform assassinations.
The men, who were eventually arrested in Mexico, were on their best behavior in the U.S., he said.
http://articles.latimes.com/2010/may/13/nation/la-na-border-crime-20100514
Monday, May 17, 2010
After dismissing fence, McCain touts it in ad
Associated Press
May 13, 2010
by Jonathan Cooper
PHOENIX — Three years after dismissing the effectiveness of building a fence on the U.S.-Mexico border, Arizona Sen. John McCain is airing a campaign ad in which he declares: "complete the danged fence."
The 30-second ad shows McCain walking along Arizona's southern border with Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu and ticking off crimes potentially associated with illegal immigration, including drug and human smuggling, home invasions and murder.
Babeu replies, "We're outmanned," and touts McCain's border-security plan. The ad ends with the sheriff telling McCain that "you're one of us."
In a 2007 interview with Vanity Fair, McCain suggested a border fence wouldn't be much help in securing the border, saying: "I think the fence is least effective. But I'll build the g--d----- fence if they want it."
Brian Rogers, McCain's campaign spokesman, said the senator has long supported a fence but recognizes that it must be used in conjunction with other tactics, particularly in remote desert areas. Rogers pointed to a 2007 compromise immigration reform bill, which McCain co-sponsored, calling for 370 miles of fencing.
The ad, which has been airing in Arizona for about a week, has been subject to ridicule online and on cable television, in part for its contrived dialogue. U.S. Rep. John Shadegg, R-Ariz., shared a laugh with hosts of MSNBC's "Morning Joe" after watching the ad Thursday, and the Democratic National Committee released a statement saying McCain's tactics "reek of political desperation."
Former Rep. J.D. Hayworth is challenging McCain from the right for the GOP nomination in an August primary. His campaign has attacked McCain's record on illegal immigration, among other issues, and says he has "flip-flopped" on the border fence issue.
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hSbnwTGhdLLKp0gvxRgH9ZbabY-QD9FM6PG00
May 13, 2010
by Jonathan Cooper
PHOENIX — Three years after dismissing the effectiveness of building a fence on the U.S.-Mexico border, Arizona Sen. John McCain is airing a campaign ad in which he declares: "complete the danged fence."
The 30-second ad shows McCain walking along Arizona's southern border with Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu and ticking off crimes potentially associated with illegal immigration, including drug and human smuggling, home invasions and murder.
Babeu replies, "We're outmanned," and touts McCain's border-security plan. The ad ends with the sheriff telling McCain that "you're one of us."
In a 2007 interview with Vanity Fair, McCain suggested a border fence wouldn't be much help in securing the border, saying: "I think the fence is least effective. But I'll build the g--d----- fence if they want it."
Brian Rogers, McCain's campaign spokesman, said the senator has long supported a fence but recognizes that it must be used in conjunction with other tactics, particularly in remote desert areas. Rogers pointed to a 2007 compromise immigration reform bill, which McCain co-sponsored, calling for 370 miles of fencing.
The ad, which has been airing in Arizona for about a week, has been subject to ridicule online and on cable television, in part for its contrived dialogue. U.S. Rep. John Shadegg, R-Ariz., shared a laugh with hosts of MSNBC's "Morning Joe" after watching the ad Thursday, and the Democratic National Committee released a statement saying McCain's tactics "reek of political desperation."
Former Rep. J.D. Hayworth is challenging McCain from the right for the GOP nomination in an August primary. His campaign has attacked McCain's record on illegal immigration, among other issues, and says he has "flip-flopped" on the border fence issue.
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hSbnwTGhdLLKp0gvxRgH9ZbabY-QD9FM6PG00
Thursday, April 8, 2010
Customs chief: Violence not crossing border
San Antonio Express News
April 8, 2010
by Gary Martin
WASHINGTON — U.S. border cities are not experiencing spillover violence from Mexico and extra security efforts must include measures to expedite legitimate trade between the two countries, the new head of Customs and Border Protection said Wednesday.
Commissioner Alan Bersin said U.S. security measures on borders with Mexico and Canada should be carried out in a way that improves the efficiency of trade so America can remain competitive globally.
Securing the border and expediting trade are not mutually exclusive — “The two go hand in hand,” he said in a meeting with reporters.
Bersin took office last week on a recess appointment by President Barack Obama.
A former U.S. attorney in San Diego, Calif., Bersin said the escalation of violence in Mexico is a result of President Felípe Calderón's crackdown on drug cartels.
The violence has claimed the lives of U.S. consulate workers in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, and smugglers are suspected in the death of an Arizona man March 27 on his border ranch.
But incidents of violence in U.S. cities near Mexico cannot be compared with the level of lawlessness across the border, Bersin said.
“When we say ‘spillover violence' we are speaking of the kind of violence that we are seeing in Mexico that we haven't seen in the United States. That's not to deny the reality of violence that's attributable to organized crime based in Mexico,” Bersin said.
Mexican officials say drug violence has claimed the lives of nearly 18,000 people since Calderón's crackdown began in 2006.
Juárez emerged as a battleground last year, and a wave of gunbattles and executions beginning in February in the northern Mexican states of Tamaulipas and Nuevo León prompted the U.S. State Department to issue a travel warning there.
Texas officials, including Gov. Rick Perry and Sens. Kay Bailey Hutchison and John Cornyn, have asked the Obama administration to send the National Guard and other resources to the border.
Cornyn said Bersin's claim of “no spillover violence is evidence that the Obama administration is sticking its collective head in the sand with regard to the safety of our border communities.”
Bersin and Cornyn are in agreement, however, that border security should not impede legitimate trade. Bersin said prescreening of travelers and shippers could help take pressure off border crossings.
U.S. trade with Mexico exceeds $1 billion per day, according to U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk.
Even with prescreening, land ports of entry on both borders need $6 billion in upgrades and repairs and 5,000 more customs agents, said Monica Weisberg Stewart, a McAllen businesswoman who chairs the Texas Border Coalition committee on border security.
The coalition is a group of community leaders from Brownsville to El Paso who act as a lobbying arm for border cities and chambers of commerce.
“The proof is in the pudding,” Weisberg Stewart said. “Let's see him put the resources and manpower at the ports of entry.”
http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/state/New_CBP_head_border_security_helps_commerce.html?showFullArticle=y
April 8, 2010
by Gary Martin
WASHINGTON — U.S. border cities are not experiencing spillover violence from Mexico and extra security efforts must include measures to expedite legitimate trade between the two countries, the new head of Customs and Border Protection said Wednesday.
Commissioner Alan Bersin said U.S. security measures on borders with Mexico and Canada should be carried out in a way that improves the efficiency of trade so America can remain competitive globally.
Securing the border and expediting trade are not mutually exclusive — “The two go hand in hand,” he said in a meeting with reporters.
Bersin took office last week on a recess appointment by President Barack Obama.
A former U.S. attorney in San Diego, Calif., Bersin said the escalation of violence in Mexico is a result of President Felípe Calderón's crackdown on drug cartels.
The violence has claimed the lives of U.S. consulate workers in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, and smugglers are suspected in the death of an Arizona man March 27 on his border ranch.
But incidents of violence in U.S. cities near Mexico cannot be compared with the level of lawlessness across the border, Bersin said.
“When we say ‘spillover violence' we are speaking of the kind of violence that we are seeing in Mexico that we haven't seen in the United States. That's not to deny the reality of violence that's attributable to organized crime based in Mexico,” Bersin said.
Mexican officials say drug violence has claimed the lives of nearly 18,000 people since Calderón's crackdown began in 2006.
Juárez emerged as a battleground last year, and a wave of gunbattles and executions beginning in February in the northern Mexican states of Tamaulipas and Nuevo León prompted the U.S. State Department to issue a travel warning there.
Texas officials, including Gov. Rick Perry and Sens. Kay Bailey Hutchison and John Cornyn, have asked the Obama administration to send the National Guard and other resources to the border.
Cornyn said Bersin's claim of “no spillover violence is evidence that the Obama administration is sticking its collective head in the sand with regard to the safety of our border communities.”
Bersin and Cornyn are in agreement, however, that border security should not impede legitimate trade. Bersin said prescreening of travelers and shippers could help take pressure off border crossings.
U.S. trade with Mexico exceeds $1 billion per day, according to U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk.
Even with prescreening, land ports of entry on both borders need $6 billion in upgrades and repairs and 5,000 more customs agents, said Monica Weisberg Stewart, a McAllen businesswoman who chairs the Texas Border Coalition committee on border security.
The coalition is a group of community leaders from Brownsville to El Paso who act as a lobbying arm for border cities and chambers of commerce.
“The proof is in the pudding,” Weisberg Stewart said. “Let's see him put the resources and manpower at the ports of entry.”
http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/state/New_CBP_head_border_security_helps_commerce.html?showFullArticle=y
Thursday, March 26, 2009
Oversold? Some lawmen, politicians say cartel spillover threat exaggerated
The Monitor
March 25, 2009
by Jeremy Roebuck
ZAPATA - The nearly 50 deputies who make up the Zapata County Sheriff's Office have encountered Zetas, busted narcotics smugglers and grappled with dangerous gangs over the past several years, Sheriff Sigifredo Gonzalez says.
But that's nothing compared to the potential threat he sees on his community's horizon.
With Mexican drug trafficking organizations battling their country's government and each other just south of the border, the threat that violence could spill over into his rural jurisdiction weighs ever heavier on his mind.
"If you could see all the intelligence we get, you'd have no doubt," he said. "You can't ignore it - for the sake of the 13-year-old girls whose homes are invaded by masked men looking for drugs."
So far, talk like that has brought millions of dollars in state and federal funding to the officers of border sheriffs like Gonzalez and a pledge from Gov. Rick Perry to seek at least $110 million more to secure the state's southernmost counties before the end of the state legislative session.
Federal lawmakers have also devoted unprecedented attention in recent weeks to the "border situation," hosting a flurry of congressional hearings and public news conferences on the threat that violence could spill over.
But crime statistics collected by the Texas Department of Public Safety suggest the hand-wringing and speech-making may distort the reality on the state's southern frontier, according to a handful of border politicians and lawmen who are urging the state to reconsider the way it doles out border security funding.
A cadre of elected officials and rural authorities has exaggerated the threat Mexican drug cartels pose to border communities, they say, to score points with voters and bring home grant money to their otherwise cash-strapped agencies.
That outsized rhetoric has harmed economic development in border communities and unreasonably scared local residents, McAllen police Chief Victor Rodriguez said in a speech this week before the annual Texas Homeland Security Conference.
"We owe Texans and we owe our border communities responsible action that is based in reality - not rhetoric," he said.
Eagle Pass Mayor Chad Foster went further:
"There are some entities out there that think that the louder they scream, the more funding they're going to get."
SPILLOVER?
Since taking office in 2006, Mexican President Felipe Calderón has made rooting out his nation's entrenched drug trafficking organizations a top priority. The effort, while showing some signs of success in disrupting drug distribution routes, has spurred outbreaks of violence along his country's northern border.
Cities such as Ciudad Juarez, across from El Paso, and Tijuana, south of San Diego, have been the hardest hit, accounting for most of Mexico's 7,000 drug-related killings since January 2007. But so far, that violence has largely remained south of the border.
Starting in 2005, Perry and a group known as the Texas Border Sheriff's Coalition launched a vocal public campaign to alert federal authorities to the threats in their home state. The governor granted the group $6 million divided equally among the counties to beef up equipment and pay for overtime to respond to the possible threat of spillover.
Millions of dollars more have followed since then - including part of a $110 million border security package Perry helped push through the state Legislature during the last session.
Border lawmen like Hudspeth County Sheriff Arvin West say every dime of that funding has been well spent because the spillover effects are already here.
In recent months, his deputies have responded to two incidents in which county residents disappeared after visiting Mexico. Although his investigators haven't linked either case to drug violence, West said during an interview Tuesday that he couldn't rule out the possibility of such a connection.
Elsewhere along the border, law enforcement agencies continue to receive calls of home invasions and drug-related kidnappings every month.
The governor's office has pointed to these crimes as evidence of a growing threat, but the DPS crime statistics paint a calmer picture of life in rural counties like Hudspeth, whose population is estimated to be just over 3,000.
Between 2005 and 2007, West's office reported only 137 index crimes - which include law violations such as murder, aggravated assault, burglary and auto theft. The crime rate there has remained stable at between 40 and 50 index crimes a year, according to the DPS statistics.
In Zapata County, index crimes dropped from 325 reported in 2005 to 267 reported two years later - an almost 18 percent decrease.
And despite being located just across the border from the epicenter of Mexican drug violence - Ciudad Juarez - El Paso remains one of the safest metropolitan areas in the United States.
West, the Hudspeth County sheriff, maintains, however, that the crime stats aren't an accurate depiction of what the grant money has done for his county. Deputies working border security details have referred dozens of cases to federal agencies and there's no telling how many crimes they have deterred just by having more peace officers on the street, he said.
"The threat has been exaggerated?" he said during a Tuesday interview. "Tell that to the 6,000 dead ones over there. Tell that to the ones that have been kidnapped on our side."
STICKS AND STONES
Those who wish to reform border security spending define the spillover threat differently.
While Hidalgo County Sheriff Lupe Treviño concedes his jurisdiction has had its fair share of drug-related crimes in the past several years, he points out that the day-to-day narcotics violence rarely involves Mexican cartel members and can be seen in any major U.S. city with a drug problem. Average Hidalgo County residents are no more or less safe than they were before Calderón began his cartel war.
Treviño advocates stricter auditing of how state grant money is spent and has argued more assistance should go to counties such as Cameron, El Paso and Webb, which lie on major smuggling routes near the state's ports of entry.
"Those types of crimes have been occurring for as long as drugs have been shipped across the border," the sheriff said. "If the sky is falling, then you better say it. But you don't want to be Chicken Littles either."
http://www.themonitor.com/articles/border_24687___article.html/state_threat.html
March 25, 2009
by Jeremy Roebuck
ZAPATA - The nearly 50 deputies who make up the Zapata County Sheriff's Office have encountered Zetas, busted narcotics smugglers and grappled with dangerous gangs over the past several years, Sheriff Sigifredo Gonzalez says.
But that's nothing compared to the potential threat he sees on his community's horizon.
With Mexican drug trafficking organizations battling their country's government and each other just south of the border, the threat that violence could spill over into his rural jurisdiction weighs ever heavier on his mind.
"If you could see all the intelligence we get, you'd have no doubt," he said. "You can't ignore it - for the sake of the 13-year-old girls whose homes are invaded by masked men looking for drugs."
So far, talk like that has brought millions of dollars in state and federal funding to the officers of border sheriffs like Gonzalez and a pledge from Gov. Rick Perry to seek at least $110 million more to secure the state's southernmost counties before the end of the state legislative session.
Federal lawmakers have also devoted unprecedented attention in recent weeks to the "border situation," hosting a flurry of congressional hearings and public news conferences on the threat that violence could spill over.
But crime statistics collected by the Texas Department of Public Safety suggest the hand-wringing and speech-making may distort the reality on the state's southern frontier, according to a handful of border politicians and lawmen who are urging the state to reconsider the way it doles out border security funding.
A cadre of elected officials and rural authorities has exaggerated the threat Mexican drug cartels pose to border communities, they say, to score points with voters and bring home grant money to their otherwise cash-strapped agencies.
That outsized rhetoric has harmed economic development in border communities and unreasonably scared local residents, McAllen police Chief Victor Rodriguez said in a speech this week before the annual Texas Homeland Security Conference.
"We owe Texans and we owe our border communities responsible action that is based in reality - not rhetoric," he said.
Eagle Pass Mayor Chad Foster went further:
"There are some entities out there that think that the louder they scream, the more funding they're going to get."
SPILLOVER?
Since taking office in 2006, Mexican President Felipe Calderón has made rooting out his nation's entrenched drug trafficking organizations a top priority. The effort, while showing some signs of success in disrupting drug distribution routes, has spurred outbreaks of violence along his country's northern border.
Cities such as Ciudad Juarez, across from El Paso, and Tijuana, south of San Diego, have been the hardest hit, accounting for most of Mexico's 7,000 drug-related killings since January 2007. But so far, that violence has largely remained south of the border.
Starting in 2005, Perry and a group known as the Texas Border Sheriff's Coalition launched a vocal public campaign to alert federal authorities to the threats in their home state. The governor granted the group $6 million divided equally among the counties to beef up equipment and pay for overtime to respond to the possible threat of spillover.
Millions of dollars more have followed since then - including part of a $110 million border security package Perry helped push through the state Legislature during the last session.
Border lawmen like Hudspeth County Sheriff Arvin West say every dime of that funding has been well spent because the spillover effects are already here.
In recent months, his deputies have responded to two incidents in which county residents disappeared after visiting Mexico. Although his investigators haven't linked either case to drug violence, West said during an interview Tuesday that he couldn't rule out the possibility of such a connection.
Elsewhere along the border, law enforcement agencies continue to receive calls of home invasions and drug-related kidnappings every month.
The governor's office has pointed to these crimes as evidence of a growing threat, but the DPS crime statistics paint a calmer picture of life in rural counties like Hudspeth, whose population is estimated to be just over 3,000.
Between 2005 and 2007, West's office reported only 137 index crimes - which include law violations such as murder, aggravated assault, burglary and auto theft. The crime rate there has remained stable at between 40 and 50 index crimes a year, according to the DPS statistics.
In Zapata County, index crimes dropped from 325 reported in 2005 to 267 reported two years later - an almost 18 percent decrease.
And despite being located just across the border from the epicenter of Mexican drug violence - Ciudad Juarez - El Paso remains one of the safest metropolitan areas in the United States.
West, the Hudspeth County sheriff, maintains, however, that the crime stats aren't an accurate depiction of what the grant money has done for his county. Deputies working border security details have referred dozens of cases to federal agencies and there's no telling how many crimes they have deterred just by having more peace officers on the street, he said.
"The threat has been exaggerated?" he said during a Tuesday interview. "Tell that to the 6,000 dead ones over there. Tell that to the ones that have been kidnapped on our side."
STICKS AND STONES
Those who wish to reform border security spending define the spillover threat differently.
While Hidalgo County Sheriff Lupe Treviño concedes his jurisdiction has had its fair share of drug-related crimes in the past several years, he points out that the day-to-day narcotics violence rarely involves Mexican cartel members and can be seen in any major U.S. city with a drug problem. Average Hidalgo County residents are no more or less safe than they were before Calderón began his cartel war.
Treviño advocates stricter auditing of how state grant money is spent and has argued more assistance should go to counties such as Cameron, El Paso and Webb, which lie on major smuggling routes near the state's ports of entry.
"Those types of crimes have been occurring for as long as drugs have been shipped across the border," the sheriff said. "If the sky is falling, then you better say it. But you don't want to be Chicken Littles either."
http://www.themonitor.com/articles/border_24687___article.html/state_threat.html
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)