Texas border sheriffs participated in a press conference for the roll-out of a new report, Texas Border Security: A Strategic Military Assessment, written by Barry McCaffrey and Robert Scales who [...]]]> Serious national security experts say that the southern border is dangerously insecure, and Washington is in denial about the danger, ignoring Mexican narco-terrorism at America’s peril.

Texas border sheriffs participated in a press conference for the roll-out of a new report, Texas Border Security: A Strategic Military Assessment, written by Barry McCaffrey and Robert Scales who were also present.

The report warns that Mexico’s crime syndicates have escalated their aims and now want to control territory within the United States (as they already have succeeded in doing in southern Arizona) to make narco-business easier: “In effect, the cartels seek to create a “sanitary zone” inside the Texas border — one county deep — that will provide sanctuary from Mexican law enforcement and, at the same time, enable the cartels to transform Texas’ border counties into narcotics transshipment points for continued transport and distribution into the continental United States.”

Below, an illustration from the new report.

Texas Border Security Report, KFDM-TV, Beaumont TX, September 26, 2011

AUSTIN — From Texas Department of Agriculture – In an effort to protect U.S. citizens from spillover cartel violence while continuing to emphasize the critical need for enhanced Texas/Mexico border security, Agriculture Commissioner Todd Staples today released “Texas Border Security: A Strategic Military Assessment.” The independent study, co-authored by retired General Barry McCaffrey and retired Major-General Robert Scales, was unveiled as part of the Protect Your Texas Border Summit at the Capitol.

Click here to read the entire Texas Border Security Report.

“Washington keeps telling us our border is more secure than ever, but this detailed military assessment, by two of America’s top generals, offers proof to the contrary,” Commissioner Staples said. “It’s time to shed the cloak of denial and protect our citizens and national security. Would Washington stand by and allow terrorists from Canada to make daily incursions into New York? The answer is a resounding, ‘No.’ We expect and demand that same level of protection in Texas. It’s time for Washington to uphold its constitutional duty to protect Americans on their home soil.”

Commissioned jointly by the Texas Department of Agriculture and the Texas Department of Public Safety, the report offers a military perspective on how to best incorporate strategic, operational and tactical measures to secure the increasingly hostile border regions along the Rio Grande River. It also provides sobering evidence of why Texas landowners and officials have called for increased federal support to defend our southern border.

“During the past two years, the southwestern United States has become increasingly threatened by the spread of Latin American and Mexican cartel organized crime,” said Gen. Barry McCaffrey (Ret.). “I congratulate Commissioner Staples for his vision in creating awareness of the inadequate attention paid to violence stemming from the drug cartels in Mexico and Latin America.”

“The violence and ongoing threat to our security reflect a change in the strategic intent of the cartels to move their operations into the United States,” said Maj. Gen. Robert Scales (Ret.). “American cities and rural areas now have Latin American drug, gun and human smuggling cartels operating inside our borders.”

Among the generals’ findings were:

• Living and conducting business in a Texas border county is tantamount to living in a warzone in which civil authorities, law enforcement agencies, as well as citizens, are under attack around the clock.

• Criminality spawned in Mexico is spilling over into the United States. Texas is the tactical close combat zone and frontline in this conflict. Texans have been assaulted by cross-border gangs and narco-terrorist activities.

• Federal authorities are reluctant to admit to the increasing cross-border campaign by narco-terrorists.

• One reason for this disparity between reported and actual cartel activity in Texas is that the 17,000 local and state law enforcement agencies that provide data to the Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) are not required to categorize these crimes as “drug related.”

• Reform at that operational level is dependent on bringing more “boots on the ground” to the fight for border security.

• Texas is the frontline in this escalating war and the potential consequences of success or failure will affect our entire nation.

To review the report in its entirety click here or go to TexasAgriculture.gov and click on popular links.

The 82nd Texas Legislature, via House Bill 4, directed the Texas Department of Agriculture to fund an assessment of the impact of illegal activity along the Texas/Mexico border on rural landowners and the agriculture industry. Commissioner Staples immediately partnered with the Texas Department of Public Safety to commission Generals McCaffrey and Scales for this important study.

About the Generals

General Barry McCaffrey is the former Director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy under President Bill Clinton and former Commander of all U.S. troops in Central and South America. Retired Major-General Robert Scales is the former Commandant of the United States Army War College.

First, it is suspicious that this news was released on a Friday in late August, which makes it look like the Obama administration hopes it will pass unnoticed.

The White House spin is that the extreme violation of sovereignty [...]]]> This item is definitely for the “What could possibly go wrong?” file. The idea is crazy and dangerous.

First, it is suspicious that this news was released on a Friday in late August, which makes it look like the Obama administration hopes it will pass unnoticed.

The White House spin is that the extreme violation of sovereignty is justified because it will help out America’s friends the Mexicans (which they most certainly are NOT). Mexicans despise America and only want to rip us off.

Plus, who counts to make sure all the Mexicans leave when the operation is over?

And who keeps the violent cartel criminals out of the United States? They already enter at will and control large areas of southern Arizona to run their drug shipments. Will Obama send additional Border Patrol agents to protect Mexican police when he has not acted similarly to defend Americans?

Below, Mexican police are the men wearing masks in this drug lord arrest photo. Mexico is so lawless that being a cop is indeed dangerous — but that’s not America’s problem.

Mexican police (or criminals dressed like police) have already made hundreds of incursions into this country. They shouldn’t be made to feel even more relaxed about American sovereignty than the average Mexican already does. Training foreign policemen to violate our border as a normal procedure does not send the message that Americans still value the perimeter that denotes our nation.

U.S. Widens Role in Mexican Fight, New York Times, August 25, 2011

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration has expanded its role in Mexico’s fight against organized crime by allowing the Mexican police to stage cross-border drug raids from inside the United States, according to senior administration and military officials.

Mexican commandos have discreetly traveled to the United States, assembled at designated areas and dispatched helicopter missions back across the border aimed at suspected drug traffickers. The Drug Enforcement Administration provides logistical support on the American side of the border, officials said, arranging staging areas and sharing intelligence that helps guide Mexico’s decisions about targets and tactics.

Officials said these so-called boomerang operations were intended to evade the surveillance — and corrupting influences — of the criminal organizations that closely monitor the movements of security forces inside Mexico. And they said the efforts were meant to provide settings with tight security for American and Mexican law enforcement officers to collaborate in their pursuit of criminals who operate on both sides of the border.

Although the operations remain rare, they are part of a broadening American campaign aimed at blunting the power of Mexican cartels that have built criminal networks spanning the world and have started a wave of violence in Mexico that has left more than 35,000 people dead.

Many aspects of the campaign remain secret, because of legal and political sensitivities. But in recent months, details have begun to emerge, revealing efforts that would have been unthinkable five years ago. Mexico’s president, Felipe Calderón, who was elected in 2006, has broken with his country’s historic suspicion of the United States and has enlisted Washington’s help in defeating the cartels, a central priority for his government.

American Predator and Global Hawk drones now fly deep over Mexico to capture video of drug production facilities and smuggling routes. Manned American aircraft fly over Mexican targets to eavesdrop on cellphone communications. And the D.E.A. has set up an intelligence outpost — staffed by Central Intelligence Agency operatives and retired American military personnel — on a Mexican military base.

“There has always been a willingness and desire on the part of the United States to play more of a role in Mexico’s efforts,” said Eric L. Olson, an expert on Mexico at the Woodrow Wilson Center. “But there have been some groundbreaking developments on the Mexican side where we’re seeing officials who are willing to take some risks, even political risks, by working closely with the United States to carry out very sensitive missions.”

Still, the cooperation remains a source of political tensions, especially in Mexico where the political classes have been leery of the United States dating from the Mexican-American War of 1846. Recent disclosures about the expanding United States’ role in the country’s main national security efforts have set off a storm of angry assertions that Mr. Calderón has put his own political interests ahead of Mexican sovereignty. Mr. Calderón’s political party faces an election next year that is viewed in part as a referendum on his decision to roll out this campaign against drug traffickers.

Deputy Secretary of State William J. Burns walked into that storm during a visit to Mexico this month and strongly defended the partnership the two governments had developed.

“I’ll simply repeat that there are clear limits to our role,” Mr. Burns said. “Our role is not to conduct operations. It is not to engage in law enforcement activities. That is the role of the Mexican authorities. And that’s the way it should be.”

Officials said Mexico and the United States began discussing the possibility of cross-border missions two years ago, when Mexico’s crime wave hit the important industrial corridor between Monterrey and Nuevo Laredo. To avoid being detected, the Mexican police traveled to the United States in plain clothes on commercial flights, two military officials said. Later the officers were transported back to Mexico on Mexican aircraft, which dropped the agents at or near their targets.

“The cartels don’t expect Mexican police coming from the U.S.,” said one senior military official. None of the officials interviewed about the boomerang operations would speak publicly about them, and refused to provide details about where they were conducted or what criminal organizations had been singled out.

They said that the operations had been carried out only a couple of times in the last 18 months, and that they had not resulted in any significant arrests.

The officials insisted that the Pentagon is not involved in the cross-border operations, and that no Americans take part in drug raids on Mexican territory.

“These are not joint operations,” said one senior administration official. “They are self-contained Mexican operations where staging areas were provided by the United States.”

Former American law enforcement officials who were once posted in Mexico described the boomerang operations as a new take on an old strategy that was briefly used in the late 1990s, when the D.E.A. helped Mexico crack down on the Tijuana Cartel.

To avoid the risks of the cartel being tipped off to police movements by lookouts or police officials themselves, the former officers said, the D.E.A. arranged for specially vetted Mexican police to stage operations out of Camp Pendleton in San Diego. The Mexican officers were not given the names of the targets of their operations until they were securely sequestered on the base. And they were not given the logistical details of the mission until shortly before it was under way.

“They were a kind of rapid-reaction force,” said one former senior D.E.A. official. “It was an effective strategy at the time.”

Another former D.E.A. official said that the older operations resulted in the arrests of a handful of midlevel cartel leaders. But, he said, it was ended in 2000 when cartel leaders struck back by kidnapping, torturing and killing a counternarcotics official in the Mexican attorney general’s office, along with two fellow drug agents.

In recent months, Mexico agreed to post a team of D.E.A. agents, C.I.A. operatives and retired American military officials on a Mexican military base to help conduct intelligence operations, bolstering the work of a similar “fusion cell” already in Mexico City.

Meanwhile the Pentagon is steadily overhauling the parts of the military responsible for the drug fight, paying particular attention to some lessons of nearly a decade of counterterrorism operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. At Northern Command — the military’s Colorado Springs headquarters responsible for North American operations — several top officers with years of experience in fighting Al Qaeda and affiliated groups are poring over intelligence about Mexican drug networks.

One officer said, “The military is trying to take what it did in Afghanistan and do the same in Mexico.”

That’s exactly what some Mexicans are afraid of, said a Mexican political scientist, Denise Dresser, who is an expert on that country’s relations with the United States.

“I’m not necessarily opposed to greater American involvement,” Ms. Dresser said. “But if that’s the way the Mexican government wants to go, it needs to come clean about it. Just look at what we learned from Iraq. Secrecy led to malfeasance. It led to corrupt contracting. It led to torture. It led to instability. And who knows when those problems will be resolved.”

Michael Barone has taken the notion to the extreme in a recent opinion piece extolling his [...]]]> On the propaganda front, the ridiculous idea that Mexican immigration is nearing zero is catching on. The great fount of liberal disinformation is to blame (see my analysis of the recent NYT article New York Times: Mexican Invasion Is Over.)

Michael Barone has taken the notion to the extreme in a recent opinion piece extolling his own brilliance and predictive powers:

Immigration From Mexico Down Close to Zero , AEI, July 7, 2011

Immigration from Mexico to the United States has slowed down toward zero: that’s the thrust of an excellent story by Damien Cave in the New York Times (complete with excellent interactive graphics). I plan to write a column on that subject, but I can’t resist pointing out that I have been predicting this trend for more than two years now.

The Orange County Register commented similarly that the era of big illegal immigration is over, no more problema:

Study: Illegal Mexican migration to U.S. in decline, Orange County Register, July 8, 2011

[. . .] Today’s illegal Mexican immigrant pays up to $6,000 for a smuggler and contends with a dangerous journey, dominated by ruthless cartels, a reinforced border and menacing desert. For those who make it, there’s no guarantee of a job and there is a higher risk of detection and deportation than ever before.

These are some of the reasons why fewer Mexicans are choosing to cross illegally into the United States, immigration demographers and experts said. [. . .]

However, one gets a different impression reading the following Arizona report, which describes illegal aliens clawing their way through roaring wildfires and blistering desert heat to steal American jobs. It doesn’t sound like much has really changed down on the border.

Despite the Borderland Fires, Border-Crossers Keep Coming, Tucson Weekly, July 8, 2011

Even amid the smoke, the danger and the confusion of the border-area fires, the smugglers don’t let up.

We saw that phenomenon play out during the Horseshoe 2 Fire, which began in the Chiricahua Mountains on May 8, just south of a well-known drug camp at Burro Springs. The massive fire burned until June 25 and did enormous damage across parts of 222,954 acres.

Blogger and mountain resident Narca Moore-Craig attended a fire briefing June 17, at which Incident Commander Rich Harvey told the assembled group that he was conducting a back burn on the west side of the Chiricahuas when four UDAs “burst out of the flames” and ran past the firefighters.

Moore-Craig, an artist and biologist, wrote on June 18 that the firefighters are accustomed to clearing deer and cattle before firing a line. “But these folks don’t live along the border, and they were surprised indeed by the illegals,” she wrote. “Harvey advised anyone igniting fire to yell, ‘¡Pásela!’ before firing, to try to shoo hidden people out of danger.”

Reached by e-mail, Harvey, Nevada’s deputy state forester, confirmed Moore-Craig’s account.

Dinah Davidson, a semi-retired biology professor, tells a similar story from Saturday, June 4. That morning, Border Patrol intercepted 14 people in Sulphur Canyon, south of Portal. The fire had passed through that area days before, but was still burning off to the northwest.

One of them, a Salvadoran, escaped, and Davidson ran into him as she was driving to her home in Cave Creek Canyon. He said his name was Andres. He was hungry and wanted to call his mother, but didn’t have a phone card, and Davidson doesn’t have long distance service. She says illegals often say they want to call their mothers, only to phone for a pickup ride to their destination.

She describes Andres as wide-eyed, frightened and confused. He first asked Davidson to call “imigra,” but quickly changed his mind. She told him to follow her car the one-tenth of a mile to her house, and she’d feed him. He sat in a corner of her porch and ate peanuts, fried eggs, yogurt, granola bar, watermelon, an apple, and some bean-and-rice leftovers from the fridge.

Andres said he lived in El Salvador with his mother and eight siblings. He had left there about eight days before en route to Washington state, where he had friends, and was discouraged to learn how many states he had to pass through to get there.

He said he had been very cold at night and had brought nothing to cover him. He carried a small backpack and wore a T-shirt, jeans and sturdy shoes. Davidson didn’t ask Andres how and when he crossed the border. “I’m not sure whether he would have been truthful in any case,” says Davidson. “Anyway, one can just walk around the border fence east of Douglas.”

Andres said he had been traveling with 13 others, who “abandoned him yesterday.” But that was false. Later, at the Portal Post Office, Davidson heard of the arrest of the other 13.

Davidson, who speaks Spanish, chatted with Andres, who complemented her on being “muy amiable.” Indicating the fire damage, she informed him that illegal immigrants were a big problem for the people in the area. He responded, “We die along the route.”

Andres fell asleep on a shady portion of the porch that Davidson had swept for him. Border Patrol arrived about 45 minutes later. Andres didn’t seem surprised when they woke him up. He took the large water bottle Davidson had given him and left with the agents, never looking at her again.

But Horseshoe 2 also brought a heavy-law enforcement presence to the Chiricahuas, an acknowledgement by authorities of a serious problem in those mountains.

On May 11, two days after the fire started, Ray Mendez was at the intersection of Stateline Road and Highway 80, near Rodeo, N.M., when he ran into a group of “police and troopers from both states (New Mexico and Arizona) armed to the teeth, wearing flak jackets and gathering for action where needed.”

When he asked about all the armament, the officers said it was to protect evacuated homes from break-ins by illegal aliens and drug runners. “They looked at us and said everyone knew illegals and drug runners had started the fire,” says Mendez, a 64-year-old former entomologist, who now makes his living creating museum exhibits. “They said, flat-out, ‘We know who did this.’”

The Mendez family was evacuated twice, the first time the week of May 9. The second evacuation occurred on May 15 and this time they were gone nine days. They live five miles outside Portal.

Mendez and wife, Joy, both send out e-mail reports to friends around the country to tell them the truth about the borderlands. Ray says his mailings go out mainly to people he knew while growing up on the east side of Manhattan. He calls it — Tales From Far, Far Away Arizona.

On May 9, the day after the fire began, he wrote:

“Yesterday we had a fire set up in Horseshoe Canyon – now known as Horseshoe #2. I will keep the unfortunate nature of the drug and illegal alien paths and camps we as a people seem unwilling to do anything about out of this sending. I have had enough of this crap to last 4 lifetimes. The name is based on the unfortunate fact that last year we had an identical if, I believe, smaller deal.”

The ‘deal’ was the Horseshoe 1 Fire, which started on the same smuggling trail through Horseshoe Canyon on May 26, 2010, eventually burning 3,400 acres.

In addition to her e-mails, Joy looked into taking out a full-page ad in USA Today to tell the nation what is happening 50 miles north of Arizona’s border with Mexico. But it was too expensive. Joy says that when she describes what it’s like to live in a mountain range beset by illegal aliens and drug-smugglers, friends elsewhere usually commiserate, saying, “That must be a horrible place to live.”

“I say, ‘No, it’s a wonderful place to live,’” says Joy. “But you need to know that what’s coming through here is on its way to your city, especially in terms of the drugs. So much of the country feels like this doesn’t affect them, but it does.”

She says the community thought it was making headway against the criminals after Rob Krentz’s murder, when attention turned to border security. And she says the Portal area has seen a reduction in smuggler break-ins, which had plagued the community.

“But then it gets buried again,” says Joy. “People need to understand this isn’t an immigration issue. The powers that be want to attribute this to immigration. But it’s a border-security issue.”

Ray, who favors drug-legalization, places blame for the problem on the government’s refusal “to do its job and close the borders.” In an e-mail on May 11, Ray wrote that the cost of fighting the Horseshoe 2 fire “will run into the millions and we as taxpayers will pay because our politicians have the testicular fortitude of chipmunks.”

The fire eventually cost almost $50 million to fight.

When Napolitano did make her speech in Nogales, Arizona, only drug smuggling was mentioned, at least as reported by the mainstream media.

Is illegal immigration no longer an acceptable subject for [...]]]> Earlier this week the DHS announced that Secretary Napolitano would present a new plan to deal with southwestern perimeter crime, called the Southwest Border Counternarcotics Strategy.

When Napolitano did make her speech in Nogales, Arizona, only drug smuggling was mentioned, at least as reported by the mainstream media.

Is illegal immigration no longer an acceptable subject for debate? Perhaps the Obama crew believes the invasion crisis will disappear if the administration ceases to speak of it.

In another example of relying on lies, the Secretary declared, “Violent crime along the border is flat and or is going down,” as assessment with which many who live there would not agree. When Rep. Ed Royce visited the area last winter, ranchers told him there was “more vandalism, more threats, it was worse.”

Last spring, Napolitano scrapped the Secure Border Initiative, a program that was supposed to use technology to shut down illegal entry via a “virtual” fence. But it didn’t work very well, so a billion-dollar system went down the drain.

If Washington keeps switching means of enforcement midstream, then it needn’t worry about the firehose of illegal alien labor from the south being shut down. The feds have a strategy for failure, and it’s working.

Napolitano visits Nogales border, Fox News Phoenix, July 8, 2011

TUCSON, Ariz. — The drug fight at the border continues to be an ongoing battle.  Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano and other senior Obama representatives laid out their plan to try and stop drugs and violence at the border.

On a hot afternoon at the Nogales border patrol station, drugs crossing the border was the hot topic of discussion.

“Look, this is a fight that we all need to be in and we need to be in it quite holistically.  There’s no one enterprise here that owns the problem, we’re all in this together,” said Director of National Drug Control Policy Gil Kerlikowske.

The goal of the strategy is to reduce the flow of illicit drugs, the proceeds and the violence that comes with it.

“Two things have meshed together our counter narcotics strategy which emphases prevention as well as addiction, the southwest border initiative which is designed to make sure that the United States has a safe and secure border with Mexico,” said Kerlikowske.

Two years ago there was a border drug and security strategy unveiled in El Paso.  Two years later Secretary Napolitano feels there’s been some progress.

“What we know violent crime along the border is flat and or is going down, we have air cover that we didn’t have before its border patrol agents that we didn’t have before,” said Napolitano.

But not all in attendance agree that the counter narcotics strategy is working.

“Now the third year into the administration to start talking about mitigating the drug smuggling coming through all across the border and what you’re going to do with it,” said Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu.

Sheriff Paul Babeu feels that the best thing do now is get more man power along the border.

“We need 6,000 soldiers here now for a two year period of time then build the necessary infrastructure and then enforce the law completely across the board,” said Babeu.

Governor Brewer has been an outspoken critic of the federal government’s security efforts on the border.  Thursday she expressed some trepidation over not being in the loop about Napolitano’s announcement.

“I had no idea that she was going to the border.  I had no idea that she was going to move forward or make an announcement and I finally am a little bit further frustrated in the fact that every time I find out anything about our border I read about it in the paper or hear it on television or I hear about it on the radio,” said Brewer.

The governor also demanded that the Obama administration notify her in advance about their border security initiatives.

And truckers, in both the U.S. and Mexico, can now drive commercial cargo throughout both countries.

The North America Free Trade Agreement 17 years ago, led to disagreements on where truckers from each side could go.

Mexican truckers were allowed to travel just 20 miles within America and 75 miles into Arizona.  That led to Mexico imposing tariffs on U.S. products entering Mexico.

McCraw to drug runners: U.S. officers will fire back, San Antonio Express-News, June 10, 2011

WESLACO — State officials lauded the quick, heavy, multi-agency [...]]]> It sounds like a shooting war is forming up on the border down in south Texas. The report below describes a serious border gun battle with American law enforcement against the Gulf Cartel.

McCraw to drug runners: U.S. officers will fire back, San Antonio Express-News, June 10, 2011

WESLACO — State officials lauded the quick, heavy, multi-agency gunfire response to bullets coming from drug runners on the Rio Grande early Thursday, saying a single shot against a U.S. law enforcement officer is “one too many.”

Department of Public Safety Director Steve McCraw said there would be “zero tolerance” to attacks against U.S. officers.

“We are going to use overwhelming force. We’re going to use tactics…You shoot a law enforcement officer, you’re going to get return fire,” McCraw said.

Texas Rangers, state game wardens, and U.S. Border Patrol sprayed as many as 300 rounds during the exchange near Mission early Thursday, wounding at least three suspected operatives of the Gulf Cartel.

McCraw, leading a press conference attended by dozens of high-level state and federal law enforcement officials, said there was a possibility one or more of the drug runners was killed.

Mexican military, arriving some three hours after the exchange, seized the inflatable raft with its load of about 400 pounds of marijuana. No arrests were made.

The bad guys fired first, McCraw said, recounting an incident that began at 6:18 a.m., when three Texas Parks and Wildlife boats and one Border Patrol boat approached a red Dodge Durango waiting on U.S. riverbanks.

They then saw the raft full of drugs, he said. As they approached the raft, large, jagged rocks flew from the Mexican side of the river, wounding two game wardens. The rocks were followed by four to six gunshots.

“Make no mistake, from a Texas standpoint it was not just a shooting incident,” he said. “It was an attempted capital murder of both Texas police officers and Border Patrol agents, and we’re investigating it that way.”

The officers, agents and game wardens did not hold back.

“They encountered force, and we will appropriately respond to that force, and we will go home at the end of the day, and we will protect ourselves, and we will protect our citizens,” TPW Col. Peter Flores said. “That’s not negotiable.”

The U.S. officials were working a multi-agency Ranger Reconnaissance mission, touted by Gov. Rick Perry as adding state resources to federal ones along the Texas-Mexico border.

McCraw said it was the first time state law enforcement had taken fire on the river, though not Border Patrol, who were shot at as recently as September.

He said the attack showed the increasing brazenness of the cartels, who routinely conduct sophisticated “splash down” smuggling operations involving retrieval teams, blocking vehicles, road spikes, and safe havens on the Mexican side.

McCraw said there had been at least 44 high-speed chases over the past 18 months, most ending with the drug runners splashing back to safety on the other side.

Interdiction of two similar rafts on Wednesday netted U.S. officials 1,200 pounds of drugs.

“They will not comply, they can’t be arrested, they really scoff at what we do,” McCraw said. “They’re out manning us.”

Hopefully the crime will be solved, unlike last year’s murder of border area rancher Rob Krentz in Arizona [...]]]> Was rancher Larry Links shot and killed by an illegal alien? There is no evidence of the identity of the killer. However the 68-year-old man was shot on his property near Interstate 10, a major drug smuggling corridor.

Hopefully the crime will be solved, unlike last year’s murder of border area rancher Rob Krentz in Arizona which remains unsolved.

One example was Rep. Steve King’s amendment to fund the removal of Mexican cartel spotters located in this country who direct the movement of drugs and aliens across the border and north.

The surrender of American territory to Mexican [...]]]> There’s good news from the House of Representatives, where positive small-ball immigration enforcement legislation was passed last week.

One example was Rep. Steve King’s amendment to fund the removal of Mexican cartel spotters located in this country who direct the movement of drugs and aliens across the border and north.

The surrender of American territory to Mexican organized crime has been truly shameful. Mexican cartels operate freely in southern Arizona, with spotters up to 100 miles north of the border. But the Obama administration has chosen to prosecute Arizona rather than protect it adequately.

For details, see Roy Beck’s blog item, U.S. House Beefs Up Local Immigration Enforcement & Goes After Drug Cartel ‘Spotter Nests’ We’ve Long Warned About.

The April 15 hearing, titled “The Border: Are Environmental Laws and Regulations Impeding Security and Harming the Environment?,” was an opportunity [...]]]> It was great to see Rep. Rob Bishop (R-UT), the Chairman of the House Resources Subcommittee on National Parks, Forests and Public Lands, tear into the border suits who defend policies that threaten national security.

The April 15 hearing, titled “The Border: Are Environmental Laws and Regulations Impeding Security and Harming the Environment?,” was an opportunity for Bishop to criticize the imbalance of environment regulations taking precedence over America’s safety.

The current situation enables violent foreign narco-thugs. Environmental regulations hamper the ability of Border Patrol agents to move around in public lands, giving the Mexican drug smuggling criminals an extra advantage.

And for people who care about protecting the environment of the border area, the damage done by millions of illegal aliens tramping through leaving tons of garbage far outweighs the footprint left by the Border Patrol agents doing their job. In 2009, Arizona conservationists picked up 234 tons of trash left by aliens in that state alone.

Below is Rep. Bishop making his opening statement, in which he pulls no punches. You can watch the entire hearing on C-SPAN.

Bishop bill seeks to waive environmental rules for border patrol , Salt Lake Tribune, April 14, 2011

Washington • Border patrol agents would be able to cross into sensitive wilderness areas, build and maintain roads, construct fences and patrol the areas with vehicles without fear of breaking environmental laws under a bill introduced this week again by Rep. Rob Bishop.

The Utah Republican, chairman of the House Natural Resources subcommittee over federal lands, says his bill would allow border agents to secure the border without what he says are barriers — literally physical barriers in some cases — put up by public land managers.

Bishop, who toured the border in Arizona last year and plans to go next week as well, is holding a joint hearing Friday with the Oversight and Government Reform Committee, to look at border security along the U.S.-Mexico line.

He says federal lands along the U.S. border are a “haven of criminal activity” and environmental laws meant to protect the lands are actually allowing border crossers to destroy them.

“I have seen firsthand the damage that has been done to our federal lands from trash, foot traffic and man-made fires,” Bishop said in reintroducing the bill he proposed last session. “Providing Border Patrol with the necessary access to deter and apprehend those who cross through our federal lands illegally would deliver the greatest benefit to both national security and the long-term health of our federal lands.”

Matthew Chandler, a spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security, under which border patrol operates, said the department doesn’t comment on pending legislation. But he noted that DHS is fully committed to cooperating with Interior and the Forest Service, which also has lands abutting the international border.

Interior spokeswoman Kendra Barkoff also declined to comment on pending legislation but noted that the department’s work with Homeland Security has allowed basic border security infrastructure to be strategically located on federal lands to meet DHS’ goals.

Interior, Homeland Security and the U.S. Department of Agriculture entered into an agreement in 2006 that allows border patrol to enter sensitive wilderness areas in pursuit of criminal activity, though Bishop has contended the deal still hampers the ability to secure the border.