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Border crossers finding new fence painful

Thursday, February 2nd, 2012

NOGALES, AZ – The higher the wall, the harder they will fall. That’s what border crossers trying to scale the new border fence at Nogales are painfully finding out.

The imposing new border fence running through Nogales is proving to be a treacherous obstacle for suspected illegal immigrants.

Nogales 2011_v2

(New Wall 20 feet 6 inches 2011 – Old Wall 15 feet 2010)

A Nogales Police Department report says on Aug. 12, a woman broke her leg after climbing the border fence.

Two days later, officers found a second injured fence climber. And a third, suspected illegal immigrant from China fell and broke his leg on Aug 22.

Nogales Fire Department Chief Hector Robles tells the Nogales International that in addition to the height of the fence, adrenaline and miscalculations in determining the distance and angle of a fall ar potential injury factors.

By: Associated Press

photography – Maurice Sherif

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Military engineers dig in to support Border Patrol

Tuesday, January 24th, 2012

On Jan. 6, members of an Alaska-based Army airborne engineer brigade parachuted out of an Air Force plane at Fort Huachuca. Since then, they’ve been working to cut 0.7 miles of border access road through rugged terrain approximately 3 miles west of the Mariposa Port of Entry in Nogales.

Project organizers say the experience, from the parachute drop-in to the remote road-building and eventual departure on Feb. 27, mirrors the type of mission the 40 soldiers might conduct if they were deployed to a place like Afghanistan.4f1ecea5436c7.image

“This will prepare them for future deployments, especially in the areas of current contingency operations,” said Armando Carrasco, spokesman for the Department of Defense’s Joint Task Force North (JTF North), the agency that coordinated the mission.

Standing on a hilltop above the work site Friday as heavy machinery dug through a steep slope below her, mission commander Lt. Michelle Zak spoke of the difficulties of maneuvering large earth movers around the mountains, canyons and ravines of western Santa Cruz County.

“It’s been challenging, but also a great opportunity for us to train,” she said.

This effort, along with other military road-building projects that have been conducted in the county in recent years, also provides a great opportunity for agents at the U.S. Border Patrol’s Nogales Station to gain better access to some of their hardest-to-control areas.

“You’ve got to look at it as a win-win situation,” said Agent Steven Passement, a spokesman for the Border Patrol’s Tucson Sector.

“One, for the unit that’s here and the units that will come, it’s real-world training experience,” he said. “And for us, we’re getting infrastructure put in place that’s going to be permanent.”

Those permanent roads, built with drainage culverts to keep them from washing out, helps agents responds faster to illegal activity in the area and provide aid more quickly to migrants in distress. What’s more, Passement said, a better road surface means less wear-and-tear on Border Patrol vehicles, and therefore less expenditures on new tires, shock absorbers and struts.

Local residents and businesses are also benefiting from the arrangement. The current group of 40 engineers is staying at a local hotel and spending some of their pocket money at local establishments.

“I know a lot of the soldiers have been out on the town, and they’ve enjoyed the tacos that come from the trucks,” Zak said.

Rancher Dan Bell, who grazes cattle in the same section of Coronado National Forest lands where the road are being built, says he’s seen an improvement in security in the area since the road-building began.

“Prior to these roads going in, there really wasn’t any way to get to the border in a lot of these areas,” Bell said. “It’s allowed (Border Patrol) to actually get down to the border and patrol the actual border rather than a larger area that they’d have to hike or go into on horseback.”

The soldiers themselves are not engaged in any law enforcement activity while on the road-building projects, Carrasco said. That duty is left up to the Border Patrol.

Environmental concerns

Since the construction is taking place on National Forest land, the U.S. Forest Service has been included in the project planning, and an environmental monitor is on hand to make sure the project stays within the construction easement, said Maj. Chris Neels, mission planner for JTF North.

Even so, environmentalists like Jenny Neeley, conservation policy director at the Tucson-based Sky Island Alliance, say they are worried about the long-term effects of border-infrastructure projects that are conducted outside of federal environmental law. Since April 2008, the Department of Homeland Security has operated under a waiver that allows it to build border fencing and related infrastructure in the U.S. Southwest without having to adhere to more than 30 environmental regulations.

“We’re extremely disappointed that none of it is subject to review under the National Environmental Policy Act because of the existing waiver along the border,” Neeley said. “Those roads are being installed without any oversight whatsoever, in terms of regulatory oversight or having to follow best practices.”

Neeley said she hadn’t seen the particular roads being built west of Nogales, but she said there have been numerous projects carried out under the waiver that have later led to erosion and flooding. She cited an example from the Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, where rainwater runoff collapsed a 40-foot stretch of new border fence in August 2010 due to faulty design.

A Department of Homeland Security-sponsored public forum in December 2010 laid out the technical details and environmental analysis that had gone into the planning of the agency’s border road and fence projects in and around Nogales. Still, Greg Gephart, program manager for tactical infrastructure for U.S. Customs and Border Protection, acknowledged that the projects would be conducted under the environmental waiver.4f1ecef54d05a.image_II

“The waiver doesn’t mean we’re throwing out all environmental considerations,” Gephart said at the time. “It’s just a method that allows us to expedite the construction.”

‘Good feeling’

The 40 Army engineers currently deployed to Nogales work six days a week, from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Even so, due to the terrain, theirs is the first of three phases necessary to complete the 0.7 miles of roadway.

What’s more, military units are scheduled to execute four additional engineering missions in the Nogales area in support of the Border Patrol during the current fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30.

It’s all organized by JTF North, based at Fort Bliss, Texas, which has been supporting federal law enforcement agencies along the Southwest border since 1989. Working as a liaison between law enforcement and all four branches of the military, JTF North has coordinated engineering missions that built and improved roads and installed border lighting, fencing and vehicle barriers in areas stretching from California to Texas.

The majority of the costs of the projects are paid for with Department of Defense counter-drug funds, JTF North says; the participating law enforcement agency covers only the cost of materials.

For example, Tucson-based Hertz Equipment Rental has been contracted to provide the heavy machinery for the current road effort, as well as training and maintenance. That’s all covered by JTF North, Carrasco said.

As for the price tag for the 0.7-mile road project, Carrasco estimated $400,000 for Phases 1 and 2 and $350,000 for Phase 3 – a grand total of $1.15 million.

Part of the expense includes the cost of housing the soldiers at an area hotel, which is also contracted to provide the team with a hot breakfast and dinner each day. (JTF North declined to name the hotel, citing security concerns.)

“It also creates a good quality of life for them while they’re deployed on this mission,” he said. “Obviously they work very hard, so it’s important that we also take care of them during their down time.”

As for the military engineers, they say they are greatly appreciative of the good meals and soft beds – as well as the warm, sunny weather of Southern Arizona. After all, they left their home base in the middle of the frigid, snowy and daylight-deprived Alaska winter.

Specialist Nickalous Herd, a native of Atlanta, praised the “wonderful weather, wonderful people and wonderful state” as he stood at the worksite Friday under clear blue skies and 70-degree temperatures. And while the local terrain has been a challenge to work with, Herd said, he has also enjoyed its rugged beauty.

“It is beautiful, it is extremely beautiful here,” he said.

Sgt. Everell Gustave, a native of the Boston area, said the experience of coming to a new area and working under new conditions with new equipment has been an important skill-builder for his team, which, if deployed to Afghanistan, might parachute into a remote area to rebuild roads, supply routes and airstrips.

“It is definitely a good feeling for our guys. We are getting the training that we need to be successful anywhere around the world,” Gustave said. “Helping out the Border Patrol is just a plus.”

By Jonathan Clark Nogales International

copyright © Nogales International

Images By Jonathan Clark

Nogales International
Phone number: (520) 375-5760
Address: 268 W. View Point Dr.
Nogales, AZ 85621

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Ag Commissioner Declares War on the Border

Monday, January 23rd, 2012

Lately it seems that Agriculture Commissioner Todd Staples would rather have the Texas Department of Agriculture become a wing of the U.S. Department of Defense than a Texas state agency. Not long ago, Staples commissioned an $80,000 “strategic military assessment” of the Texas border. The Ag Commissioner released the 182-page tome, written by two retired generals, yesterday in a press conference at the Texas Capitol. Texas_Plate_26

If you hadn’t heard, Staples is running for Lieutenant Governor in 2014. For the past year, the Ag Commissioner has been beating the war drums and burnishing his border security credentials. Last March, he unveiled a fancy, new taxpayer-funded Web site called “Protect Your Texas Border” which offers such highlights as night-vision surveillance chases of drug traffickers along the Rio Grande and a video interview with a Texas Ranger who proclaims: “We are in a war and I am not going to sugarcoat it by any means. We are in a war, and it is what it is.”

The Web site also hosts a forum where visitors are encouraged to share their views on securing the border. The forum was dinged by the press, however, after a number of posts advocated for vigilante justice offering such gems of advice as “Killem all!!!! They are destroying or great country.”

Now, we have Staples’ “military assessment” advocating for greater militarization of the border, which sets a dangerous precedent and adds to the growing campaign by the GOP to turn Mexico into Afghanistan. In the report written by retired Generals Barry McCaffery and Robert Scales drug cartel operatives are referred to as “narco-terrorists” and U.S. border counties are referred to as the “sanitary tactical zone” where military operations can push back the “narco-terrorists.” The generals applaud the Texas Department of Public Safety’s “comprehensive military-like operational campaign against narco-terrorists” and suggest that Texas serve as the national model for the nation-wide militarization of the border.

“Five years of state operations have yielded valuable lessons and insights that can improve the border security operations of states and U.S. federal agencies. Below are insights shared by senior leaders within the Texas DPS who consider their operations in the war against narco-terrorism to be a model for how war might be prosecuted in a wider, multi-state and national campaign. They accede to the face that much of their effort was derived from experience in recent campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan…”Texas_Plate_6

The only problem is this isn’t a war and U.S. border counties — last I checked — are still considered part of the United States and civilian territory. They also boast crime and murder rates far lower than cities such as Washington, D.C., according to FBI crime statistics.

Despite this fact, GOP leaders are pushing ahead at both the federal and state level to turn the border region into a theater of war. After 9/11, Congress gave the Department of Homeland Security the right to set up internal checkpoints within 100 miles of the international borders where they have the ability to stop people, question them and ask them to prove their citizenship. Now, Staples and other politicians are calling for more militarization which will inevitably deteriorate further U.S. citizens constitutional rights.

Texas_Plate_28

I don’t want to understate the growing security crisis in Mexico. It does have an impact on the United States. But a military-only solution doesn’t address the underlying factors that are fueling organized crime’s takeover of Mexico – namely poverty, impunity, government corruption and the U.S’. multi-billion dollar drug market.

It’s a purely cynical and political move to only push for militarization and not address the myriad social, economic and political issues fueling the crisis in Mexico. For Republican candidates such as Staples issues such as combating poverty, immigration reform or revising our outmoded drug laws are not politically expedient. They just don’t draw GOP Primary voters to the election booths like armored cars or boots on the ground, which is a shame for both the United States and Mexico.

by Melissa del Bosque

Published on: Tuesday, September 27, 2011

Melissa del Bosque has a Masters in Journalism from U.T. Austin and a M.P.H. from the Texas A&M School of Rural Public Health.  She spent five years in the Texas Senate as a communications director. Her work has been published in Time magazine and the NACLA Report on the Americas.

Follow @MelissaLaLinea on Twitter.

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Interview: Charles Bowden on the violence plaguing Juárez

Wednesday, October 5th, 2011

Beef tripe and birdseed are the keys to maintaining sanity while chronicling the bloody narco-wars along the Mexican border. Just ask reporter and author Charles Bowden.

Probably more than any other U.S. author, he has revealed the intricacies of the violence haunting Ciudad Juárez, most recently in two books, “Murder City: Ciudad Juárez and the Global Economy’s New Killing Fields” and “Dreamland: The Way Out of Juárez.” He’s swatted at flies swarming fresh bloodstains and reported from a house where bodies were drenched in acid before burial. One wonders if he didn’t lose a slice of his sanity with each movement of his hand.

2009

He has met with hit men, government officials who know more than they say, pastors struggling to soothe in the war-torn city and Mexican reporters running for their lives.

To recover, Bowden settles back for a while on his land in Patagonia, Ariz., about 20 miles from the Mexican border. That’s where the feed and tripe come in: He drops about $150 a month on his hummingbird feeders and lays out a block of tripe for the ravens. “Then we have coffee together,” he told The Texas Tribune on Thursday. Something simple and beautiful to crowd out the death and despair in his mind, at least for a while.

He keeps connected with nature as a sort of therapy. After unearthing tales of unfathomable human cruelty, he relaxes by watching the black birds gnaw at the bowels of a cow.

Mexicans, he says, are a people discarded by their government — women who prefer to sell drugs so they won’t have to sell their bodies, newspaper vendors gunned down in broad daylight, beauty queens gone mad after being raped for days by police officers, pastors who care for the insane because no one else will. Then he returns to what he says are the “rhythms of the Earth.”

“If you don’t, you’ll go down; you’ll be useless; you’ll be of no use to anyone,” he says.

Bowden spoke for more than two hours about what he saw, what he wants to forget and why he’ll probably go back, even though he dreads even the thought of it. In his desert drawl, with the dust from the graves still fresh in his mind, Bowden explains why the fog of narco-terrorism and corruption make it impossible to fully report the slaughter, why the numbers that spew daily from media and government mean little to him, and why what is heard, and not seen, must be viewed with more than a little suspicion. (Note: The audio contains explicit language.)

And he weighs in on whether a woman burned alive on July 4, the day of the Juárez elections, was sacrificed as a message to Mayor-elect Hector “Teto” Murguía.

The violence will not end; there’s no reason currently to believe it would, Bowden explains. The shooting and cutting and beating has become thoroughly enmeshed in daily life as jobs disappear, addiction balloons,

Matamoros_02gangs multiply and the next generation is poised to take over where the older leaves off  — after it is killed off. He tells about “El Pastor,” a character in “Murder City” who hears why women join the business and how a basic struggle for control of a drug plaza has gone beyond that and entered a new dimension.

Bowden lives in Arizona, the busiest corridor for undocumented immigrants making their way into the U.S. What drives them, he says, is stronger than any force that might deter them. Bowden says he wasn’t raised to “shut the door on poor people,” and so he stocks cans of food and water for those who collapse under his mesquite trees. Half an hour later, he says, the visitors are back on their way. “How the hell do you stop people like that?” First he explains what he thinks would happen to Mexico if every immigrant went back.

Despite the success of “Down by the River,” a tale about the history of the Mexican drug trade and the accompanying U.S. government hypocrisy — told against the backdrop of a murdered brother of a DEA agent — Bowden lives to get back to bankruptcy, he says. He takes magazine stories to get out of debt, but the kind of books he writes hardly makes him a dime.

“If you get used to it, you’re worthless,” Bowden says of the beat. Since his days as a crime reporter for a newspaper, he has found ways to save his sanity, a large part of which depends on how in tune he remains with nature. He leads off by explaining what happens, to most reporters, after time.

Mexican reporters flee across the border or are murdered. They are the courageous ones. He has a three-tiered plan for staying alive, which he says that, as an American, isn’t hard to do.

In “Dreamland,” with artist Alice Leora Briggs, Bowden chronicles the death house where a Mexican informant, working for the U.S. government, participated in the murders of several men. From there, he talks about the valiant Armando Rodriguez, a reporter for El Diario de Juárez gunned down in front of his daughter. She wasn’t harmed — and that was on purpose, Bowden says. He’s come to know what a professional hit looks like, knowledge gained from interviews with one of Juárez’s best assassins.

Bowden has no problems with legalizing pot. The criminal justice system as it stands has created a police state, he says. But he warns of the havoc that would reign — at least temporarily — before that happened.

Racism — that’s the simplest reason for anti-Mexican sentiment, Bowden says. The “tea baggers” and Sarah Palin, when they say they want their country back, mean they want a “white guy as president.” It’s not just here though, Bowden says, urging a close look at how Mexicans treat Guatemalans.

Bowden doesn’t harp too much about what people say about “Murder City,” including those who allege he doesn’t explain the killings. His narratives don’t move in straight lines, he knows, but neither does life in Juárez. If warring cartels make peace, the violence won’t end, he says. Vicente Carrillo Fuentes, the leader of the Juárez cartel, doesn’t order most of the hits. “It’s gone way past that.” Meanwhile, Mexican President Felipe Calderón has opened a Pandora’s box.

By Julian Aguilar – The Texas Tribune 2010

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Pretty Ugly – Critique of “The American Wall Project” -by Jim Lewis

Wednesday, July 6th, 2011

Maurice Sherif’s photos of the border wall are undoubtedly beautiful. And that’s precisely the problem.

The first notable thing about the border wall between the United States and Mexico is that the damned thing exists. Unless you live in the most southwestern reaches of America, you may have assumed, as I did, that the whole thing was merely a proposal, one of those preposterous ideas that are floated in Washington by politicians hotdogging for their constituents, only to be shot down by saner minds. But no, there is a wall, or rather, there are several walls, intermittently covering more than 600 miles of the 1,954-mile-long boundary between the U.S. and Mexico, including most of California’s and Arizona’s borders and much of New Mexico’s. (South Texas residents, a formidably independent bunch, have slowed its progress across our state, though some cities, like Brownsville, have been unable to stop the wall from slicing through their community.)

Otay Mountain Negative. California 2010

Almost all of it has been built by the Department of Homeland Security in the past four years, under the aegis of the Real ID Act, which granted the Secretary of the DHS an absolute, monarchical freedom to barricade our borders in whatever manner he chose, unhampered by the established laws of the land, including those covering environmental protection, clean air and water, and historical preservation. Starting at the Pacific Ocean, then—or, more accurately, about 450 yards into the ocean, presumably to deter swimmers, but not really strong swimmers—the wall runs over hill and dale, gouging a path through wildlife preservations, Indian reservations, and many poor neighborhoods (though at least one golf club managed to secure a waiver). In some places it’s little more than reinforced hurricane fencing with barbed wire on top, but in most others it’s an imposing structure built of slabs of concrete or steel that extend as high as 25 feet. It has cost over $2 billion to build thus far, and it’s expected to top out at more than $6 billion, not counting future costs for upkeep. An expensive project, and what’s more, ugly, unnecessary, and ineffective. And so we have The American Wall(MS Zephyr Publishing, distributed by the University of Texas Press), a forthright attack on the entire project, composed of two volumes, the first presenting nearly one hundred photographs by the French photographer Maurice Sherif, the second containing seven essays about the wall. The whole thing comes in a slipcase and retails for $150.

If you’re like me, you’ll read the essays first, and while you probably won’t find yourself any more cheerful when you’re done, you’ll almost certainly be better informed. They’re prefaced by a monody from the essayist Charles Bowden, a longtime observer of life and death along the border, and a brief statement from Sherif. Then comes a series of dismaying facts, presented without embellishment.

Anthropologists Miguel Díaz-Barriga and Margaret E. Dorsey focus on South Texas, where the wall is seen as an eyesore, an encroachment, and a crude obstacle to communities that have traditionally enjoyed fluid relations with their Mexican neighbors. What’s more, they point out, most of it has been built in urban areas and small towns, forcing illegal immigrants to cross the border in harsh and isolated regions, thereby increasing the number who die along the way. University of Texas law professor Denise Gilman neatly sums up the many ways in which the wall violates American legal precedents and international human rights law. Scott Nicol, an activist with No Border Wall and the Sierra Club, details how it threatens animal species whose existence depends on their ability to roam the lands around the Rio Grande. The last essay is an unfortunately homiletic performance by a doctor named James Tryon, but it’s followed by an exceptionally useful timeline, put together by the researcher Martha Davidson. There you will learn, for example, that barricading the border is utterly irrelevant to about half of all illegal immigrants, who come to the U.S. on legitimate visas and simply stay when they run out, and it’s little more than a speed bump for many of the rest (in four years, the wall has been breached well over three thousand times).

Border Wall California 2010

Volume one, which is the impetus for the entire publication, is more of a mixed bag. To be sure, Sherif’s photographs are beautiful, and they’ve been printed in quadratone black and white, an elaborate process that produces an unusually rich tonal range. Together with the translucent negative borders that frame them, this gives the pictures a plush, dreamy quality. Taken as a whole, it’s obviously a deluxe production. And just as obviously, it’s all wrong.

Almost everything about the pictures suggests a will to elegance that’s inappropriate to the matter at hand. Back in the day, black and white film was the standard for both newspapers and art photography. But that changed in the seventies and eighties, and now it looks deliberately archaic and somewhat effete—the photographic equivalent of wearing spats, or using the word “shall.” By the same token, the distorted strips at the edges of Sherif’s photographs indicate that he shot on large-format film, using a discontinued stock called Polaroid Type 55—an expensive and unwieldy process, useful mainly for large reproductions but somewhat pretentious otherwise. Moreover, by printing beyond the boundary of the negative, Sherif proves that he didn’t crop the photos, in accordance with an outmoded notion of authenticity that insists that “real” photographers frame their pictures through the camera rather than in the darkroom. It’s all very precious, “artistic” in the worst way.

As a result, Sherif’s pictures make the wall seem quite lovely as it wends abstractly across the landscape. In his opening statement he asks how “the United States became such an egregious violator of basic human rights.” Yet not one of his images shows a human being; the lives that the wall has degraded have been shut out of the pictures as well. What’s left looks like an art project—something by Christo, say, or a Richard Serra sculpture blown up to enormous scale. But the wall is not a work of art. It’s a crude and wasteful boondoggle. It should have been shot to reflect as much.

To be fair, Sherif has merely fallen victim to one of the commoner paradoxes of the medium: It’s very difficult to take a good picture of an ugly thing—to preserve its ugliness in a photograph that is estimable and compelling. The camera tends to glamorize whatever it sees, making the silkiest images out of those things we should find most revolting. Many photographers have exploited this phenomenon—Sebastião Salgado comes to mind, with his epic and hyper-refined treatment of miserable conditions around the world—and many have been admired for it. But I find it meretricious at best and vile at worst, and in this case it yields an especially cruel irony. As a photo book, The American Wall is very much like the American wall: too big, too expensive, and oblivious to the needs of the people it’s meant to serve.

Read an Excerpt: The American Wall: From the Pacific Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico Copyright (c) 2011. Courtesy of the University of Texas Press. Buy it from University of Texas Press.

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UN to Mexico: Investigate abuse, kidnap of migrants

Monday, January 24th, 2011

GENEVA – The U.N.’s top human-rights official urged Mexico on Friday to investigate possible abuses and complicity by officials in kidnappings and extortion involving 40 Central American migrants.

Mexico is the transit route for thousands of illegal migrants seeking to reach the United States, with many falling victim to gangs and organized crime.

U.N. rights chief Navi Pillay said 40 migrants, mostly from El Salvador and Guatemala, were “abducted in highly questionable circumstances” on Dec. 16 from a freight train in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca. Her office said Friday that the northbound freight train was stopped first “in a joint operation by police and migration officials” who detained 92 of the 250 migrants aboard.

“According to some accounts, military personnel were also involved,” Pillay’s office said, citing U.N. interviews with human-rights groups. “A somewhat confused picture has emerged about what happened next.”

According to the U.N., about 150 migrants got back on the train, run by a government-owned company. The driver then demanded money from the migrants but was not satisfied and told them there would be “more problems ahead.”

A half-hour later, the train was reportedly boarded by gunmen who assaulted and robbed some of the migrants and abducted 40 of them, including at least 10 women and one child.

Two days later, some escaped and managed to reach a migrant shelter in Oaxaca run by Alejandro Solalinde, a well-known Roman Catholic priest and migrant-rights activist who first reported the abductions.

“The Mexican authorities need to ascertain whether or not any state officials, including those working for the state-owned train operator, were complicit with the criminal organization that carried out the abductions and extortion, both in this and other cases,” Pillay said.

Copyright 2011 Arizona Daily Star. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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Bill would stop Mexican Consulate officials entering Texas schools, colleges

Sunday, January 23rd, 2011

AUSTIN, Jan. 20 – A bill filed at the state Capitol seeks to prevent foreign consular officials from entering public schools or state universities in order to distribute foreign identification cards or accept applications for such cards.

If HB 428, authored by state Rep. Allen Fletcher, is passed into law, Mexican Consulate staff would not be allowed to go onto to a school or college campus to help students with their matricula consular applications.

Maurice in Otay Mnt_JB

In an exclusive interview with the Guardian, Fletcher, who served in the Houston Police Department for 21 years, explained the rationale behind his bill.

“The bottom line is we’re trying to keep foreign consuls from being on our campuses,” said Fletcher, R-Houston. “I don’t like them using our public facilities and our schools to basically access the foreign nationals that are in our country and give them an opportunity to take advantage of our benefits when they’re here illegally.”

The Matrícula Consular de Alta Seguridad (MCAS) (Consular Identification Card) is an identification card issued by the Government of Mexico through its consulate offices to Mexican nationals residing outside of Mexico regardless of their immigration status. -

It’s ridiculous but not terribly surprising in the current political environment. There are 40+ similar legislative proposals currently proposed in the Texas legislature according to Denise Gilman of Clinical Professor of Law – Immigration Clinic – University of Texas School of Law

© Copyright of the Rio Grande Guardian, www.riograndeguardian.com. Publisher: Steve Taylor. All rights reserved. – By Jesse Bertron

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U.S.-Mexico Border Crossing Deaths Are A Humanitarian Crisis, According To Report From The ACLU And CNDH

Thursday, May 20th, 2010

SAN DIEGO – U.S., Mexican and international officials must recognize the deaths of migrants occurring during unauthorized crossings of the U.S.-Mexican border as an international humanitarian crisis and respond with reforms that make human life a priority, according to a new report released today by the American Civil Liberties Union of San Diego and Imperial Counties and Mexico’s National Commission on Human Rights (CNDH). The report, Humanitarian Crisis: Migrant Deaths at the U.S.-Mexico Border, finds that border deaths have increased despite fewer unauthorized crossings due to the economic downturn.

The release of the report marks the 15th anniversary of the border enforcement policy Operation Gatekeeper that concentrated border agents and added walls and fencing along populated areas, intentionally forcing migrants to hostile environments and natural barriers that increase the incidence of injury and death.

“The current policies in place on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border have created a humanitarian crisis that has led to the deaths of more than 5,000 people,” said Kevin Keenan, Executive Director of the ACLU of San Diego and Imperial Counties. “Because of deadly practices and policies like Operation Gatekeeper, the death toll continues to rise unabated despite the decrease in unauthorized crossings due to economic factors.

South of Texas

South of Texas

The report analyzes deadly border enforcement policies and practices and their impact on individuals, families and communities and offers concrete recommendations to significantly decrease and possibly end the humanitarian crisis at the border.

Some of the report’s major findings include:

  • Border deaths have increased despite the economic downturn, fewer migrant crossers and a steady drop in apprehensions.
  • In the last 15 years, the deaths occurring during unauthorized border crossings have been a predictable and inhumane outcome of border-security policies like Operation Gatekeeper.
  • Migrants’ risk of death during unauthorized crossings has increased in spite of government programs that attempt to reduce the harmful effects of border enforcement policies and strategies.
  • The ongoing deaths of migrants have exposed government incompliance with international law obligations in the treatment of the dead and their families.

Since Operation Gatekeeper went into effect in 1994, an estimated 5,600 migrants have died while attempting unauthorized border crossings. In response to government failures to prevent migrant deaths, many organizations have set up water stations, desert medical camps, humanitarian-aid patrols and other rescue and recovery operations in an attempt to save lives along the U.S.-Mexican border area. As the report details, these activities have been increasingly met with government opposition and punishment.

“By any measure, Operation Gatekeeper is a failure. It didn’t reduce unauthorized border crossings, the economy did. It has, however, cost thousands of people their lives,” said Andrea Guerrero, Field and Policy Director of the ACLU of San Diego and Imperial Counties. “Instead of policies that foster fatalities, we need sensible, humane immigration and border policies that prioritize human life over death.”

The report recommends actions that the U.S. and Mexican governments should take to protect and advance the human right to life of migrants, including:

  • Recognize border crossing deaths as an international humanitarian crisis.
  • Adopt sensible, humane immigration and border policies.
  • Shift more U.S. Border Patrol resources to search and rescue.
  • Support nongovernmental humanitarian efforts at the border.
  • Direct government agencies to allow humanitarian organizations to do their work to save lives and recover remains.
  • Establish a binational, one-stop resource for rescue and recovery calls and convene all data collecting agencies to develop a uniform system.
  • Invite international involvement.

Javier Garcia, whose testimony about his brother who died while crossing the border is featured in the report, said, “I hope that my brother’s case is taken as an example of what should not happen, that things change.”

The report can be found online at: www.aclu.org/immigrants/gen/41186pub20091001.html
Courtesy of ACLU 2010.

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100-mile radius raises debate over Constitution, civil rights

Monday, May 17th, 2010
100-mile radius raises debate over Constitution, civil rights

100-mile radius raises debate over Constitution, civil rights

WASHINGTON — Vince Peppard was cruising up the highway toward San Diego, wife in the seat next to him and a bunch of tile in tow.

The 53-year-old retired social worker was driving north from Tecate, Mexico, on his way to fix up an old house.

“I breezed right through the checkpoint,” Pepper recalled. “Then a half-hour later, when I got into the U.S., they were opening my trunk and searching my car. I didn’t feel like I was in the United States. I felt like I was in some police state.”

Peppard was stopped about 20 miles north of the Mexican border by customs officials who demanded to search his car, he said. When he refused, Peppard said, a customs official brought in search dogs, hassled his wife — who is from Syria — for her citizenship papers and detained him for more than 30 minutes.

He was ultimately let go. But he can’t let go of the fact that he was stopped inside the United States.

“I actually feel nervous that I’m going to be pulled over,” Peppard said via a video hookup at a news conference Wednesday. “Now I have to have my passport when I go to the Home Depot or something.”

It was stories like Peppard’s that prompted a civil rights group to challenge the constitutionality of practices carried out by the U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

The American Civil Liberties Union charged Wednesday that searches by customs agents within 100 miles of the U.S. border threatens the rights of millions of Americans.

The civil rights group released a map showing that nearly two-thirds of Americans – 194.7 million people — live within a 100-mile-radius of the U.S. borders and could be subject to an infringement of their Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable searches.

“This is an area where the government is attempting to turn into a Constitution-free zone,” said Caroline Fredrickson, director of the ACLU’s Washington Legislative Office. “The federal government has been allowed to turn areas of this nation into places where anyone can be stopped and searched for any reason — or no reason at all.

“It is a classic case example of law enforcement powers expanding far beyond the proper boundaries–in this case literally.”

The group said it will push for legislation in the next administration to curtail customs officials’ search authority.

Customs and Border Protection, which falls under the Department of Homeland Security, was authorized by Congress nearly 50 years ago to operate within a “reasonable distance” inside the border, which it designates as a 100-mile radius. The agency operates 33 checkpoints, and the ACLU said complaints about the checkpoints have risen since Sept.11.

But border patrol officials say that the checkpoints are anything but unconstitutional.

“The 100-mile zone absolutely is not a Constitution-free zone,” said Jason Ciliberti, a supervisory border patrol agent with the U.S. Customs and Border Protection. “Those 100 miles are what essentially is said to be a reasonable distance from the boundary from the United States, and the Supreme Court has come down firmly on our side and said that what we’re doing is not unreasonable.”

Ciliberti said that the department is sensitive to citizen complaints about checkpoints and has tried to smooth the process.

“The vast number of those encounters is very brief,” Ciliberti said. “If [necessary], agents do take some time to conduct investigations. But, of course, they conduct those investigations with due diligence and as minimally invasive as possible.”

“In order to arrest that person, we still need probable cause as anywhere in the United States,” he added.

But, he noted, the agency will continue its searches as part of its efforts to stop drug smugglers and illegal immigrants.

“We do have a job to do and we don’t have the opportunity to be wrong — even once,” Ciliberti said. “So, we understand if people are offended by our tactics. We take the Constitution very seriously, we take it to heart.”

by Erica L. Green

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Arizona-Sonora Recovered Human Remains

Monday, May 17th, 2010

Fiscal Year (October 1- September 30)

2000-2001            136

2001-2002            163

2002-2003            205

2003-2004            234

2004-2005            282

2005-2006            205

2006- 2007           237

2007- 2008           183

2008-2009            206

October 1, 2009 – February 28, 2010      110

Total Human Remains = 1,961

Road_Cross_04

This Year’s Deaths

“Coalción de Derechos Humanos” counts the number of bodies recovered in Arizona for the fiscal year, which begins October 1st and ends September 30th of every year. This will be so that we can compare the numbers put out by the government officials with those that we gather, in collaboration with the Consular offices and county medical examiners.

Data courtesy of (®).Coalción de Derechos Humanos

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