Border Patrol Agent Held At Gunpoint By Mexican Military
This from The National Border Patrol Council:
A Tucson Sector Border Patrol agent was held at gunpoint by the Mexican military last night south of Ajo. Mexican military personnel crossed over the border and pointed rifles at him. Backup units arrived from the Ajo Border Patrol station, and the Mexican military personnel eventually returned to Mexico. Unfortunately, this sort of behavior by Mexican military personnel has been going on for years. They are never held accountable, and the United States government will undoubtedly brush this off as another case of “Oh well, they didn’t know they were in the United States.” A few years ago the Mexican military went a step further and put a .50 calibre rifle round through the rear window of a Border Patrol agent’s patrol vehicle south of Ajo. Nothing was ever done. Nobody was ever held accountable. Particularly galling is the fact that the Mexican military often pulls these stunts in Humvees donated to them by the American taxpayers (although they were apparently on foot this time). We note that Border Patrol agents have historically driven worn-out, junk vehicles.
I cannot imagine the United States just shrugging off the continued incursion of foreign military into the United States. This kind of thing should provoke unprecedented outrage by American citizens. Armed Mexican military should be shot on site if spotted on the U.S. side of the border.
Geraldo To Chertoff: No Mas Immigration Raids!
Geraldo Rivera wrote a slightly shrill piece for the Huffington Post calling on Homeland Security Chief, Michael Chertoff, to stop ordering immigration raids.
Geraldo refers to the estimated 12 million undocumented workers as “technically illegal” and calls raids by law enforcement as more appropriate for targeting Al-Qaeda than illegal immigrants.
He repeats a now discredited claim that during a raid in early March of 2007 in Massachusetts, “nursing mothers” were separated from their children.
At the time of the raid, liberal news organizations wrote hysterical stories claiming that nursing babies were torn from their mother’s teet and shipped back to Mexico.
Those claims were later discredited after an investigation and I’m almost certain Geraldo is aware of that.
Probably the most sensational charge in the piece is when Geraldo states that any latino who votes against “rational immigration reform” is an “Uncle Tom.”
I have previously written in His Panic, Why Americans Fear Hispanics in the U.S. that, “any Latino who votes for a Republican or a Democrat who opposes rational immigration reform is an Uncle Tom.”
It’s easy to give Geraldo grief about his immigration views, but I too am generally sympathetic to the illegal immigrants. If it weren’t for the terrorism issue, I really wouldn’t care about the illegal immigration thing. It’s not the thousands of Mexicans that pour over the border at will that really bother me. It’s the one Middle Eastern terrorist piggy-backing into the U.S. along with the thousands of Mexicans that worries me.
That hasn’t happened yet that we know of, but can you think of a better way for terrorists to enter the U.S.? I also agree with Geraldo that racism is playing a part in the immigration debate. That is certainly not anywhere near the main reason, but there’s definitely a small percentage of people who just don’t like Mexicans.
All that said, if we are a nation of laws then we should enforce those laws. If we as a country decide that we really don’t care about securing the border, then we should change the laws. No other country on earth allows people to just enter unannounced through the back door.
I believe the now defunct “Comprehensive Immigration Reform” package that President Bush and John McCain supported was the right idea.
Geraldo is dead wrong about the immigration raids. ICE has a responsibility to enforce Federal immigration laws, and they should continue to do so.
-Chris Jones
Immigration Raid On Iowa Meatpacking Plant Nets 390
From the AP:
Federal officials say a raid at a northeastern Iowa meat processing plant this week was the largest in U.S. history.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials say 390 people have been arrested on immigration charges after Monday’s raid at Agriprocessors Inc. in Postville. The facility is the world’s largest kosher meatpacking plant.
The raid was aimed at seeking evidence of identity theft, stolen Social Security numbers and people who are in the country illegally.
Fifty-six of those arrested have been released on humanitarian grounds; many of them have to take care of children.
Others arrested in the raid at are being held in county jails and at a converted fairgrounds.
10-Year Old Gives Birth In Idaho
USA Today is reporting that a 37-year old illegal alien raped a 10-year old girl who gave birth last month in Idaho.
Supreme Court Backs States Right To Demand Photo ID For Voting
The Supreme Court ruled today that states can require citizens to show a photo ID to vote. Twenty-five states require some form of ID, and the court’s 6-3 decision rejecting a challenge to Indiana’s strict voter ID law could encourage others to adopt their own measures.
It seems like a no-brainer that people should have to prove who they are before voting, but Democrats of course are adamantly opposed to this.
According to liberals, having to prove who you are will “disenfranchise” poor and elderly voters. That’s total nonsense, and merely a cover for their real grievance.
If people have to prove who they are, it’s going to make it harder for illegal immigrants to vote fraudulently for Democrats. That’s the reason liberals are in a huff about photo ID, because it’s going to cut into the illegal voting block they were counting on in the upcoming election.
New Tancredo Ad Says No To Subtlety
I think Tom Tancredo should tell voters how he really feels.
San Francisco Approves ID Cards That Exclude Gender
Next year, San Francisco will issue municipal identification cards showing the usual name, birthdate and photo, but not gender.
When other cities considered issuing ID cards without regard to legal status, the debate was over illegal immigrants. In San Francisco, where the Board of Supervisors approved such an ID on Tuesday, transgender activists added gender to the discussion.
“Transgender” is a broad term for people who do not identify with their birth sex. Those who refer to themselves as transgender include cross-dressers and transsexuals.
“The card really makes gender a non-issue,” says Kristina Wertz, legal director of the Transgender Law Center in San Francisco.
Wertz says legally changing a name and gender designation can be time-consuming and cost hundreds of dollars. IDs that don’t match appearance could “out” people and make them vulnerable to discrimination or abuse, she says.
San Francisco Approves I.D. Cards For Everyone Including Illegal Aliens
The Board of Supervisors voted Tuesday to issue municipal identification cards to city residents, regardless of whether they are in the country legally.
Supervisor Tom Ammiano, who authored the ID card legislation, said the program is a smart public safety measure because it would make residents living on the social margins of San Francisco more likely to seek the help of police and could give them more access to banking services.
The truth is that everyone in San Francisco lives on the social margins, that’s why they hate the military, religion, and border security.
It’s totally irresponsible to allow anyone to have an official I.D. card. A terrorist only has to buy a fake passport and then use it to get an official I.D. card and they have officially become a new person. Then they can take that shiny new I.D. and open bank accounts, get drivers licenses, and even vote.
This is yet another example of why San Francisco is completely out of touch with reality.
-Chris Jones
Poll: 77% oppose illegals’ licenses
Voters oppose driver’s licenses for illegal aliens by a nearly five-to-one margin, a new Fox 5/Washington Times/Rasmussen Reports poll finds.
As immigration politics explode into the presidential race, polls show Americans are taking a hard line on benefits for illegal aliens, including opposing driver’s licenses and such taxpayer-funded benefits as scholarships at state colleges for illegal-alien students.
The new poll found 77 percent of the adults surveyed opposed making driver’s licenses available to illegal aliens, while just 16 percent supported the idea.
Licenses fared poorly across party lines, including near-blanket opposition among self-identified Republicans, at 88 percent. Among independents and Democrats, it was still overwhelmingly unpopular, drawing 75 percent and 68 percent opposition, respectively.
Tancredo Says He Won’t Seek Re-Election
Republican presidential candidate Tom Tancredo says he will not seek re-election to his Colorado seat in the House in 2008.
The four-term lawmaker said illegal immigration, his core issue, now has national prominence and he doesn’t need to remain in Congress to promote it.
Tancredo does plan to continue his bid for the White House in 2008, however recent polls have him tracking in the low single digits.
As Pace of Deportation Rises, Illegal Families Are Digging In
NEW BEDFORD, Mass. — The day after his wife was deported to their home country, Honduras, Lilo Mancía grieved as though she had died.
Neighbors arrived with doughnuts and juice for their two small children, while Mr. Mancía, an illegal immigrant like his wife, María Briselda Amaya, took telephone calls from relatives and tried not to break down.
“The first thing I thought of was the children,” Mr. Mancía, who is fighting his own deportation order, told the visitors gathered in his second floor walkup apartment in New Bedford a couple of weeks ago. “The future we imagined for them, it all collapsed.”
Last year on May 1, hoping to influence Congress to adopt legislation making illegal immigrants legal, hundreds of thousands of immigrants held marches and work stoppages across the country. This May 1 there will be another round of rallies and marches, but this time immigrants will also be protesting a surge in deportations.
The events are expected to be much smaller than a year ago, organizers said, as stepped-up enforcement by the authorities has made illegal immigrants wary of protesting in public and more doubtful that Congress will soon act to give them a chance at legalization.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials, facing intense political pressure to toughen enforcement, removed 221,664 illegal immigrants from the country over the last year, an increase of more than 37,000 — about 20 percent — over the year before, according to the agency’s tally.
While President Bush and many Democrats have called for a path to legalize some 12 million illegal immigrants, a significant number of Republicans in Congress reject the plan because they view it as amnesty for lawbreakers. They advocate a broader campaign of deportations that would expel many illegal immigrants and, they say, drive millions more to give up and go home.
“We are not calling for I.C.E. to become the Gestapo knocking on doors in the middle of the night,” said Rosemary Jenks, director of government relations for NumbersUSA, a group in Washington that seeks to curb immigration. “But we have to increase the likelihood that if you are here illegally you will be caught.”
So far, many of the deportations have caused illegal families to hunker down and plot ways to avoid detection and resist deportation, not run voluntarily for the border, immigrant advocates said. In Massachusetts, immigration agents have been challenged by lawyers, labor unions and state officials who question their raid tactics and are fighting trench by legal trench to block deportations.
Mr. Mancía was amazed at the offers of help he received, including from the Massachusetts Immigrant and Refugee Advocacy Coalition, the state’s Department of Social Services and Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts.
Mr. Mancía has been given emergency aid to pay his bills while his deportation case proceeds, and Elizabeth Badger, a public service lawyer in Boston, was still fighting his wife’s deportation after she was on the ground in Honduras.
“I’m not going anywhere,” Mr. Mancía declared defiantly to a downstairs neighbor. “I’m going to stand my ground here until I win.”
Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials say their priority is to locate and deport fugitive immigrants with criminal records or convicts who are finishing prison sentences. Still, thousands of illegal immigrants like the Mancías with no criminal history have been caught in raids, the officials acknowledge.
Also, new expedited procedures have allowed agents greater flexibility to deport illegal immigrants caught in border areas, bypassing court hearings. Many immigrants, when caught, agree to leave voluntarily because it means they are not barred from returning legally in the future.
Seen from the working class communities like New Bedford, the deportations are a blunt instrument. Frequently the deported immigrants were not alone in the United States, but came from families with a mix of legal and illegal members who were well settled in this country.
A growing number of deportee families have children who were born here and are United States citizens. (The Mancía’s younger son, Jeffrey, was born in Texas.) More than 3.1 million American children have at least one illegal immigrant parent, said Jeffrey S. Passel, a demographer at the Pew Hispanic Center.
Mr. Mancía and his wife were among 361 workers arrested on March 6 in an immigration raid at Michael Bianco Inc., a leather goods factory in this faded manufacturing town. She remained in detention while he was released to care for their boys, Jeffrey, 2, and Kevin, 5.
On April 18, Ms. Amaya was awakened at 4 a.m., driven by immigration agents to Kennedy Airport in New York and placed on a passenger flight to Honduras, Mr. Mancía said. Telephoning her husband as soon as she could place an international call, she said little, only that she was disoriented and more afraid of her home country than an American jail. She has no house, property or job in Honduras.
“She has no words right now,” Mr. Mancía said, explaining why his wife refused to be interviewed by telephone.
Mr. Mancía has been left to fight off his own deportation and face a series of difficult choices.
He must decide, he said, whether to press his case in the United States or declare defeat and take the boys to rejoin their mother in Honduras. If forced to depart, he will weigh whether to leave his sons with friends in New Bedford to get a quality of schooling he believes they will not have in Honduras. Mr. Mancía said he and his wife had decided to leave their home in San Pedro Sula, Honduras, for their safety, because criminal gangs used the streets as a combat zone. Ms. Amaya’s sister was on a public bus returning from Christmas shopping on Dec. 23, 2004, when gang gunmen shot it up, killing her and 27 other passengers, he said.
“We walked over dead bodies in Honduras,” Mr. Mancía said. “The children see that and they don’t grow up well.”
He was the first to come to the United States, crossing at night at Laredo, Texas. In January 2005 Ms. Amaya took the same route, carrying Kevin, then a toddler. Caught by the Border Patrol, she applied for political asylum and was released temporarily. After Jeffrey was born in Houston, they came to New Bedford. Her asylum petition was eventually denied.
Stitching military backpacks in the Bianco factory at $7.00 an hour, the couple achieved stability that felt almost like prosperity. They bought a white aluminum kitchen set and a microwave oven. Kevin was content in kindergarten, reciting his ABC’s and chattering in English, which neither parent speaks.
Soon they had a family cluster in New Bedford, as three other relatives from Honduras, drawn by word of jobs at Bianco, came to work there as well.
“We knew it would be hard to get legal papers,” Mr. Mancía said. “Since so many people were in the same situation, we learned to live like the rest.”
After the March 6 raid, immigration lawyers appealed Ms. Amaya’s asylum case and she became optimistic. But she remained in immigration detention in the Bristol County jail, unable to receive visits from the children.
“He is refusing to eat and needs to be coaxed to take sustenance,” Arthur Dutra, a teacher at the John Hannigan School, wrote in a March 15 letter about Kevin’s condition. “He asks for his mother repeatedly.”
A nurse at the Greater New Bedford Community Health Center, Jacqueline Arieta, wrote in a separate letter that Jeffrey was having recurring earaches and losing his appetite due to “acute sadness.”
A gaunt man with a mild voice, Mr. Mancía said he did not mind cooking for the boys or washing their clothes at the Laundromat. He said he and his wife, balancing two factory jobs, had learned they both had to do housework.
The help he has received in fighting his deportation has allowed him to believe that he might avoid his wife’s fate, even though he has no papers, no job skill to offer other than hard work and very limited legal avenues to pursue. Although Jeffrey is an American citizen, he would not be able to petition for his parents to be admitted to the country legally until he was 21.
Mr. Mancía said he was preparing for any outcome, even the prospect of a separation from one or both sons so they could remain at least temporarily in the United States.
“My son is an American,” Mr. Mancía said “He needs to be educated in American schools, to speak English. He needs this country.”
Ms. Jenks, of NumbersUSA , said the responsibility for the impact on children of the deportations rests with their parents.
“If parents are going to come here illegally, unfortunately the child faces the consequences as well,” she said.
[NY Times]
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