Does anyone know WHY DHS is doing this?
Like so much, lately, this makes zero sense.
IMHO we have the worst DHS secretary possible... Chertoff and he was the man in charge of FEMA during Katrina, too... if anyone's head should roll he's the man..
We can only speculate why they are doing this.
If it was clinton, I would say that the job of the Border Patrol at that time was to arrest small independent drug dealers but let the big guys through, because clinton had been in the drug smuggling business most of his life, and collected a percentage of the take from the stuff coming through Mexico.
I don't think that's true of our current president.
The only explanation I can think of is that this drug smuggler has friends high up in the Mexican government, and the Mexican government demanded that the Border Patrol agents should be punished as a matter of Mexican American friendship and good will. No doubt Bush might have carelessly said, sure, go ahead, if they're guilty then they should be punished, and some overly zealous functionaries then started pulling some really corrupt stuff.
Bureaucracies can sometimes work that way. Word comes down from above and gets bent and twisted in the process. And I can't think of a more bloated bureaucracy than Homeland Security.
I have to say that this latest business doesn't really surprise me. I was never convinced by the weak "evidence" that these two agents were guilty. It just smelled wrong that an armed drug smuggler was being treated like some kind of innocent victim of injustice.
We may never know why this happened, but clearly an injustice has been perpetrated, and it needs to be fixed, quickly.
Why? This seems like an easy question. I believe, and have thought for some time, that the government wanted to send a message that Border Agents had better not be aggressive in responding to issues of illegals entering the country. They all see that the government will throw any such agent in prison.
This case is turning out to be disgusting. I think there is more to come.
I think that to get a government job, people must have to take some kind of test to see if they are supid enough....or just getting a job there triggers some kind of brain chemical that turns on some kind of hidden stupid gene.
Just a guess. I would imagine that the Mexican President made a request that the men not be shown leniency.
"Does anyone know WHY DHS is doing this?"
because they can.
Makes all kinds of sense to me. Our government wants illegals here.
Isn't it rather obvious the orders come from the top? This administration wants open borders, that became clear in the meeting Bush had with Fox and ...the Canadien PM in, I think it was 03, where the stated goal is a unified North America blah blah...
The lead federal atty Johnny Sutton has long & close ties to the Bush family in Texas, Sutton took the case instead of the federal prosecutors assigned for that area...
I hope this blows up on the WH but I suspect a pardon will be used to serve as damage control when things get too hot for Bush.