Free Republic

Woman allegedly handed over fake documents to be screened for a job. HAMILTON — An illegal immigrant was arrested this week in the lobby of the Butler County Sheriff's Office when she allegedly passed fake identification while trying to get a background check for a job, according to sheriff's officials. Genesis Mahelet Garcia-Garcia, 25,(photo) of Sixth Avenue in Hamilton was arrested Wednesday, July 16. She is charged with two counts of forgery and one count of identity fraud. She is in the country from Mexico illegally, according to deputies. Garcia-Garcia is being held in the Butler County Jail and faces...

REYNOSA -- Two Rio Grande Valley residents remained in a Reynosa jail Wednesday, accused of kidnapping a local businessman, Mexican authorities said. Police arrested the two Valley residents along with a Reynosa resident Tuesday after the trio retrieved a $50,000 ransom for the man, whom police suspect they kidnapped July 9 in Reynosa. The ransom was left at a mall on the city's south side. Authorities declined to identify the victim but said he was a Reynosa resident. Once in police custody, the three suspects led investigators to the hostage, who appeared badly beaten and malnourished, said Ernesto Eduardo Saenz...

Father of victim says U.N. body's order 'don't mean diddly' Texas is refusing to bow to yesterday's World Court order to stay the Aug. 5 lethal injection of convicted rapist-killer and illegal alien Jose Medellin. (snip) Texas Gov. Rick Perry's office rejected Mexico's complaint. "The world court has no standing in Texas, and Texas is not bound by a ruling or edict from a foreign court," Perry spokesman Robert Black said. "It is easy to get caught up in discussions of international law and justice and treaties. It's very important to remember that these individuals are on death row for...

In their speeches this week to the National Council of La Raza, Sens. Barack Obama and John McCain illustrated why the American public holds Congress — and politicians in general — in such low regard, particularly on the issue of illegal immigration.

Excerpt - Acting on a claim by Mexico’s government that the U.S. government has not done enough to assure the treaty rights of Mexican nationals facing execution for murders in the U.S., the World Court on Wednesday ordered the U.S. — by a 7-5 vote — to stop five imminent executions in Texas. Leaving it up to the U.S. to choose the way to carry out the order, the international tribunal — formally, the International Court of Justice that sits in The Hague, Netherlands — told the U.S. only to “take all measures necessary to ensure” that Texas does not...

Mexican authorities arrested two Rio Grande Valley residents for their alleged involvement in a kidnapping ring that terrorized the border city of Reynosa. Tamaulipas State Police told Action 4 News that three suspects were arrested in a kidnapping case on Tuesday evening. Police recovered hundreds of thousands of dollars, jewelry and other valuables. The group was allegedly arrested following an investigation into the July 9 kidnapping of a Reynosa businessman. The suspects were identified as: Agustín Edmundo Torres Flores (San Juan, Texas) Cantalicia Cantú (McAllen, Texas) Francisca Dianey Martínez Hernández (Reynosa, Tamaulipas) Action 4 News reporter Victor Castillo will have...

MONTERREY, Mexico - Suspected drug gang hitmen shot dead a senior police commander in the violent Mexican state of Sinaloa on Wednesday, despite the arrival of hundreds of police reinforcements as killings surge. Gunmen shot dead Sinaloa's state police commander Salomon Diaz as he drove through a suburb of Culiacan, the state's capital and home to one of the country's main trafficking cartels. "He was shot in the stomach by gunmen with AK-47s," said a police spokesman who declined to be named. President Felipe Calderon has sent some 25,000 troops across Mexico to fight drug gangs but it has failed...

Recent attacks are a troubling sign innocents aren't off-limits MEXICO CITY — Many Mexicans have long shrugged off the violence shaking their country by telling themselves it only affects those involved in the narcotics trade and corrupt law enforcement officers. But innocent civilians, once considered largely off-limits, now find themselves increasingly targeted. In the past five days, two attacks in the Pacific Coast state of Sinaloa claimed the lives of perhaps more than a dozen people with no apparent connection to the drug trade — including at least four teens, a 12-year-old girl and a father-and-son team of university accounting...

A downtown Laredo street bearing the name for more than a century of a Mexican hero was changed by the Laredo City Council on Monday to remove offensive connotations it may have against Arabs or Muslims.Since moving to Laredo nearly 30 years ago, Kamel M. Shrek has studied the meaning of "Matamoros," which means Moor killer or Moor slayer. The phrase was used as a battle cry by the Spaniards during the battle of Clavijo in 844 AD, according to Shrek's research, meant to encourage killing of Muslims. After becoming a nickname in Spain related to killing Catholic Spain's Arabic...

EDINBURG - The Texas National Guard is set to end a two-year border security mission this week. And while the guardsmen's arrival in South Texas was met with concern from civil liberties groups, the soldiers have departed with relatively little fanfare. Most of the more than 500 guardsmen once stationed in the Rio Grande Valley have already been released from border duty even though their mission isn't set to expire until Tuesday, said Dan Doty, a local spokesman for the U.S. Border Patrol. "I still see one or two of them around occasionally," he said. "But most of them have...

MEXICO CITY – Gunmen killed eight youths and a police chief and took dozens of restaurant patrons hostage for hours in two attacks in the drug gang-ridden state of Sinaloa, officials saidSunday. A group of hitmen sprayed four cars with bullets on a busy street in the city of Guamuchil in the early hours of Sunday, killing five young men and three female minors, a police source told Reuters. Advertisement In an earlier attack on Saturday, six other armed men caused pandemonium in the Pacific port city of Mazatlan by taking refuge in a shopping mall to escape security forces...

Organized and increasingly violent criminals are helping Cuban emigrants make their way into the United States through Mexico, prompting Havana and Mexico City to open negotiations on a treaty to try to control the human trafficking. Those negotiations were given fresh impetus by an incident last month in which armed men intercepted a Mexican immigration service bus carrying 33 captured illegal Cuban immigrants in southern Mexico and made off with the Cubans. Within days, 18 of the Cubans turned up at a U.S. Border Patrol station at Hidalgo, Texas, to apply for residency in the U.S. Illegal immigration to the...

EDINBURG -- Hundreds of people chanting "No border wall" marched to the Hidalgo County Courthouse on Saturday evening seeking to persuade local politicians to abandon their support for the planned barrier. Protesters specifically targeted Hidalgo County Judge J.D. Salinas and other county officials for linking the building of the wall to the repair of the county's deteriorating levee system. Salinas has consistently said he opposes the border wall. But when it began to seem the barrier's construction was inevitable, he and other officials started lobbying the federal government to combine the project with levee repairs to better leverage federal money...

MEXICO - Gunmen killed 16 people, including a police chief, in a spate of separate shootouts across Mexico, which is grappling with a spike in drug-related violence, local officials said Thursday. Six of the murder victims in Culiacan were inside a car repair shop, while three others were killed outside, the state attorney's office said. Reporters said the three victims outside the shop were police officers who rushed to the scene of the gunfire. At practically the same time and also in Culiacan, one police officer was shot and killed at the wheel of his pickup truck. Another officer was...

Amnesty for Abortion by: Ben Giles, July 11, 2008 Amnesty International recently addressed the Supreme Court of Mexico, urging the high court to uphold an April 2007 decision legalizing abortion in Mexico City, according to reports by Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute. “Fulfilling its duty to respect, protect, and fulfill the right to life does not require the Mexican state to restrict women’s access to safe abortion services,” AI wrote in a statement to the court. Mexico has traditionally outlawed abortion but for exceptional cases such as rape and illness. A majority of Mexican provinces still follow laws which...

A local man is drawing criticism after driving around town with an anti-illegal immigration sign mounted on a trailer. The sign reads "Build the wall, deport them all," and Davi Rodriguez says it's part of an attempt to educate residents on illegal immigration. Davi drives the sign up and down the streets of Sacramento where day laborers wait for work, sometimes videotaping the reactions and uploading them to YouTube. Workers we talked to say they feel harassed, and they're losing jobs. "The people who come down here to hire us go away," said one worker, who did not wish to...

AMSTERDAM (Reuters) - The World Court said on Friday it will rule next week on a Mexican request that it seek a delay of the imminent U.S. executions of five of its citizens, who Mexico argues were denied consular assistance. One of the five on death row, Jose Medellin, is due to die on August 5 in Texas, prompting Mexico to make its petition last month for urgent action. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) will issue its decision on July 16. The ICJ in The Hague ruled in 2004 that the United States had violated international law by failing...

---snip--- One thing is clear: renewable energy is not going to save the U.S. anytime soon. I don't know why or how people see renewable energy as a short-term answer. Think about it, even with federal subsidies, tax breaks, and record high energy prices, renewable energy still has not made a dent in the energy market. Renewable energy might be a long-term answer, I can't say. I'm just amazed that people look at it as such an option without realizing how incredibly expensive it is. The federal subsidies and tax breaks still haven't made it very competitive and people still...

Want pico de gallo on your fajita taco? You just might have to settle for chopped onion. Jalapeño and serrano chiles, as well as cilantro, have been implicated in the multistate outbreak of salmonella infections. They join the list that began with tomatoes — and all are ingredients in the enormously popular Tex-Mex relish, pico de gallo. San Antonio’s hundreds of Tex-Mex restaurateurs are faced with some important decisions this week. Blanca Aldaco, owner of two local Aldaco restaurants, said she’s not serving pico de gallo at this time. “We’re only using our cooked salsa,” she said. Tomatoes, connected with...

A comic-book character popular in Mexico for generations has run into a cultural barrier at the border, where Americans see him as a racist caricature. For more than 60 years Mexicans have followed the adventures of "Memin Pinguin." But the dark-skinned Memin's exaggerated features in "Memin for President" came as a shock to Houston, Texas, Wal-Mart shopper Shawnedria McGinty. "I was like, OK, is that a monkey or a boy?" McGinty said. "To me it was an insult." She'd never heard of "Memin Pinguin." She bought a Spanish-English dictionary and tried translating but still didn't like what she saw. "So...

SAN JUAN - A group of nonprofit agencies in the Rio Grande Valley said Wednesday they were suing the U.S. Border Patrol for clear answers on whether there would be document checks of residents fleeing a hurricane. The lawsuit, to be filed Wednesday in federal court in McAllen, claims conflicting statements by U.S. Customs and Border Protection have brought fear and confusion to a region where many families are split between unauthorized immigrants and U.S. citizens or legal residents. Those families have said they would not evacuate if there were reason to fear deportation as they board buses or pass...

Customers ask Wal-Mart stores to remove book Beloved by Mexicans for his dim wits, street smarts and playful disposition, long-running comic book character Memín Pinguín — a little black boy whose face resembles a monkey — is at it again. His zany adventures chronicled in a hugely popular book series for decades are up for sale at your neighborhood Wal-Mart store in the Libros en Español section, right next to the store's cadre of African-American books. The latest issue: Memín para presidente. By Shawnedria McGinty's American standards, the image was shocking. The African-American woman who was shopping at the store...

The most recent outbreak of salmonella poisoning of produce caused much alarm across the country and cost American tomato growers millions in lost revenue. As of this writing, over 900 salmonella cases have been diagnosed in 40 states. While American farmers struggled as the CDC did their best to pin the tainted tomatoes on them, their crops rotted on docks and in warehouses as consumers refused to buy potentially contaminated goods. For those of us in Arkansas, it was a relief when our famous Bradley County pink tomatoes were cleared; harvesting had not begun when the outbreak occurred.

Whose idea was it to send John McCain down to Mexico the day before Independence Day and have him grovel for Latino votes south of the border by visiting the Basilica de Guadalupe–a famed Catholic shrine featuring the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe, which most Mexican politicians consider off-limits for campaigning? According to Frentes Politicos (hat tip - reader Edgar M.), the stunt was the brainchild of none other than McCain’s open-borders Hispanic outreach director and former Mexican cabinet official Juan Hernandez, who apparently survived the big campaign staff shake-up:

Mexico City, Official Residence The Presidency reported that President Felipe Calderón met Arizona Senator John McCain, who will be nominated as the US Republican Presidential Candidate in September, at the official Los Pinos residence today. The President remarked that Mexico trusts the United States will value the priority given to bilateral work on migration, trade, development, regional competitiveness and security as the means for promoting the well-being of both societies. President Calderón confirmed his government’s intention of continuing to collaborate on all issues of common interest, including the prevention of and response to natural disasters and pandemics, food security and...

Whose idea was it to send John McCain down to Mexico the day before Independence Day and have him grovel for Latino votes south of the border by visiting the Basilica de Guadalupe–a famed Catholic shrine featuring the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe, which most Mexican politicians consider off-limits for campaigning? According to Frentes Politicos (hat tip - reader Edgar M.), the stunt was the brainchild of none other than McCain’s open-borders Hispanic outreach director and former Mexican cabinet official Juan Hernandez, who apparently survived the big campaign staff shake-up: I. El truco para la buena imagen fue idea...

Presumptive Republican U.S. presidential nominee John McCain told Mexican leaders security at the border is a precondition of immigration reform. McCain ended a visit to Colombia and Mexico Thursday, The Arizona Republic reported. I believe we must have comprehensive immigration reform. The American people want our borders secured first, McCain said at a Mexico City news conference. That will require some walls. It will require virtual fences. It will require high-technology equipment. We must secure our borders, and then we will address the issue of comprehensive immigration reform. McCain was one of the authors of an immigration reform bill that...

MEXICO CITY — Three decapitated corpses were discovered in Mexico's northwestern Sinaloa state Friday, bring to a total of seven headless bodies found and 11 police assassinated in a bloody week of often drug-related violence in the country, officials and news reports said. The three headless corpses were found in a car in Culiacan, Sinaloa, together with a note critical of one of the Beltran Leyva brothers, heads of a faction of the divided Sinaloa drug cartel, state judicial officials said in a statement. The Beltran Leyva brothers are in a fight with Sinaloa-based Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, the country's...

WASHINGTON — Besieged Texas sheriffs have vowed to press the White House and Congress to deliver emergency assistance to law enforcement officers battling drug cartels along the Mexican border to match the $400 million on its way to Mexico. The sheriffs said they were frustrated that President Bush and Congress agreed to provide assistance to Mexico as part of the Merida Initiative, without offering additional federal help to their departments. The officers said they'd seek direct federal assistance, as well as changes in Department of Homeland Security restrictions to permit local law enforcement departments to use homeland security funds to...

BROOKS COUNTY -- It's just before noon in the tangled woods of La Copa Ranch. U.S. Border Patrol Agent Rick Garcia makes his first discovery of the day. Through the web of mesquite brush and weeds, the footsteps of three immigrants crunch louder on the blanket of dead leaves as they approach the weathered ranch path. Garcia's partner, K-9 agent Chico, just found the immigrants struggling through the woods. Garcia asks the exhausted group in Spanish whether any of them have weapons, then how long they have been traveling on foot. "Two days," one woman replied in Spanish. The group...

Jeb Bush Joins McCain on Tour of Basilica in Mexico City Sen. John McCain, his wife Cindy McCain, and Sen. Joe Lieberman, listen as Monsignor Diego Monroy Ponce, left, discusses details from an image of the Virgin of Guadalupe at the Basilica of Guadalupe in Mexico City, July 3, 2008. (Associated Press)By Juliet EilperinMEXICO CITY -- Paying homage to one of the holiest sites for Mexican Roman Catholics, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) visited the Basilica of the Virgin of Guadalupe this morning along with his wife and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush.  The president's younger brother, who has been friendly...

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush will join presumptive Republican presidential nominee John McCain in Mexico City Thursday morning on the last day of McCain's three-day visit to Latin America. Gov. Bush was in Mexico City on business and wanted to spend time with the candidate. He will not spend the day with Sen. McCain, R-Ariz., who has several other events today, including a media availability this afternoon. Gov. Bush's name has been floated in Republican veepstakes chatter. On Good Morning America Wednesday, however, McCain pushed back on any talk of his vice presidential pick.

MEXICO CITY - The severed heads of four men were found dumped on a Mexican street on Wednesday with a message accusing a drug gang kingpin of treachery, police said. Neighbors in the northern city of Culiacan found the men's bodies wrapped in plastic sheets and a blanket, with their heads stuffed into white plastic bags. An obscenity-laden note scrawled onto a piece of cardboard invited Joaquin "El Chapo" (Shorty) Guzman -- the head of the Sinaloa drug cartel -- "to see what his stupid acts had caused." Guzman, who is considered Mexico's most-wanted man, is battling a rival gang...

MISSION -- Police busted a stash house Tuesday after a Honduran woman said she was sexually assaulted there. Officers raided the house -- at 2113 Sierra Court, near Mission Veterans Memorial High School on Mile 2 North and N. Mayberry Ave. -- about 11:25 a.m. Police had found the woman wandering along a nearby road in the wee hours earlier that morning. Police pulled over to see if she was OK and she told them she had been sexually assaulted at the brick house, Mission police spokesman Lt. Martin Garza said. The house likely sheltered illegal immigrants traveling north, he...

PACHUCA, MEXICO - THREE suspects confessed to strangling and cutting into pieces a woman and her three-month old daughter because they feared they were witches, police in this central Mexican town said on Tuesday. Pachuca police spokesman Ms Norberto Munoz said the remains of the woman and her infant were found 'with signs of having been strangled, quartered and burned.' The three female suspects - who police have not named - were arrested 'and declared that they committed the crime to stop supposed acts of witchcraft of the mother and her daughter,' Ms Munoz said. The remains of the victims...

As pointed out by this representative of the Florida Attorney General's office, it is impossible to separate national security issues from illegal immigration, and one of the most important illegal immigration issues in Florida is the issue of human trafficking. And as Jake at Freedom Folks notes (thanks for the tip), this story doesn't appear to have been covered by the news wires. Here, a horrifying story is described of a little girl who, after being taken to the Florida panhandle from Mexico, resisted while being raped, and was subsequently made an example of by being beheaded in front of...

HIDALGO -- The pair of U.S. Border Patrol agents guide their horses under the fiery midday sun. One man spots more than a dozen people huddled beneath a grove of trees that sit just several yards before them. The two charge forward. Part of the gaggle breaks apart as the immigrants try to outrun the agents - a desperate run for escape while others remain beneath the trees. As one agent chases the runners while still on horseback, his partner breaks off and confronts the others in the shade. But as he approaches, the supposed coyote - clad in green...

REYNOSA - The family of a Pharr man brutally murdered last week could be linked to his death, Mexican authorities said Monday. Ramiro Torres Hernández, 25, was with his wife and cousin when he was kidnapped by two men, according to authorities. But neither the wife or cousin reported the kidnapping when it occured after midnight Wednesday, they said. The wife's and cousin's names were not released. A family member told investigators Torres had gotten off his vehicle at a Super 7 in the Luis Donaldo Colosio neighborhood of Reynosa when he was kidnapped, homicide unit chief Fernando Miranda Guerrero...

McALLEN - A local resident was found wrapped, tortured and shot execution-style in Reynosa on Friday, according to a Mexican news report released Sunday. Ramiro Torres Hernández, 24, - a manager of a Burger King in McAllen - was found inside an abandoned vehicle's trunk in a rural field heading toward Rio Bravo in Ejido El Porvenir, El Universal wire service reported. Tamaulipas state police identified Torres as a Pharr resident. His visibly tortured body was wrapped in a blanket inside the trunk of a white 2000 Buick sporting Texas license plates, El Universal reported. He had been shot in...

It is a steel and concrete corridor that will run right through the Old Pueblo, connecting Mexico City to Edmonton, Alberta. Its purpose is to facilitate trade among the three countries and minimize traffic and congestion for residents. Or is it evidence of a move afoot to intertwine the three North American countries and blur the lines of sovereignty? That's a matter of opinion.

As if our military didn't have its hands full in Iraq and Afghanistan, the head of the Minuteman Project border security group seems to think Minutemen might make good narcotics cops. Minuteman co-founder Jim Gilchrist suggested in recent radio interviews that the U.S. give Mexico 12 months to corral its criminal drug cartels and rising violence, particularly in border towns such as Juarez and Tijuana—or deploy the U.S. Army to do the job. That's the Minutemen. Their remedies for the drug war next door sound simplistic, but at least they're paying attention. While most of us north of the border...

The El Paso sector Border Patrol chief, a UTEP professor and the special agent in charge of the El Paso FBI spoke about the cartel war in Juarez and Mexico. The deadly cartel war responsible for dozens of deaths a week in Juarez is liable to go on for another two years, the El Paso’s Border Patrol Chief Victor Manjarrez said at today’s El Paso Press Club Meet the Press forum. UTEP Professor Tony Payan blamed the former governor of the state of Chihuahua and mayor of Juarez for allowing the lawless atmosphere that led to the armed struggle between...

Gwinnett County authorities are working with federal agencies to extradite a Mexican man wanted for the murder of his four-year-old daughter. District Attorney Danny Porter said he expects to receive and sign a provisional arrest warrant from the FBI. It will say the county will pay the costs to extradite Mexican citizen Christian Vasquez, 23, from Mexico back to Gwinnett to be tried. Vasquez is accused of killing four-year-old Prisi Vasquez. He did so, police believe, with a blow to the head, sometime in early 2007, and then fled to Mexico. With him were his wife, Amy Yesemia Ruiz, 20,...

PIEDRAS NEGRAS, Mexico, The first of 400,000 trees are being planted to form a ``green wall' in protest of the fence the U.S. is building along the border with Mexico. The treeline will eventually stretch for 512 kilometres along the border between the Mexican state of Coahuila and Texas. Coahuila Gov. Humberto Moreira Valdes says ``our wall is of life, and it competes with shame and hate.' The U.S. government says the fence is critical to security. Critics say it fuels animosity between the two countries and raises environmental and private property concerns. The mayor of a Texas border town...

As organized crime galvanizes their hold on Mexico, their network infiltrates our colleges, street gangs, and our communities. Our country is being raped and ravaged as our elected leaders remain insulated and uncaring within the halls of Congress.

MONTERREY - Drug hitmen shot dead six Mexican policemen on patrol in the marijuana-producing state of Sinaloa, the latest in a growing stream of attacks on police, the local attorney general's office said on Friday. A group of armed men blocked a busy road in Sinaloa's state capital Culiacan on Thursday night and shot at the police with automatic weapons from two vehicles, a spokesman for the state attorney general said. "We believe the killers were drug hitmen. The police were from different local and state units traveling together in the same vehicle," he said. The attack came hours after...

Amid fierce U.S. government protests over the release of a suspect in the killing of a U.S. Border Patrol agent, Mexico yesterday pledged close cooperation with U.S. authorities. But Mexican officials said they have yet to receive a request for his extradition or arrest. Jesús Navarro Montes, who is suspected of drug smuggling, is accused by U.S. authorities of driving a sport utility vehicle over agent Luis Aguilar in January near the U.S.-Mexico border west of Yuma. Navarro was released from a Mexicali prison earlier this month after Judge Laura Serrano Alderete, of the Baja California 12th District, cleared him...

WASHINGTON (AFP) — Republican White House hopeful John McCain is heading to Colombia and Mexico next week for talks with their presidents on trade and narcotics, aides said Thursday. Burnishing his foreign policy credentials against Democrat Barack Obama, McCain will be in the Colombian city of Cartagena on Tuesday and Wednesday, according to a brief campaign statement. The Arizona senator will meet Colombian President Alvaro Uribe to discuss a bilateral free-trade pact that Democrats have held up in Congress, campaign aides said. They will also talk about US support for the Uribe government's fight against "narcoterrorism," McCain spokeswoman Hessy Fernandez...

Suspect in Harlingen police shooting, Abraham Mar, has been (Captured) The suspect in the shooting of a Harlingen police officer was transferred to U.S. custody from Mexican authorities Thursday evening, officials said. Abraham Mar, 18, of Harlingen, was in the custody of U.S. Customs and Border Protection as of 7 p.m. Thursday, authorities said. Earlier in the evening police confirmed he was in the custody of Mexican authorities in Matamoros, Mexico, police spokesman David Osborne said. Mar faces a charge of attempted capital murder in the Wednesday night shooting of Officer Carlos Diaz, who was shot multiple times during a...

Border Patrol picks up 23 Cubans near Hidalgo HIDALGO -- U.S. Border Patrol agents apprehended 23 Cuban immigrants Wednesday who had illegally entered the country near the Hidalgo-Reynosa International Bridge. All the immigrants remained in custody Thursday to be interviewed and check their criminal and immigration history, according to a Border Patrol news release. The immigrants may be paroled into the United States, based on the Cuban Refugee Adjustment Act.