Free Republic

The Obama administration is scrambling to make Mexico by the end of the year a full-fledged member of a North American industry pact that works to defend the electric grid from cyberattacks. The reason for the eleventh-hour move to include Mexico in the cybergroup is likely a result of the contentious presidential election and the administration's goals of creating a North American clean energy grid. Such collaboration would be far less likely if Republican nominee Donald Trump gets into office with his walled-off vision for the U.S., said a senior industry official. But it would benefit Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton,...

The common-law wife of imprisoned drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman has filed a complaint with Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission complaining of his treatment in prison. Emma Coronel is the mother of twin daughters with Guzman. She told local media Monday outside the commission’s Mexico City office that she had just filed the complaint charging that Guzman suffers from declining health. Coronel has filed complaints before to pressure the government to improve conditions for the Sinaloa cartel’s leader.

Drug smugglers and human traffickers “have a very effective intelligence gathering system” that is “much more effective than what we have in the U.S. government,” former U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent A.J. Irwin said Wednesday during a panel discussion at the National Press Club in Washington. The discussion highlighted recent statistics from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) agency showing a dramatic ten-fold increase in the number of illegal immigrants claiming asylum when they reach the U.S. border since 2009. Irwin said that smugglers quickly find out about changes in U.S. law or policy and then move...

Mexico City’s Mayor Miguel Angel Mancera is handing out plastic whistles. A half-million of them. At three bucks a pop, he’s hoping that women will use the whistles to scare off harassers on the packed public transportation system. When the plan was announced this summer, it received a flurry of scathing criticism and mocking memes on social media. But city officials are moving forward and have been handing out the whistles by the thousands at subway and bus stops. […] So far, the critics of the whistle plan have been making the most noise. Since he began handing out the...

SIERRA VISTA — Many keen-eyed residents may have noticed that one of the common sights of the local skyline, the aerostat on Fort Huachuca, has been missing from the skies above Sierra Vista for the last several weeks. After five years of serving as an important link in a chain of detection spanning the length of the international border, the most recent iteration of the Tethered Aerostat Radar System (TARS) has been brought down for regular comprehensive maintenance after reaching the end of its life cycle, said Robert Brown, TARS program manager for U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), which...

The total apprehensions by U.S. Border Patrol agents of people trying to illegally cross the border between the United States and Mexico increased in 2016 from last year but is lower than the two years prior. In 2016, there were 408,870 total apprehensions, a 23 percent increase from 2015 in which there were 331,333 apprehensions, U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said in a statement. The 2016 numbers, though, represent a 14.7 percent decrease from the 479,371 apprehensions in 2014, and a 1.3 percent decrease from the 414,397 apprehensions in 2013.

Throngs of Haitians, Africans, Russians, Armenians and Guatemalans are being admitted into the United States via the Mexican border with virtually no vetting for security or health risks, high level Homeland Security officials told Judicial Watch this week. Overwhelmed and understaffed border agents are bombarded daily with an onslaught of immigrants from these countries and have been ordered by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to process them as refugees with “credible fear.” Most are camping out in Mexican border towns and going “port shopping” before gaining entry to the U.S., according to federal officials whose identities must be kept...

This year, alone, apprehensions by Border Patrol in New Mexico have surged to 18,500 people in the 11 months through August, compared with 11,216 in all of fiscal 2015. Many of the migrants are from Central America like Alex, a 30-year-old farmworker. About 7,900 of the migrants apprehended this year in New Mexico are classified by Border Patrol as “other than Mexican,” mostly from Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador and, lately, Brazil – and they have accounted for much of the increase. The strength of the U.S. dollar, which makes basic goods more expensive in Latin America; stagnant wages and few...

John SantucciVerified account ‏@JTSantucci 3 senior level sources confirm to ABC - Trump is drafting a lawsuit against the New York Times for defamation. 1 source tells me "it's war"

While the nation is absorbed with presidential election theatrics, the Obama administration continues letting huge amounts of illegal immigrants to pour in through the southern border and the latest figures released by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) are incredibly chilling. The number of family units apprehended by the U.S. Border Patrol in the first 11 months of fiscal year 2016 nearly doubled from the previous year, according to updated information released by the agency. The majority of these illegal border crossers will remain in the country under Obama’s special refugee and family reunification programs. Fiscal years run from October...

Documents obtained by Rep. Duncan Hunter detail the assistance of the Mexican government in getting Haitian refugees into the US illegally. In the last year, more than 6,000 Haitians have arrived at the border near San Diego with thousands more in Mexico waiting to get in.   Washington Times: “Haitians have forged a dangerous and clandestine new path to get to the United States,” says the document, which lays out in detail the route and the prices paid along the way for smugglers, bus tickets and, where they can be obtained legally, transit documents.

Mexican officials are quietly helping thousands of illegal immigrant Haitians make their way to the United States, according to an internal Homeland Security document that details the route taken by the migrants, the thousands of dollars paid to human smugglers along the way and the sometimes complicit role of the governments of America’s neighbors. More than 6,000 Haitians arrived at the border in San Diego over the last year — a staggering 18-fold increase over fiscal year 2015. Some 2,600 more were waiting in northern Mexico as of last week, and 3,500 others were not far behind, waiting in Panama...

U2 frontman Bono berated Donald Trump at a Dreamforce benefit concert in San Francisco Wednesday night, blasting the Republican presidential candidate’s proposal to build a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border and shouting “You’re fired!” at the candidate’s onstage projection.

A group of Mexican senators is backing a “Tell Them To Vote” campaign that encourages Mexicans to urge relatives living in the U.S. to vote in the November election. Sen. Gabriela Cuevas says she will push for the full Senate to back the campaign, which includes videos that call on Mexican-Americans in the U.S. to register to vote. Speaking Tuesday, Cuevas said that “I think this is something that can unify all the political parties.” …

Elon Musk takes the stage of the 67th International Astronautical Congress in Guadalajara, Mexico on Sept. 27, it won’t be to rehash terrestrial concerns like a fatal Tesla autopilot crash or a poorly received merger proposal. Instead, the space and electric-car entrepreneur will be talking about realizing his boyhood dream: going to Mars. Read more on Bloomberg.com: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Authorities have arrested and indicted a pair of Mexican nationals with several charges after they allegedly raped young children. Fernando Limon, 23, along with his brother Ramiro Limon, 28, are charged with four counts of child rape each and were arrested in Tennessee on September 20 “without incident,” according to the Wilson County Sheriff’s Office.

Teaching students in western Mexico's Michoacán state are holding a police chief hostage, demanding the release of arrested fellow students, authorities said Wednesday. On Tuesday afternoon, in the indigenous village of Carapan, teaching students took Chilchota municipality police chief Alfredo Lucio Rios Chávez hostage after he approached them as they were setting fire to three vehicles - a passenger bus, a tractor trailer and a pickup truck - and having a confrontation with security forces. Rios approached the angry students to "try to calm the kids down and they grabbed him as a hostage and took him away," Chilchota Mayor...

It’s a boy! A five-month-old boy is the first baby to be born using a new technique that incorporates DNA from three people, New Scientist can reveal. “This is great news and a huge deal,” says Dusko Ilic at King’s College London, who wasn’t involved in the work. “It’s revolutionary.” The controversial technique, which allows parents with rare genetic mutations to have healthy babies, has only been legally approved in the UK. But the birth of the child, whose Jordanian parents were treated by a US-based team in Mexico, should fast-forward progress around the world, say embryologists.

Three priests with the Catholic Church have been kidnapped and murdered in Mexico in less than a week. The high profile murders mark the latest chapter in Mexico’s ongoing crime wave that continues to spread. The most recent murder took place the week of September 19 in the Mexican state of Michoacán when authorities confirmed the kidnapping and murder of Rev. Jose Alfredo Lopez Guillen. Over the weekend, the Michoacán Attorney General’s Office confirmed the discovery of Lopez’ body in a rural area called las Guayabas. Days before the kidnapping of Lopez, in the Mexican state of Veracruz, a group...

Former Mexican President Vicente Fox on Tuesday slammed Donald Trump's performance in the first presidential debate and warned that the GOP nominee's behavior should alarm world leaders. "We think he’s a danger. He’s a threat to the world," Fox, who watched the debate on Mexican television, told The Washington Post. "When he speaks about geo-economic situation and the geo-political situation and terrorism, he’s absolutely ignorant, and he’s only provoking us democratic leaders from around the world to reject everything he’s proposing. He is an imperialistic gringo." In contrast, Fox said Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton looked "very presidential." "My impression...