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McALLEN — Jurors convicted three men Wednesday for their roles in the sex smuggling of three teenage Mexican girls in Rio Grande City. Jurors deliberated about two hours following the three-day trial, which pegged Juan Antonio Garcia Garay as the ringleader of the operation. The case involved a March 17 traffic stop by Rio Grande City police, who encountered a barefoot 13-year-old girl toting a pistol hidden beneath a purple jumper dress. The girl later told U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents she was a prostitute working alongside two others, ages 15 and 18. The three girls had been staying...

A woman accused of leaving the scene of a traffic accident last month where an investigating Houston police officer was later killed has been charged with two felonies and is believed to have fled again — this time, to Mexico. Houston police have issued a warrant for the arrest of Francisca Cortez, 28. Authorities said they believe she is the driver who struck two motorcyclists on Interstate 610 near Yale on May 29. While investigating that wreck, Officer Kevin Will was fatally struck by a suspected drunken driver. In a probable cause affidavit filed Friday in Harris County, police revealed...

By MANUEL DE LA CRUZ - Associated Press TUXTLA GUTIERREZ, Mexico -- Mexican police on Sunday discovered 210 mainly Central and South American migrants crammed inside a truck near the country's southern border, an immigration official said. The dehydrated and hungry migrants were found when the truck was searched at a highway checkpoint, said the immigration official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk on the record.

SALT LAKE CITY — More than a dozen Latin and South American countries have joined Mexico in expressing potential international fallout over Utah's illegal immigration enforcement law. In a court brief filed Tuesday, the Mexican government lists several reasons for its opposition to HB497, including impeding diplomatic relations, hindering trade and tourism and possible harassment of Mexican citizens. "Mexico respectfully submits that if HB497 is allowed to take effect it will have significant and long-lasting adverse impact on U.S.-Mexico bilateral relations, and on Mexican citizens and other people of Latin American descent present in Utah," court documents say. The brief...

MEXICO CITY - Mexico's border mayors say they are worried about a possible surge in deportations of criminals to their cities after a U.S. Supreme Court ruling ordered California to reduce its prison population by 33,000. .

Mexico City – The most fearsome weapons wielded by Mexico's drug cartels enter the country from Central America, not the United States, according to U.S. diplomatic cables disseminated by WikiLeaks and published here Tuesday by La Jornada newspaper. Items such as grenades and rocket-launchers are stolen from Central American armies and smuggled into Mexico via neighboring Guatemala, the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City reported to Washington. The assertions appear in embassy cables written after three bilateral conferences on arms trafficking that took place between March 2009 and January 2010 in Cuernavaca, Mexico; Phoenix; and Tapachula, Mexico, respectively. The cables' authors...

Immigration attorneys and immigrant-rights groups in the Texas border city of El Paso said they have formed a coalition aimed at providing greater support for asylum seekers facing a hurdle-ridden application process. The director of the Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center in El Paso, Louie Gilot, said cases of Mexicans fleeing drug-related violence have risen significantly over the past two years and that the asylum seekers include former police officers, rights activists, journalists, business leaders and even government officials. Just across the Rio Grande from El Paso is Ciudad Juarez, Mexico's murder capital and the largest city in Chihuahua state,...

WASHINGTON (AFP) – US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) will double the number of its agents deployed in Mexico and examine new security measures in the wake of the killing of one of its officers, director John Morton said Friday. "We're going to go from 20 people to 40 people" in Mexico, Morton told members of Congress in a hearing on his agency's budget for the upcoming fiscal year. "It will be by far our largest office." The comments come less than a month after ICE agent Jaime Zapata, 32, was killed and a second ICE agent wounded while driving...

WASHINGTON — The final agreement to end a 2-year-old trucking dispute between the U.S. and Mexico "should be weeks, if not days" away, U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk said Thursday. At a lunch meeting with reporters, the highest-ranking Texan in the Obama administration said U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack and Mexican Transportation Minister Humberto Treviño are close to signing the deal that will end an impasse that has cost American businesses about $5 billion in retaliatory tariffs imposed by Mexico. "This could not have been better news and it could not have happened soon enough" for Texas and California agriculture...

UNEDITED) Utah's Grand Old Party (the GOP) took one right out of President Obama's playbook this session when they passed a new Illegal Immigration bill, which I call Utah's Obama-gration law. Now from the beginning, let me set one thing straight. ObamaCare has some really good ideas in it, ideas that everyone would agree on. And the same goes for Utah's new Obama-gration law, HB116. It has some good things in it that everyone agrees on. But that is not the issue. The issue is the "little bitty part" that is Unconstitutional. You see individual States do not have the...

MEXICO CITY — Lawmakers in Mexico are demanding an investigation into a U.S. law enforcement operation that allowed hundreds of weapons to flow into the hands of Mexican drug cartels amid claims from a ranking legislator that at least 150 Mexicans have been killed or wounded by guns trafficked by smugglers under the watch of U.S. agents. U.S. authorities say manpower shortages and the high number of weapons sold resulted in their losing track of hundreds of guns, from pistols to .50-caliber sniper rifles, though a federal agent deeply involved in the Phoenix-based operation said it was "impossible" that U.S....

ALACHUA -- A man wanted by federal immigration enforcement is being held at the Alachua County Jail on a number of charges, including battery and child abuse, after a hit-and-run in Alachua. On March 5, Persiliano Garcia, 20, of Mexico, ran into the back of a woman's sedan, according to an Alachua Police Department report. When the woman, Sherell Hope of Alachua, got out of her car, Garcia backed up his white Honda sedan, hitting Hope in the leg, and drove away. Police caught up to him on County Road 235, and a record check revealed Garcia was using a...

Mexican federal police detained Mario Jimenez Perez, also known as “El Mayito,” a Zeta drug cartel member who has been linked to the slaying of ICE Special Agent Jaime Jorge Zapata. Mexico’s Ministry for Public Security issued a statement Wednesday announcing that Jimenez Perez was taken into custody Saturday in San Luis Potosi, along with 16 other members of the Zeta criminal organization. Mexican authorities said Jimenez Perez is in charge of finances for the Zetas. However, the statement does not specify his role in the attack. Zapata, a special agent with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and fellow...

In testimony today before the House Committee on Homeland Security, the head of the sprawling agency that protects the nation at home announced that the Obama administration will ask Mexico to turn over the suspected killers of ICE agent Jaime Zapata to face trial in an American court.

In an effort to counter the broad brush strokes that dominate discussions of immigration, the University of Texas at San Antonio is hosting a two-day seminar that will take a more nuanced look at the issue, said Harriett Romo, director of the school's Mexico Center. Today and Friday at UTSA's downtown campus, the Bilateral Perspectives on Mexican Migration Conference will feature panelists from the U.S. and Mexico trying to show the impact immigration has on both countries and on immigrants themselves, Romo said. Demographers, sociologists, economists and others will delve into the issue, including aspects such as health on the...

“A Mexican officer assigned to guard President Felipe Calderón was accused of leaking information to drug cartels in exchange for bribes, training hit men through a private security firm, and supplying military weapons to groups like the Zetas, according to a U.S. diplomatic cable.” The information comes to us via elpasotimes.com. As I’ve said before, Los Zetas and their main competitors are NOT buying their weapons in dribs and drabs from Bob’s Gun Stores in Los Estados Unidos. To even suggest such a thing is the height of absurdity. No wait: it’s official U.S. government policy, courtesy of the Gunwalking...

On December 14, 2010, a firefight erupted in the Arizona desert. When the smoke had cleared, Customs and Border Protection Agent Brian Terry was dead, and the seeds of a scandal had been sown. Some of the rank and file of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (BATFE), often referred to as the ATF, began to grow concerned that a new development in Project Gunrunner probably had resulted in the death of Agent Terry.

Two years ago, when Los Angeles businessman Alejandro Viecco visited the agave-fields surrounding the Mexican town of Tequila—where the eponymous liquor is made—he made a startling discovery. The process of making tequila, it turns out, can be as messy, smelly and disgusting as the aftermath of drinking too much of it. “When you go to [the town of] Tequila, there’s this beautiful fresh spring water coming through the lava rock,” he says. “Then not that far away you have this waste that’s being dumped. It has hot alcohol content and it’s destroying everything in its path. If you looked at...

The mother of a 14-year-old hitman who confessed to severing heads for a brutal Mexican drug cartel pleaded not guilty on Thursday to a charge that she was in the United States illegally, according to news reports. Yolanda Jimenez Lugo, 43, and her husband, Gabriel Aguirre Manuel, 46, pleaded not guilty to charges in federal court in San Diego, the San Diego Union-Tribune newspaper reported.

The Greek government has unveiled plans to construct a wall along its 128-mile land border with Turkey in order to tackle the influx of illegal immigrants. Interior minister Christian Papoutsis said the wall was a necessary measure after more than 100,000 people illegally entered the Mediterranean nation last year. But the plans - which have compared with the 650-mile barrier along sections of the border between the U.S. and Mexico - have been criticised by the European Commission as a 'short-term measure' that does not deal with the root of the problem. Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1343885/Greece-follows-U-S-example-building-giant-border-wall-illegal-immigrants.html#ixzz1A5Sq0itZ