www.esryle.comLOCAL NEWS ACROSS THE NATION
Posted on 08/26/2004 7:16:36 AM PDT by esryle
EL PASO, Texas - (KRT) - There's a growing sense of urgency among those who police America's long, porous borders that tighter control is needed to prevent terrorists from slipping into the flood of illegal immigrants entering the United States.
The Sept. 11 Commission found that the nation's borders are largely unprotected and recommended that border security become an integral part of national security policy. Now that airline security has been improved, terror suspects increasingly are being detected trying to enter the country on ships or overland.
A military unit called Joint Task Force-6 is greatly expanding its role in supporting the hunt for terrorists trying to slip across the Mexican and Canadian borders.
A modern control center at its headquarters at Fort Bliss in El Paso, which starts operations next month, will gather feeds from U.S. intelligence agencies. And the commander of JTF-6 gets military Reserve units from all over the country to volunteer for missions along the southern border. He tells them there's no better place in America to get the kind of training that will prepare a unit for deployment to Afghanistan or Iraq.
Units come here for two weeks at a time, in lieu of ordinary summer training back home. This month, Army Reserve engineers from New York were out in the 115-degree heat building roads on the border at Nogales, Ariz. Marine Reservists flying Super Cobra helicopter gunships with forward-looking infrared radar were helping the Border Patrol by scouring the border at night looking for smugglers and illegal immigrants.
Since the 2001 terrorist attacks, the government has directed more resources at tightening border security. Still, the commander of JTF-6, Brig. Gen. John "Jay" Yingling, said his nightmare is that al-Qaida terrorists will slip in with illegal immigrants and attack the United States again.
Authorities see Latin America as a potential recruiting ground for terrorist groups because it has weak governments and police, drug smuggling conduits for moving people and goods and its own lax border controls.
Some recent developments have heightened concerns:
_Authorities in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, have received information suggesting that a group affiliated with al-Qaida has been planning attacks against the British, Spanish, and American embassies. Security was increased around the embassies on Friday.
_Other police reports suggest at least one Saudi-born member of al-Qaida, Adnan el Shukrijumah, may have been in Tegucigalpa in July, having crossed the border illegally from Nicaragua after a stay in Panama.
Yingling and his bosses at the U.S. Northern Command in Colorado hope to see the Joint Task Force become an interagency operation that will get all law enforcement and intelligence agencies on the same sheet of music.
On October 1, JTF-6 will be renamed Joint Task Force-North, and after years of working within the entire continental United States, primarily focusing its efforts along the U.S.-Mexican border, the task force will start looking across the nation's borders into Mexico, Canada and beyond.
Yingling has built a modern state-of-the-art control center at JTF-6 headquarters at Fort Bliss to coordinate and sharpen the impact of law enforcement.
Intelligence feeds gathered by the center's computers can be displayed on large plasma screens.
"There is too much stove-piping of information and intelligence," Yingling said. "The events of 9-11 are a striking catalyst for change. We need to bring it all together - human intelligence, signal intelligence, radar, all of it - to be more effective, more pro-active."
Last year, the U.S. Border Patrol apprehended more than 900,000 illegal immigrants who were trying to get across the border. Some agencies estimate that for every one apprehended, four others make it across and disappear.
What JTF-6 watches most closely are "special interest aliens" - those whose native countries are of high interest in the global war on terrorism. The Border Patrol detained 303 such people crossing the border from Canada last year and 262 crossing from Mexico.
Carl L. McClafferty, the deputy chief of the Tucson Sector of the Border Patrol, said his agency has increased manpower in the stations along the Arizona border, doubling and even tripling the number of agents. Arrests, he said, are up, and the flow of illegal immigrants is down.
After heightened security and better fences made smuggling difficult in the high-traffic areas of San Diego and El Paso, smugglers rerouted the flow of aliens and drugs toward Arizona. The Border Patrol then built 14-foot-tall steel fences and installed 60-foot-tall towers equipped with infrared cameras and other detection equipment for several miles through each of the major crossing points in Arizona: Douglas, Nogales, Naco and Yuma. That forced the smugglers into the desert.
McClafferty said finding and apprehending smugglers and illegal immigrants is easier in the desert, far from cities and towns where they can quickly blend in.
But the desert is unforgiving. Last year, 66 illegal immigrants were found dead there; so far this year, 39 bodies have been recovered. Border Patrol aircraft this year have rescued more than 400 stranded people, many of them women and children.
McClafferty said the "coyotes," those who smuggle illegal immigrants across the border for money, tell their customers they will only be walking a few miles and will need only a gallon plastic milk jug full of water. In fact, some may have to walk several days and up to 60 miles through heat that can reach 130 degrees. When they become dehydrated and exhausted and fall behind, McClafferty said, the coyotes, who have already been paid, abandon them to their fate.
Flying out of Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson, HMLA-773, the Marine reservists of the Red Dog squadron and their Super Cobra helicopters, are temporarily helping McClafferty's ground and air units.
The squadron, which draws pilots and crew from the Atlanta and New Orleans areas, was activated for two years of active duty last September. Half the squadron is flying combat missions for special operations forces along Afghanistan's border with Pakistan. The other half, training in Arizona, will go to Afghanistan to relieve them this fall.
In addition to flying the border at night, the Red Dog pilots and gunners have been doing live-fire training with Hellfire missiles at the Gila Bend target area. The squadron, which normally gets to fire only four of the $40,000 Hellfire missiles in a year of training, this time had 100 of them, enough for each pilot to shoot between five and 10 in practice.
Right behind the 3.2 miles of steel fence that runs through and divides the Mexican and American halves of Nogales, the 854th Army Reserve Engineer Battalion is grading and building an all-weather road over steep hills to help Border Patrol vehicles respond quickly.
Each of the battalion's companies - the 306th from Amityville, N.Y., the 328th from Atlantic City, N.J., and the battalion headquarters out of Kingston, N.Y. - has taken a two-week turn at the project.
On occasion, the opposition lobs two- or three-pound rocks by catapult from beyond the fence. The Border Patrol covers its vehicles with heavy steel mesh to protect its agents. When the rocks start flying, the Army engineers sometimes take cover behind a metal mesh structure that looks like a baseball backstop.
ping
But... but... but, all those single-issue FReepers told me my brothers in the National Guard weren't defending the borders all this time!
Maybe I should refund the pay I took for those missions? After all, the borders weren't defended.
Too little, too late.
Great place to further wring out those Strykers...on the Mexican border......
Next time the Mexican Army crosses supporting their narco terrorist arm....
and starts shooting at our Border Patrol...
We can fire them up...in ways that will be "seared.....seared....into their memory"
I wonder how many of these trucks on I-10, I-20 and I-40 have these imigrants in the back?
Traffic stop near Amarillo reveals immigrant smuggling
AMARILLO (AP) — Two men face federal charges of illegally transporting 19 Brazilian and Dominican Republic residents who were found inside the back of a tractor-trailer rig.
The illegal immigrants were discovered Monday during a traffic stop on Interstate 40 near Amarillo.
Jose Antonio Cordero-Martinez and Pablo Enrique Sosa-Flores were charged with alien smuggling Tuesday. They each face up to 10 years in prison, if convicted.
According to an affidavit, the truck was stopped by a Department of Public Safety trooper for driving on the shoulder, and the driver of the vehicle, Cordero-Martinez, gave his consent to search the vehicle.
The trooper discovered the illegal immigrants, the affidavit states.
Cordero-Martinez told authorities an unidentified man approached him at a truck stop in El Paso and offered to pay him $2,000 to transport the immigrants to Dallas, the affidavit states.
Cordero-Martinez and his passenger, Sosa-Flores, agreed to accept, and Cordero-Martinez said he met the man in El Paso and picked up the group, the affidavit states.
The 15 from Brazil told authorities they each paid a Brazilian smuggler between $4,000 and $10,000 to be smuggled to Boston and Connecticut, the affidavit states.
They arrived in Juarez, Mexico, on various dates and were smuggled into the United States near El Paso on Aug. 13, according to a news release Wednesday from the U.S. Attorney's Office. The passengers said they were kept in an El Paso apartment for nine days.
The passengers from the Dominican Republic said they each paid an unidentified smuggler $13,000 to $14,000 to be smuggled to Boston, and had entered the country Aug. 20 near El Paso.
The two men will remain in federal custody pending a detention hearing Monday. Federal prosecutors have filed a motion to detain them without bond, claiming they represent a flight risk.
During Tuesday's hearing, the Dominican Republicans were told they will be held as material witnesses until the men are tried. A federal agent told the judge, however, that he expects all 19 will be deported.
Looks like there is more going on to restrict illegal immigration than I thought. How come my own neighborhood is flooded with southeast Asians and Hispanics, though?
When you have thousands of people walking across the border daily it's not being defended.
You see, if the borders were defended those people wouldn't even be trying to cross on foot because they know they wouldn't make it.
When people cross the borders almost at will any claims that they are being defended are rendered moot.
Then, who are you voting for? Or are you staying home?
JTF-6 has been around for a long time...when you hear about Marines being shot at in Bisbee, AZ, they're talking about a JTF6-detailed unit working on the border fence/wall. JTF-6 brings in Reserve and NG units all the time to perform their Summer AT along the U.S.-Mexican border.
About damn time!
I would never vote for a democrat if that's what you're implying.
Leaning towards Bush but it all depends on what is done and proposed over the next two months.
How many of the thousands that got across on your watch did you apprehend?
I wasn't on Interdiction. I was on Collection Management.
I guess you wouldn't know.
I really don't think they've wargamed it out that far...
We could use the Navy down here to stop the swimmers crossing the Rio Grande. It is a fact that more middle easterners are caught in Texas.
Then hang on: patience is rough (I know, because I don't have that much in the basic load) and we all want instant results.
I've had to remind myself of that, all too often lately...
sw
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