Posted on 02/23/2005 5:42:22 PM PST by The Loan Arranger
From San Diego to the Rio Grande Valley, US soldiers are on duty. First it was the "War on Drugs," now they have an additional mission, blocking Mexico's emigrants.
In California's Imperial Valley, soldiers from an antidrug task force hunker over night vision equipment to watch for illegal border crossings. At the San Diego port of entry, National Guards inspect vehicles. In the Arizona desert, heavily-armed Marines, DEA agents, and the Border Patrol conduct joint patrols as training exercises. Inside a nondescript building on an army base near El Paso, military translators, linguists, and analysts decipher intercepted messages and feed the results into massive, interlinked databases. And in night skies across the Southwest, the drone of military reconnaissance aircraft breaks the desert silence. These are scenes from an intensifying campaign being waged on the US-Mexican border. A decade ago, the Reagan administration and an overwrought Congress drafted the US military to help fight the War on Drugs along the border. Now, in a significant break with past policy, which officially limited the military's crime-fighting mission to stopping illegal drugs, the Clinton administration has broadened the Pentagon's role to include suppressing the flow of undocumented immigrants. In January, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) unveiled a new battle plan to double US military and local law enforcement along the border. This plan will build on the formidable joint military-law enforcement infrastructure already in place as part of the Pentagon's antidrug initiatives. In the San Diego sector alone, some 350 members of Marine and Army units more than double the current National Guard and Pentagon contingent will help monitor electric sensors, staff night-vision scopes, assist with communications and transportation, and conduct aerial surveillance.
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I spoke with my Congressman and the Tucson Sector Border Patrol Commander tonight.
We most certainly do need more agents in this area. There aren't enough of them to stop the flood of people crossing the border here.
Do you have any concept of what it means to have upwards of 2000 people come tramping across your private property each and every day of the week? Or how many people it would take just to herd them into buses, if the buses were available?
Enforcing laws won't stop that traffic, only stopping that traffic will stop that traffic. I know, it sounds a little too basic, but stop and think about it. There is no other way.
As I explained, that's precisely what is needed. I think a ranger force is called for - properly selected, equipped and trained, with a virtual armada of air and ground support. It would also force smugglers, as well, more to the gulf, the coasts and the Canadian border (which basically doesn't exist, either). It certainly would charge the border jumping patterns of foreign nationals.
Not by any long shot. I agree. What's needed is a new force, a new mission. A properly trained ranger force, properly selected, trained and equipped to cover the entire southern border and maybe a bit out to the coast and the gulf as well. It would change the pattern of border jumping by citizens of other countries. You'd find more trying to come in by the two coasts, and certainly over the non-border with Canada. Dealing with Canada at that point, in my opinion, would prove interesting.
I guess we need another Operation Wetback then?
Maybe the current situation is so bad that we do need troops. But if our elected officials had the cojones to enforce the laws on the books in the first place, it wouldn't have to come to militarizing the border.
JMO.
http://www.spymac.com/forums/showthread.php?threadid=158120#post2684276
Check out this thread, theres lots of good stuff there.
By six_day_trial
I used to live in the Hereford/Sierra Vista area, where all this is going on... my parents still live there on the crest of a huge valley, and their back yard has a beautiful view of a mountain in Mexico, and you can see Tombstone just to the east. This has been a heated issue since I can remember.
Nothing like racists with guns. I wonder how many are going to patrol the boarder with Canada?
What a predictable and ignorant statement. Is it that they are American that they are deemed racist? Or is it because they have a personal interest in upholding the laws of the country that they are deemed racist? Tell me, what is it? What makes them racist?
The Cochise county border has some utterly ridiculous things going on. The Minutemen are countering two forces. A complacent ineffective federal government that has yet to do anything about border protection, and American volunteer groups that aid illegals to get in... oh, and also environmental protection agencies... the border patrol is restricted from infiltrating illegals in certain parts along the border where there are "endangered plants", where the illegals can simply walk on through. There are volunteer groups that place water stations along the border and through the desert there to aid illegals in their trek across the border.
The problem is beyond serious... has been for years, and evermore since 9/11. I think they have every right to take the solution into their own hands. In my 4 years of living in Sierra Vista, not one single day went by where I didn't see border patrol pulling over someone, and there were still thousands upon thousands coming through on a daily basis. The border patrol is stretched far too thin, and I'm very disappointed by the Bush administration's inaction. The border checkpoint is a joke as well. I would go in and out of Mexico, sometimes they didn't ask for an ID, sometimes they didn't have my pockets checked, sometimes they never even asked me ANYTHING... and it even happened once AFTER 9/11.
Lots of things need to be done. We need to at least double the number of border patrol units. We need to stop wasting money on idiotic strategies of keeping them out (currently, we are flying illegals deep into southern Mexico after they are caught crossing the border... this results in a huge cost for us in flying them, and only a minor delay in their next attempt to cross the border). We need to aid Mexico in some way to become independently wealthy and try to hinder the levels of governmental corruption so the desire to come to America illegally diminishes.
Until all that is accomplished, the Minutemen have ever right to do what they are doing. They have a reputation to uphold now, and as long as they remain legitimate and keep a basic morale, they are a fine form of an interim border patrol unit.
That's exactly my point. We need balls not laws. Too many emasculated people running around.
If the guvmint, USBP, and cops are willing to tell the Leftist pro-invasion crowd always screaming and whining about "racism" to go take a flying Patrick Leahy and don't forget to do the Teresa Heinz Kerry on the way to becoming a Rachel Corrie;
Then we won't have any more immigration problems.
Depends on what you mean by that. In the short run - ONLY - the military have the helicopters, manpower and ability to set up barriers. The border patrol is underfunded and politicized. As someone pointed out, American citizens apparently even have free zones in which to cross the border so to encourage foreign citizen to jump here. In the long run, what I think, in my opinion, is required is a force of rangers with one mandate - close the southern border. They would be motivated, well-selected, well-trained, well-equipped and not subject to nuisance suits or meddling in their effectiveness. If current border agents are deemed to have sufficient integrity and capability, they too could put in for such duty. But that seems the best and ultimate solution. Simply close the border, with a ranger force designed to say - we mean it.
As for the foreign nationals, they might still wish to jump the border, only it won't be from the south. Maybe over in Fla, yes. May the eastern gulf, yes. Perhaps that would prove the new entry point for border jumpers. I suspect some would simply engage coyotes, gangsters and 'environmentalists' to ferry them up the west coast, in international waters, some attempting a quick run at the coast to see if they could avoid patrols or a sensor net, but with the idea of off-loading up in western Canada and so to cross in the 'blue' state of WA, which just recently allowed the Dem to literally steal the office of Governor! That would suggest an open border mentality, that would appeal not just to those in Canada, but those who would head there from parts south. At any rate, if this country could successful patrol our own southern border, all that would happen is that border jumpers would find another point of entry. But that might prove of some benefit if it were to become so disruptive to others. What if they decided to flood the NE, instead, as a block of 'blue' states? Would the lib establishment, and the 'just doing bizness here' opportunists, continue to support the abandonment of US borders if they felt they were bearing the brunt of wage deflation, job loss and spikes in state welfare funding?
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