Gunmen pepper Mexico TV station, but no one hurt

MEXICO CITY — Attackers fired more than 100 bullets and threw at least three grenades at a television station in Mexico's western state of Nayarit before dawn Monday, causing damage but no injuries, a company spokesman said.

Enrique Berumen, a spokesman for Mexican broadcasting giant Televisa, said the raid on its XHKG channel in Nayarit was the eighth attack on one of the company's facilities in recent years.

Investigators found 102 spent cartridges from high-powered rifles as well as pieces of an exploded grenade and two grenades that didn't go off.

In January 2009, a Televisa station in the northern city of Monterrey was attacked by assailants that authorities later said were associated with the Gulf cartel, one of several drug gangs blamed for a wave of violence that has killed 23,000 people in Mexico since President Felipe Calderon cracked down on organized crime three years ago.

The international journalism advocacy group Reporters Without Borders says the government hasn't done enough to protect journalists during the drug violence. Five or possibly six journalists have been murdered in Mexico this year and a total of 62 have been murdered since 2000, says the group, which ranks Mexico and Honduras as the Western Hemisphere's two most dangerous countries for the media.

Another article not posted by Heather McDonald.

Tuesday, May 04, 2010

Why We Need a Border Fence [Heather Mac Donald]

The Arizona law has the salutary purpose of increasing the chance that any given illegal alien will be lawfully detected and deported, but the record suggests that a huge percentage of individuals apprehended under the law will simply illegally reenter.

This ICE press release boasts of success stories from the Secure Communities program, which under the Obama administration focuses on identifying and deporting only the most serious criminal aliens. It presents 26 cases in which violent or otherwise serious offenders were apprehended since late 2008; a full 13 of them had already been deported, many multiple times.

The record for reentry goes to a Mexican aggravated felon apprehended in Florence, Ariz., on May 22, 2009, who had been deported nine times, following 51 documented arrests under 16 different aliases. The runner-up is a Mexican arrested for assault causing bodily injury on June 9, 2009, in Starr County, Texas, who had been deported five times and was convicted of attempted murder in 2005. More typical is a Guatemalan drug dealer apprehended in Dallas on Aug. 7, 2009, who has been deported twice, and whose lengthy criminal history includes aggravated assault with a deadly weapon (legalese for shooting someone); a Honduran MS-13 gang member booked on March 8, 2009, in Boston, who had previously been removed once; and a Mexican gang member arrested for strong arm aggravated assault in Maricopa County, Ariz., who had been previously convicted of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon and deported once.

The logic of the Arizona law is that by increasing the chance of detection, it will discourage illegal aliens from entering in the first place and encourage those already in the country to leave on their own. Undoubtedly, many people will respond to the law as intended; the deterrent effect would be even greater if more states followed Arizona’s lead and discarded their actual or de facto sanctuary policies. But for other illegal aliens, the threat of detection and deportation is apparently not particularly meaningful. I don’t know whether the rate of illegal reentry (which is a felony) is higher for serious criminal aliens compared with illegal aliens who do not commit other crimes. But clearly, better interior enforcement, while a necessary part of restoring the immigration rule of law, cannot succeed in the absence of a truly secure border. The only reason for not creating a border fence that I can see is ambivalence about whether we really want to prevent illegal entry.

http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=N2Q5MzczZTNlYTE3YmE3NGI5ZWQ3NGMzMGIwNGRlOGU=

Deported nine times, following 51 documented arrests under 16 different aliases---a Mexican aggravated felon apprehended in Florence, Ariz May 22, 2009 holds the record for illegal reentry fraud.

ALL THESE FAKE IDENTITIES VOTE AND VOTE AND VOTE, TOO.

2 Texans accused of planning to sell counterfeit IDs

NORTH BERGEN, NJ -- (AP) 07/21/06---The Pelcastre brothers were a walking threat to national security -- expert document forgers who, for a few thousand dollars, could give anyone a new identity, authorities said. (ED. They sell drugs to get the money to buy fake documents.)

When police stumbled across the Pelcastre brothers, the men had turned a Tonnelle Avenue hotel room into a business office and were readying a massive cache of fake Social Security cards for delivery to a local identity broker, authorities said.

The brothers, Angel, 31, and Jorge, 34, both of Dallas, were a "one-stop shop" for a myriad of government documents, including birth certificates, Social Security cards, driver's licenses for any state in the country including passports and resident alien cards .

"Can you imagine if a terrorist were able to get their hands on this stuff? They'd have free passage throughout the country." Note that Mexico is the global staging area for entry across US borders.

A task force including NJ state troopers and officers from both the Bergen and Hudson county prosecutors' offices happened upon two cars bearing Texas plates in the parking lot of the hotel. Authorities wouldn't identify the hotel by name for fear it could hinder cooperation from other hotels in future investigations or spark retribution from savage, murderous drug lords.

A Task Force regularly runs checks on motor vehicles in area motels. Members of the task force began watching the cars, a Chevrolet Impala and a Pontiac Firebird, and followed the brothers to an office supply store in a nearby shopping center, where the men purchased computer supplies.

Officers then followed the brothers to a self-storage facility in Secaucus, where they loaded several boxes from a storage unit into one of the cars, Jones said. One of the men stood lookout, which heightened police suspicion, he said. Authorities approached the men when they returned to the hotel and questioned them separately, Jones said. The brothers consented to a search of their cars, hotel room and the storage facility, he said.

Police recovered laminating sheets with built-in security features, pages of blank documents waiting for fake names and information, finished documents, computers and software to create the fake IDs.

All told, the haul was worth about $500,000 on the street. Police also recovered $6,000 in cash, which was the first payment from a fake document broker for a shipment of 500 Social Security cards.

"They were aggressively selling to brokers," he said. "This isn't like selling driver's licenses to individuals. These were multiple layers of high-level documents."

The brothers were being held in jail without bail on charges of possessing fraudulent documents and conspiracy to sell fraudulent documents. Federal charges are also pending against them.

Another recent McDonald article that I didn’t see posted.
Her analysis is always right on.

Heather MacDonald: Arizona law is hated because it could be effective

To understand the hysterical reaction to Arizona’s new immigration initiative, consider the numbers. There are 6,000 federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents tasked with restoring the rule of law in a country that already contains between 12 and 20 million immigration law-breakers.

Any intending illegal immigrant knows that if he can get across the border undetected, he faces a minute risk of being apprehended on U.S. soil. (By comparison, the New York Police Department, with a current headcount of 35,000, feels itself greatly understaffed in a compact city of eight million residents, only a portion of whom are law-breakers.)

The Arizona law, were it to be widely emulated, threatens to disrupt the calculus of illegal immigration. There are 650,000 state and local police officers in the U.S. If a significant portion of those officers received the mandate of the Arizona law—to inquire where practicable into the immigration status of an individual they have legitimately stopped, if they have a valid reason to believe he is in the country illegally—the balance between law enforcement and law-breaking would be changed enough to likely deter illegal border crossings and to persuade many illegal immigrants already in the U.S. to return to their home countries rather than face arrest and deportation.

The opponents of Arizona’s law — SB 1070 — detest it not because it will lead to racial profiling (it will not), nor because it is unconstitutional (it is not), but because it just might work. Texas is reportedly already considering a similar law. The illegal immigrant lobby knows that it has to stop SB 1070 if it wants to maintain its monopoly over border matters, a monopoly that has led to the chaos that is now engulfing Arizona.

The people screaming the loudest against Arizona’s law do not believe in immigration enforcement, period. No matter where an illegal immigrant is arrested—whether on the street, at home, or at a work site—the illegal immigrant lobby will declare that place to be an illegitimate locus for arrest.

So opposed are illegal immigrant advocates to immigration enforcement that they want to dismantle programs targeting the most dangerous illegal immigrants for deportation.

The New York Times recently called for the abolition of the so-called 287(g) and Secure Communities initiatives, a call echoed by illegal immigrant advocates in Arizona and elsewhere. Those programs now focus almost exclusively on screening jail and prison inmates to identify illegal immigrants with particularly serious criminal histories for deportation.

A typical recent catch was a Mexican gang member arrested for aggravated assault in Mesa, Arizona, who had already served seven years in state prison for aggravated assault with a deadly weapon. Remarkably, the New York Times charges that the 287(g) and Secure Communities initiatives “undermine” public safety, not enhance it, because they use local sheriff’s deputies to identify illegal immigrant inmates. Those deputies, the Times warns, are likely racial profilers.

The racial profiling charge is as specious leveled against jail deputies as it is against police officers. The overwhelming majority of the nation’s law enforcement personnel base their actions on suspicious behavior, not on race. Opponents of SB 1070 and the 287(g) program have never explained why cops are more likely to abuse their authority than federal ICE agents, a distinction they need to maintain in order to justify their desired cordon sanitaire between local police resources and federal immigration enforcement.

Such explanations will never be forthcoming. Arizona’s effort to enlist its police officers and sheriff’s deputies in the fight against illegal immigration is a legitimate use of police power, intended to restore public order and the rule of law. It would also be an effective use of police power, which is why it is so feared.

Heather Mac Donald is a contributing editor at City Journal and a co-author of “The Immigration Solution.”

COMING TO A US TOWN NEAR THE BORDER 23,000 have been killed since Mexico President Felipe Calderon cracked down on organized crime three years ago. Reporters Without Borders says the government hasn't done enough to protect journalists during the drug violence.

Mexico's Calderon to protest Arizona law to Obama
Optionetics - Market News | By Catherine Bremer and Adriana Barrera
FR Posted May 14 by Natural Born 54

MEXICO CITY, May 13 (Reuters) - Mexican President Felipe Calderon will protest to Pres Barack Obama when he comes to Washington next week about Arizona's crackdown on illegal immigrants, Calderon told Reuters. Calderon said a law that will come into force in Arizona in July, requiring police to check the immigration status of anyone they suspect is in the United States illegally, was already affecting relations between the two neighbors. "It contains elements that are frankly discriminatory, terribly backward," Calderon told Reuters in an interview.

Calderon He said he would bring Mexico's protest over the law to a meeting with Obama and when he addresses the US Congress during an official visit to Washington next week. (Excerpt) Read more at optionetics.com ...

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townhall.com, By Humberto Fontova
FR Posted May 04, 2010 by pissant

“Cuba Si!—Arizona No! “ Says Mexican President Felipe Calderon

EXCERPT Mexican President Felipe Calderon can hardly contain his revulsion and rage against Arizona’s law--SB 1070. He’s "deeply troubled" reports the Associated Press over a law he denounces as "discriminatory and racist," not to mention “a dire threat to the whole Hispanic-American population." This new Arizona law "opens the door to intolerance, hate, discrimination and abuse in law enforcement," sputters the Mexican President.

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Indeed, this “threat to Hispanics” and these “abuses in law enforcement," have been ongoing for years.

The Associated Press carried a story where a Maria Elena Gonzalez, reported how female migrants were “forced to strip by abusive police officers, supposedly to search them, but the purpose is to sexually abuse them." Jose Ramos, 18, reported “that extortion by border police occurs at every stop on their migratory route. Until migrants are left penniless and begging for food.”

According to AP: “Others said they had seen migrants beaten to death by police, their bodies left near the railway tracks to make it look as if they had fallen from a train.

"If you're carrying any money, they take it from you," said Carlos Lopez. "Federal, state, local police--all of them shake you down. If you're on a bus, they pull you off and search your pockets, and if you have any money, they keep it all and say, get out of here.” Police shake down motorists on bogus traffic stops so regularly it is like going through a toll - money paid right there on the spot or your car gets impounded.

All of the above “hate” and “abuses in law enforcement” as reported by the Associated Press, befell Central American migrants who enter Mexico. (Excerpt) Read more at townhall.com

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Get outta my country, Calderon----we spit on you, your countrymen, and your ambitions to undermine US security via Azatlan.

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