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This past week, a 10-year veteran of the U.S. Border Patrol shot and wounded a man in the left buttock who assaulted agents at a violent stretch of the U.S.-Mexico border. Despite the fact that the man was among a group that was trying to enter the United States illegally and was throwing rocks and concrete chunks at agents, officials at the Mexican Consulate in San Diego are criticizing the agent and demanding the U.S. conduct a full investigation. Consul General Remedios Gomez Arnau said: "Any kind of shooting toward Mexican territory is rejected by the Mexican government. They should...

Governors at an annual conference explore public-private toll lanes to cut wait times between the U.S. and Mexico. Hoping to cut down on wait times at the border, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said Friday that he and other governors are exploring the idea of public-private partnerships to construct vehicle toll lanes at entry points between the United States and Mexico. Schwarzenegger raised the issue at the closing of the 26th annual Border Governors Conference, a three-day summit that drew four governors from the United States and six from Mexico. Among the problems the governors agreed to tackle next year was the...

American businesswoman Veronica was stepping out of her car in California when two men forced her into the passenger seat at gunpoint, pushed her teenage daughter into the back and drove them into Mexico.Taking advantage of lax Mexican security at the San Diego border, and with U.S. authorities focused mainly on those entering the United States, the kidnappers took the two women to Tijuana in January and held them for a month before their family paid a $100,000 ransom.Snip....Mexican intelligence officials say Veronica is one of around 30 Americans abducted in southern California and taken to Tijuana since last November.

EL PASO, Texas -- FBI and Border Patrol agents arrested a Mexican citizen for assaulting a Border Patrol agent near the Bridge of the Americas on Wednesday, FBI officials said Thursday. FBI officials said 28-year-old Erick Diaz-Becerril was attempting to cross into the United States illegally near the bridge when he was stopped by a Border Patrol agent. Diaz-Becerril tried to resist arrest and injured the agent, officials said. He is charged with one count of assault on a federal officer. He will appear in the court of U.S. Magistrate Judge Richard Mesa, and if convicted, he could face up...

The men and women of the U.S. Border Patrol guarding the Southern land border come into constant contact with drug and human smugglers, criminals and migrants. Every so often, they even encounter Mexican military personnel making unauthorized incursions across the border into the United States. The most recent Mexican military incursion occurred last week on the Tohono O’odham Indian Reservation in Arizona. According to reports, the Mexican soldiers crossed the border in a military vehicle and held a Border Patrol agent at gunpoint before escaping back to Mexico. While the agent who was temporarily detained by the Mexican soldiers was...

While many view the contentious border fence as a government fiasco, an animal rights group sees a rare opportunity. The billboards, in English and Spanish, would offer the caution: "If the Border Patrol Doesn't Get You, the Chicken and Burgers Will — Go Vegan." "We think that Mexicans and other immigrants should be warned if they cross into the U.S. they are putting their health at risk by leaving behind a healthier, staple diet of corn tortillas, beans, rice, fruits and vegetables," said Lindsay Rajt, assistant manager of PETA's vegan campaigns. The Department of Homeland Security is working to meet...

...The city of Ciudad Acuna, across the border from Del Rio, Texas, said Friday that it fined four U.S. residents for carrying extra diesel and would impound their cars until they pay....

The conflict culminated yesterday with the announcement that Gen. Sergio Aponte Polito, the outspoken commander of military forces in Baja California, is being transferred to Mexico City. The general's supporters worry they are losing a fierce opponent of corruption and organized crime, In a 21-page letter delivered to reporters Sunday, Aponte accused state law enforcement agents of corruption and said their bosses are upset that his military forces have upstaged them in the struggle against drug traffickers. During his 20 months in Baja California, El General Aponte, as he is commonly known, cut a powerful public figure. Inside a tightly...

SAN ANTONIO — Despite efforts to add Border Patrol agents to areas where immigrant traffic is high and drug violence is flaring, officers assigned to the 2,000-mile boundary with Mexico are bunched up near the California coast. And some critics see politics at play. An Associated Press analysis of Border Patrol staffing shows that the San Diego sector, with the shortest section of border and fences covering half the boundary, has four times the number of agents per mile that West Texas does and three times as many as most of Arizona. That is the case even though the Tucson...

NEAR FLORENCE -- Nine people were killed and nine more were hurt in a single-vehicle rollover on the highway outside of Florence.

Gunmen killed a senior police homicide investigator in Ciudad Juarez on the U.S.-Mexico border, the fourth policeman killed in the city this week, an attorney general's office said on Wednesday. State police commander Vidal Barraza, who was investigating the 600 drug murders in Ciudad Juarez this year, was shot on Tuesday night as he stepped out of his house to meet a friend, the Chihuahua state attorney general's office said. Barraza was appointed Chihuahua state murder investigator in July. He was barefoot and wearing only a pair of shorts when he was shot in his driveway. "Witnesses told us they...

Tucson, Ariz. (AP) -- Four Mexican soldiers crossed into a remote area of Arizona and briefly held a U.S. Border Patrol agent at gunpoint before realizing where they were and returning to Mexico, U.S. authorities said. Border Patrol spokeswoman Dove Crawford said the incident early Sunday on the Tohono O'odham Indian Reservation, about 85 miles southwest of Tucson, was in an area where the border likely was marked only with barbed wire.

Just west of El Paso, near where Spanish conquistador Juan de Onate crossed the Rio Grande from Mexico in 1598, construction crews have completed a steel fence authorities say is a new model for border security. The five-meter (18-foot) tall fence has a mesh woven so tightly that feet and fingers cannot grab hold, but it still allows people to see through. Steel pylons are set close enough to stop a truck from bursting through, and two meters of reinforced concrete underground deters any tunneling. The structure is designed to push would-be illegal immigrants and drug smugglers out into the...

San Diego, CA (AP) -- When crews finish lining part of the All-American Canal with concrete, the waterway will be deeper, faster — and possibly more of a death trap for migrants crossing the border illegally from Mexico. The agency responsible for lining 23 miles of the canal to conserve water for Southern Californians is having second thoughts about whether it has done enough to prevent drownings on a waterway that has claimed more than 500 lives since it was built in 1942. The Imperial Irrigation District is scheduled to consider Tuesday whether to install ladders on each side and...

“Who is an American?” I asked myself that question the other day, when I heard on my car radio, that former Border Agents Ignacio Ramos and Jose Compean had the appeals of their lengthy prison sentences (11 and 12 years, respectively), rejected. They were convicted of shooting an “alleged” illegal alien drug smuggler, Osvaldo Aldrete Davila, in the buttocks, as he was fleeing to the Mexican border with nearly a million dollar's worth of marijuana, that he had tried to smuggle into the U.S. In spite of nationwide protests, Ramos and Compean were imprisoned and Davila was let go! Go...

Sixteen Chinese policemen have been killed in an attack on a border post near Kashgar city in the western region of Xinjiang, state media say. Two men drove a lorry into a group of jogging policemen before attacking them with explosives and knives, according to the Xinhua news agency. Police say both attackers - ethnic Uighur Muslims - have been arrested.

<p>A Mexican federal police commander whose top deputies were gunned down last weekend was charged Friday with possessing more than $500,000 from drug trafficking.</p> <p>Carlos Cepano Filippini, 34, was one of four people charged with one felony count each of possession of money as part of narcotics trafficking, the Los Angeles County district attorney's office said in a statement.</p>

A total of 290 Mexicans have died trying to cross the border into the United States in the first half of 2008, according to a lawmaker in Mexico's Chamber of Deputies. (snip)

SAN FRANCISCO -- About a dozen members of the Minutemen, a group that patrols the U.S.-Mexican border in an effort to keep illegal immigrants out, stood on the steps of San Francisco's City Hall today to decry the city's sanctuary policy and demand that Mayor Gavin Newsom resign. They waved signs calling Newsom, District Attorney Kamala Harris and William Siffermann, head of the city's Juvenile Probation Department, "accessories to murder" for the city's now-reversed policy of not turning over illegal immigrant youths arrested for felonies to federal authorities for possible deportation. One Salvadoran immigrant who benefited from the policy, Edwin...

Guest Commentary by Laurie Roth This week I thought I would lose my mind when I heard of the horrifying decision by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals against Agents Ignacio Ramos and Jose Compean. So many of us who had followed this case for the last few years were hoping that once all the evidence had finally been heard, unlike with the first trial, that justice would be done. Wrong!! Justice was not done!!! You may recall in the first trial that the illegal alien, drug thug Osbaldo Aldrete-Davila, who brought 743 pounds of marijuana over our border was...

At 11:30 am today, right as the ground breaking ceremony with Brian Bilbray and Duncan Hunter was getting underway at the bottom of Smuggler's Gulch, four Bush-McCain-Kennedy "guest workers" decided to invade the sovereign territory of the United States (sans permission) just a couple hundred yards to the east on the high ground. Apparently, they figured the distraction of the nearby ceremony would be a great time to sneak past the Border Patrol who were all down in the gulch. An American Patriot driving towards Smuggler's via the border road spotted 4 in the bushes, got out and snapped these...

In a complex decision, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the major counts against former Border Patrol agents Ignacio Ramos and Jose Compean but reversed the obstruction of justice counts and sent the case back to a lower court for resentencing.

Pakistan must do more on its side of the border with Afghanistan to combat terrorist extremists, U.S. defense leaders said Wednesday. “We're seeing a greater number of insurgents and foreign fighters flowing across the border with Pakistan, unmolested and unhindered,” Navy Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said during a news conference. “This movement needs to stop.” Mullen, who recently returned from a trip to Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, said all involved with operations on the border must do a better job of policing the region and eliminating the extremists’ safe havens in Pakistan’s federally administered...

SAN DIEGO – Forty-nine people being smuggled into the United States were found Friday morning packed inside the metal tank of a water truck a Border Patrol agent noticed near the notorious Smuggler's Gulch. The truck was coming out of a construction area, its driver apparently trying to blend in, when the agent saw it didn't have a license plate, said Border Patrol Agent Jason Rodgers, a spokesman for the agency. Rodgers said the agent followed the truck from Monument Road and Hollister Road in an under-the-speed-limit pursuit that ended not far away with the arrest of the driver and...

Mexican officials say a concrete barrier constructed by the U.S. Border Patrol in a storm-water tunnel beneath Nogales appears to be on Mexican soil and was the main cause of serious flooding July 12 in Nogales, Sonora. The flooding caused about $8 million in damage in Nogales, Sonora, the officials say. The 5-foot-high wall on the floor of the tunnel in front of a gate was put in without notifying the International Boundary and Water Commission, said Sally Spener, spokeswoman for the U.S. section of the commission. The commission requests that any agency doing work on the border that could...

Five Koreans ― four men and one woman ― had been abducted by several unidentified kidnappers who had disguised themselves as police officers in a U.S.-Mexico border city on July 14, an official of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade said Tuesday. The official, asking not to be identified, said the abductors have demanded $30,000 in ransom, but declined to give details about the whereabouts of the South Korean nationals and their condition. "As far as I know, the kidnappers have contacted one of the families of the hostages and asked if they were willing to meet their demands...

BROWNSVILLE — The border barrier that soon will be built in the Rio Grande Valley hardly fits the Berlin Wall image conjured by its opponents. Rather, it’s a patchwork of permeable structures riddled with apertures for animals and people, with lots of gates and lots of keys. The Homeland Security Department’s Environmental Stewardship Plan for the Valley shows the agency has settled on locations for 21segments totaling about 70 miles, scattered from Brownsville to Roma. Seven segments will be 18-foot-tall cuts into existing river levees, reinforced with concrete. Three segments will be movable in case of hurricane-induced flooding. And one...

A package of baby diapers yielded an unlikely load in Mexico on Friday, according to the defense ministry: nearly half a million dollars in cash. Soldiers conducting a routine check "found in a tractor-trailer a packet of diapers containing 490,300 dollars," the ministry said. It said that the cash was likely a stash of narco-dollars destined for money-laundering, as the truck had come from Culiacan, the capital of Sinaloa state in Mexico's northwest, a region known for trafficking by major drug cartels. The driver of the truck was arrested. Copyright AFP 2008, AFP stories and photos shall not be published,...

Washington -- Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff on Monday blamed tightened security on the U.S.-Mexico border for increased violence there, and he said the border probably will not be fully secured until 2011, two years after President Bush leaves office. "(Increased violence) is what typically happens when you start to enforce and make it harder to fight over the shrinking pie, so to speak, and who gets the best opportunity to exploit the additional space that's left," Chertoff said at a news conference at the U.S. Customs and Border Protection headquarters in Washington, D.C. on Monday. "That's a good...

“All the illegal border crossings are down. It looks like the border patrol is doing their job. There’s really no need for a wall like that,” said Mark Abeyta from east El Paso. The El Paso sector has reported that they have apprehended 25,500 illegal border crossers during the first nine months of this fiscal year. This is the lowest since 2000, and it was made possible because of more barriers, increased agents and the zero-tolerance policies. Currently the Department of Homeland Security has completed around 300 miles of pedestrian and vehicle fencing and they expect to have a total...

EDINBURG -- Hundreds of people chanting "No border wall" marched to the Hidalgo County Courthouse on Saturday evening seeking to persuade local politicians to abandon their support for the planned barrier. Protesters specifically targeted Hidalgo County Judge J.D. Salinas and other county officials for linking the building of the wall to the repair of the county's deteriorating levee system. Salinas has consistently said he opposes the border wall. But when it began to seem the barrier's construction was inevitable, he and other officials started lobbying the federal government to combine the project with levee repairs to better leverage federal money...

Escondido city officials refuse to give up. Two years ago, the city passed an ordinance to punish landlords for renting to illegal immigrants. But it rescinded the rental restriction after a legal challenge was filed and bills began to mount. Now Escondido is trying a new approach to what it calls the "public nuisances" of illegal immigration, citing residents for code violations such as garage conversions, graffiti and junk cars. The city is also debating a new ordinance that would restrict overnight street parking without a permit. In addition, it is drafting a policy that would prohibit drivers from picking...

BEIRUT, JULY 3 - The border between Israel and Syria, sealed for 60 years, has been opened exceptionally to allow the passing of some 80 Syrian students from the Golan Heights, occupied by Israel in 1967, who are preparing to start their university studies in Damascus, Syrian state-controlled daily al-Thawra reported today. The passing of the first 82 students took place yesterday in Quneitra, a "freed" Syrian town destroyed in 1973 in the war between Syria and Israel, thanks to the mediation of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and the United Nations Disengagement Observer Force (UNDOF), the...

Just months from now, either John McCain or Barack Obama will be our President. Neither of these men are strong on stopping the flow of illegal aliens, so this truly is our best--and possibly last chance to get a REAL border fence built.

ICx ships Cerberus units to U.S. borders WASHINGTON, July 8 (UPI) -- ICx Technologies has begun shipping its unmanned mobile surveillance systems for deployment along the U.S. border with Mexico. ICx officials say the shipments of their Cerberus unmanned mobile surveillance technology, part of a $4 million order, will go to support the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol's operations along the U.S.-Mexican border. The Cerberus units offer Border Patrol officers mobile surveillance towers with advanced radars and camera technology that company officials say enhance the ability to identify and track potential suspects attempting to cross the border as part of...

SWANTON, Vt. -- The U.S. Border Patrol says an agent shot at three suspects after being assaulted near the Vermont-Quebec border early today.The agency said the officer was interviewing the three who were on foot at about 2:15 a.m. when he was assaulted. The agent fired two shots.A male and female suspect are in custody. The third suspect, a male, escaped back into Canada.The Border Patrol said it doesn't know if the missing suspect was armed or if he was wounded.Border Patrol Spokesman Mark Henry said the agent was on routine patrol when he spotted the suspects. The suspects knocked...

Mexico City, Official Residence The Presidency reported that President Felipe Calderón met Arizona Senator John McCain, who will be nominated as the US Republican Presidential Candidate in September, at the official Los Pinos residence today. The President remarked that Mexico trusts the United States will value the priority given to bilateral work on migration, trade, development, regional competitiveness and security as the means for promoting the well-being of both societies. President Calderón confirmed his government’s intention of continuing to collaborate on all issues of common interest, including the prevention of and response to natural disasters and pandemics, food security and...

Presumptive Republican U.S. presidential nominee John McCain told Mexican leaders security at the border is a precondition of immigration reform. McCain ended a visit to Colombia and Mexico Thursday, The Arizona Republic reported. I believe we must have comprehensive immigration reform. The American people want our borders secured first, McCain said at a Mexico City news conference. That will require some walls. It will require virtual fences. It will require high-technology equipment. We must secure our borders, and then we will address the issue of comprehensive immigration reform. McCain was one of the authors of an immigration reform bill that...

As pointed out by this representative of the Florida Attorney General's office, it is impossible to separate national security issues from illegal immigration, and one of the most important illegal immigration issues in Florida is the issue of human trafficking. And as Jake at Freedom Folks notes (thanks for the tip), this story doesn't appear to have been covered by the news wires. Here, a horrifying story is described of a little girl who, after being taken to the Florida panhandle from Mexico, resisted while being raped, and was subsequently made an example of by being beheaded in front of...

Refugees shot fleeing North Korea Michael Sheridan in Hunchun, China North Korean guards, newly armed with Russian Dragunov sniper rifles, have shot dead refugees attempting to ford the river that divides their hungry homeland from China, according to human rights campaigners. On the Chinese shore alone, two bodies, marked by several bullet holes, were found by a local activist, said Tim Peters, an American pastor who runs a Christian group supporting the fugitives. The shootings indicate a coordinated change in tactics by North Korea and China to deter refugees from crossing. They want to stamp out bribery among border guards...

<p>Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff issued a strongly worded statement Wednesday on the release of a Mexican man suspected of killing a Yuma Sector Border Patrol agent in the Imperial Sand Dunes west of Winterhaven. SNIP The 22-year-old Navarro Montes, an alleged narcotics smuggler, is suspected of running over 32-year-old Agent Luis Aguilar in a Hummer while fleeing agents on the morning of Jan. 19.</p>

(CNSNews.com) - An appeal by environmental groups to stop the federal government from waiving regulations during construction of a fence along the U.S.-Mexican border was turned down by the Supreme Court on Monday. In its decision, the high court rejected a plea from Defenders of Wildlife and the Sierra Club to challenge a provision of a 2005 law that gives the U.S. Department of Homeland Security the authority to bypass environmental and other laws obstructing completion of the border fence. The controversy began after Michael Chertoff, secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, invoked the REAL ID Act while issuing...

Caltrans has announced it will no longer accept applications for its Adopt-a-Highway volunteer cleanup program. The move comes after members of the San Diego Minutemen sued the state agency over the right to sponsor a stretch of I-5 south of San Clemente near a Border Patrol checkpoint. Caltrans routinely posts signs noting the individuals or groups who sponsor that particular stretch of highway, but removed the Minuteman group's sign in January. Caltrans officials said then that they feared vandalism or protesters along the freeway. Caltrans offered the group another stretch of San Diego County highway, but the Minutemen have sought...

The evidence suggests the answer is yes. Regardless if they are secret or not, the bigger problem is that McCain just won’t let go of his Pro-Amnesty agenda:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Supreme Court rejected on Monday a legal challenge by two environmental groups to the U.S. Homeland Security secretary's decision to waive 19 federal laws so a fence could be built on the Arizona-Mexico border. The high court refused to hear an appeal by Defenders of Wildlife and the Sierra Club challenging a 2005 law that Secretary Michael Chertoff invoked on the grounds that it violated the constitutional separation of powers principles. The Republican-led Congress in 2005 gave Chertoff the power to waive environmental and other laws to build fences and other border barriers in an effort...

FoxNewsChannel Megyn Kelly just now (9:15am CST) reported as breaking news that the Supreme Court will not hear the appeal from the Texas group who sued to stop the DHS from building the border fence......

It was as frightening as a Halloween trick can be: It happened in broad daylight. It was caught on camera. The government says it really happened. On Oct. 31, 2006, a covert agent of the Government Accountability Office (GAO) pulled to the side of a Canadian highway that runs along the U.S. border. Greg Kutz, GAO's managing director of forensic audits and special investigations, explained what happened in a May 16, 2008, report to Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus. The report summarized GAO's efforts (from 2003 to 2007) to covertly test the effectiveness of U.S. border security. The covert agent...

About 50 protesters marched in downtown Los Angeles on Saturday to decry violence by illegal immigrants and to demand that the Los Angeles Police Department change its controversial policy limiting when someone can be questioned about their immigration status. The marchers, including anti-illegal-immigration Minutemen and local community activists, also called for justice for Jamiel Shaw II, 17, a black athlete who was shot and killed in March by an alleged gang member who was in the country illegally.

When the border fence is constructed along the Rio Grande, Fermin Leal will watch as the barrier slices through the backyards of his neighbors, bypassing his 500-acre farm in San Pedro. The fence's trajectory, incontiguous and largely unexplained, has left many border residents suspicious of the federal government's plans. "I'm still not sure how my land is different than theirs," Leal said. "They still haven't given us any answers." The fence will run nearly unabated through Brownsville before stopping at River Bend Resort and golf course. It will break again for nearly seven miles in San Pedro, where the federal...

The two presidential candidates will discuss matters of interest for the latin american community in this country. The Angeles.- The two main presidential candidates, Republican John McCain and Democrat Barack Obama, will be the guests of honor at the third Latin American National Congress, that will be carried out on July 18 and 19 in Los Angeles. The organizers confirmed the participation of the two politicians in the event, that will be performed in an exclusive hotel in Downtown Los Angeles, where it is expected that more than 300 organizations of 20 cities will attend. On the first day, McCain...