Free Republic

Because of a continuing software glitch, the first high-tech “virtual fence” at the nation's borders remains unused, three months after its scheduled debut. Nine 98-foot towers laden with radar, sensors and sophisticated cameras have been built across 28 miles close to the Arizona-Mexico border near Sasabe, southwest of Tucson, in an area heavily trafficked by illegal immigrant and drug smugglers. The towers, each a few miles apart, are intended to deter or detect border-crossers and potential terrorists and to enhance the ability of Border Patrol agents to catch them. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said more testing is expected by...

Reforma news agency MÉXICO, D.F. — The United States’ Drug Enforcement Administration hopes to expand border operations by creating a new division in Tamaulipas state to fight drug trafficking. DEA officials have asked the Mexican government for authorization to open offices in three cities where smuggling is most prevalent — Nuevo Laredo, Matamoros and Nogales. Tamaulipas is the location where the Gulf Cartel and a group of former Mexican Army soldiers known as “Zetas” are locked in a deadly battle over lucrative drug-smuggling routes into the United States. If the request is approved, the DEA will expand to 11 offices...

EL PASO, Texas — Two U.S. Border Patrol agents were watching the Mexican boundary last year when they stopped a van carrying 743 pounds of marijuana. The driver fled back across the Rio Grande — with a gunshot wound in his buttocks. Federal prosecutors convinced a jury in March that the agents had shot a defenseless man and schemed to cover it up. Much of the evidence against them came from the drug runner, Osvaldo Aldrete-Davila, who reported the shooting to a friend at the Border Patrol in Arizona. Aldrete-Davila was given immunity from prosecution by the U.S. attorney's office....

EL PASO -- A judge sentenced two former U.S. Border Patrol agents today to more than a decade in federal prison for shooting and wounding a Mexican drug smuggler and trying to cover it up. Ignacio Ramos was sentenced to 11 years and one day, and Jose Alonso Compean was sentenced to 12 years. Both were fired after their convictions on several charges, including assault with a deadly weapon, obstruction of justice and a civil rights violation. The men, neither of whom spoke in court, will be allowed to turn themselves on Jan. 17. Both have proclaimed their innocence in...

American Hispanics Rally Behind Border Patrol Officers Facing Prison for Protecting their Communities Washington, D.C.--(HISPANIC PR WIRE)--August 24, 2006--Rampant lawlessness along the U.S.-Mexico border is of great concern to all Americans, but for the people who live in communities along the border, it is a daily threat to their safety and security. For these largely American Hispanic communities, the Border Patrol amounts to an overstressed and outmanned line of protection for communities under siege. In fact, these communities are so overwhelmed by illegal immigrants and the crime that comes with them, that Arizona and New Mexico have been forced to...

Washington, D.C. – In a letter today to President George W. Bush, Third District Representative Walter B. Jones (R-NC) expressed deep concern over the Justice Department’s unacceptable prosecution of two U.S. Border Patrol agents for simply doing their jobs to protect our homeland. “Agents Ignacio Ramos and Jose Alonso Compean should have been commended by our government for their actions last year in attempting to apprehend a Mexican drug smuggler who brought nearly 800 pounds of marijuana across our border,” Jones wrote. “But because of an incomprehensible prosecution by the U.S. Attorney’s Office – including granting full immunity to the...

Nobody paid much attention when a large white van with Arizona numberplates pulled into a parking space in the shade of the 15ft-high sheet-metal wall that separates Mexico from the United States in the divided border town of Nogales. A few yards away US border guards monitored the steady flow of pedestrians through a heavily fortified gate in the wall. There was no reason to be suspicious of a van legally parked on a metered space directly beneath a pylon of American surveillance cameras. Yet inside the van Mexican gangsters were preparing one of the most brazen smuggling ploys ever...

WND Exclusive CONTROLLING THE SUBSTANCES Big money in Mexican meth New laws cut down on U.S. labs, but drugs still flow Posted: August 19, 2005 1:00 a.m. Eastern © 2005 WorldNetDaily.com While new state and federal laws are cutting down the number of U.S. meth labs, the deadly drugs continue to flow into the U.S. across the porous border with Mexico, say law enforcement authorities. The federal anti-meth law was recently amended to permit states to impose their own stiffer restrictions and penalties. In Oregon, for instance, legislators now require cold medicines containing pseudoephedrine, a principal ingredient in methamphetamine, to...

NUEVO LAREDO, MEXICO - When Esteban Perez sold $35 bags of heroin on the streets of this violent border city, he said he felt three things: fear, dread and terror. He feared not having enough money to bribe the local police to look the other way. He dreaded not having enough heroin left to feed his addiction. And he was terrified of not having enough cash for the drug smugglers who had sold him the narcotics and demanded a share of his profits. "I was scared of them, most of all," Perez, 24, said of the traffickers. "They ask you...

Albanian-American roofer Florin Krasniqi has been living in Brooklyn and smuggling American guns into Kosovo to arm the Kosovo Liberation Army--this time for war against its erstwhile saviors, NATO and the UN. The KLA are the bin Laden-trained, Iran-backed narco-terrorists whose 1999 jihad against the Christian Serbs we helped fight, abetting secession and creating a mono-ethnic terror haven and future Islamic republic in Europe. Krasniqi, who raised $30 million from fellow Albanian-Americans to help finance the KLA's war, is the subject of a documentary by Dutch filmmaker Klaartje Quirijns, titled "The Brooklyn Connection," which will air Tuesday night at 10...

MEXICO CITY – A team of rogue Mexican commandos blamed for dozens of killings along the U.S.-Mexico border has carried out at least three drug-related slayings in Dallas, a sign that the group is extending its deadly operations into U.S. cities, two American law enforcement officials say. The men are known as the Zetas, former members of the Mexican army who defected to Mexico's so-called Gulf drug cartel in the late 1990s, other officials say. "These guys run like a military," said Arturo A. Fontes, an FBI special investigator for border violence based in Laredo, in South Texas. "They have...

PARIS, Jen 5 (AFP) - An Italian woman trying to smuggle cocaine into Europe died on a flight arriving at Paris when one of 77 latex bags filled with the drug she had swallowed burst in her stomach, police said Wednesday. The middle-aged woman died of a lethal overdose on an Air France flight landing at Charles de Gaulle airport Saturday after the long flight from Santo Domingo, the capital of the Caribbean state of the Dominican Republic, despite the best efforts of the crew to save her, they said. An autopsy revealed the drugs hidden in her stomach. The...

llegal Entry From Mexico to U.S. Spikes 57 minutes ago By OLGA R. RODRIGUEZ, Associated Press Writer SASABE, Mexico - After a four-year decline, illegal immigration from Mexico is spiking as several thousand migrants a day rush across the border in hopes of getting work visas under a program President Bush (news - web sites) proposed. Many also are trying to beat tighter security to come in June. The U.S. border patrol told The Associated Press that detentions — which it uses to judge illegal migration rates — jumped 25 percent to 535,000 in the six months ending March 31...

Douglas-area shooter takes on smugglers, nearly pays with life DOUGLAS - Richard Kozak had enough. After two years of drug smugglers running their loads across his 40-acre property, tearing down fences and at times taking wild shots at him, Kozak on Wednesday fired back with more than his usual warning shots. Authorities say the suspected smugglers reacted with a full attack on Kozak's cabin, in a sparsely populated area some four miles east of Douglas. The smugglers' attack resulted in his home being struck with more than 30 shots from an AK-47 and a handgun. His 24-foot trailer was set...

A Cochise County man who fired on a truckload of people crossing his property Wednesday morning near Douglas, escaped unscathed an hour later when the vehicle apparently returned and its occupants shot up his house, officials said. A 24-foot travel trailer on the property about four miles east of Douglas also was on fire when the unidentified homeowner escaped, said Carol Capas, a spokeswoman for the Cochise County Sheriff's Department. No one has been arrested. The homeowner opened fire on the vehicle about 9 a.m. trying to scare it off because he was tired of his property being trekked across...

JUAREZ -- There will be more digging for corpses in Juárez as more victims of violent drug wars remain to be found, Mexican police officials said Wednesday. Investigators are now looking at six additional houses for possible graves, and will continue to dig in the back yard of the original house at 3633 Parsioneros St., where 11 bodies have been unearthed since Saturday. Officials said they have dug up only 30 percent of the yard. In the remaining portion are two spots marked last week by visiting K-9 units from the Austin Police Department as possible burial sites. "We have...

TEHRAN, Iran - Drug smugglers have demanded $6 million in ransom for three tourists they kidnapped in southeastern Iran, officials said Tuesday. The tourists — two Germans and one Irish — were abducted a day earlier while cycling from the historical city of Bam to Zahedan, the provincial capital, in a region known as a major drug-smuggling route. The kidnappers were drug smugglers whose rackets had been hit hard by the security forces during the past year, the director general for security affairs in Sistan-Baluchistan province, Gholam Reza Javdan, told The Associated Press. He said an anonymous caller claimed responsibility...

Three Texas men whose bodies were found floating in the Kentucky River near Lexington, Ky., in April were murdered because of a drug deal gone bad, a Kentucky State Police detective testified Monday in Fayette County District Court. Detective James Devasher said Juan Manuel Moreno, 29, of Fabens; Cruz Rincon Alarcon, 37, of San Elizario; and Manuel Armendariz, 49, of El Paso, were killed April 27 in a house in north Lexington before their bodies were thrown into the Kentucky River. Devasher testified at a preliminary hearing for two of the suspects, 37-year-old Audencio Alkabala-Sanchez and 22-year-old Luis Alberto Alkabala-Sanchez....

Another day, another learning experience. (I meant to post this strange screed Saturday night, but it took a good 24-hours for my brain to digest what I saw.) Lesson Number One: Border Patrol agents (at least in Cochise County) are not like the rest of us. Their anatomies have been altered – certain appendages have been replaced with oversized spheres of solid cobalt steel. And that goes for the female agents as well; they’re just allowed to carry them in a pouch on their belt. Lesson Number Two: Twenty years in the Army, which included two years trotting around the...

Those who protested the Navy exercises on Vieques "want bombs to stop falling from the sky, but they want money to keep falling" to Puerto Rico. That more or less was the gist of a critical report, aired Friday night over ABC to millions of stateside viewers, of efforts to keep Roosevelt Roads Naval Station open after the Navy ends exercises on Vieques on May 1. The report, featured on the 20/20 news show by commentator John Stossel, suggested that keeping Roosevelt Roads open after the Navy leaves Vieques was "a waste of taxpayer money." Stossel, who usually hosts a...