The More Things Change, The More They Stay The Same

The U. S. Mexican Border Has Become a Sieve of Death

By Martin Brass (Part III of V)

Silent Invasion, Deadly Consequences

"The pilgrims begin their journeys, or return to the United States, after holidays in January, February and March, when the Border Patrol prepares for the biggest influx.

"They drown, they die of the desert heat, they die of hypothermia" Miguel Reyes, a protection officer for Mexico's foreign ministry in south Texas told Reuters.

"There is a belief that if you cross in the desert that the snakes will not cross the railroad tracks" Reyes said. Six Mexican immigrants who believed that sleeping on railroad tracks would protect them from poisonous snakes were crushed by a freight train near Norias, TX in 1998. Their mangled bodies, smashed with cans of beans and tortillas, were unidentifiable.

The tales are endless.

Thirteen immigrants nearly suffocated in a sweltering 140 degrees inside a boxcar in San Antonio TX before they could struggle out. The rotting bodies of seven of them were found under a tree a week later.

Smugglers hire truck drivers to smuggle their human cargos over the border, and from state to state. A passerby on U.S. Highway 77, outside of Victoria TX, called the police to report a hand, waving a bandana out of a hole in the back of a white 18-wheeler, in 2003. "A flood of human beings" spilled out, said U.S. Attorney Michael Shelby. Eighteen out of 100 Mexicans, El Salvadorans, Guatemalans and Hondurans were asphyxiated in a trailer abandoned by three traffickers. The trailer was registered to Tyron Williams of Schenectady, NY, who was later arrested.
Felipe de Jesus Preciado Coronado, head of Mexico's National Immigration Institute told the Washington Post that the government has identified at least 57 organized smuggling bands. Jim Chaparro, head of the anti-smuggling office at U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, INS - abolished in March, 2003 and incorporated into the Department of Homeland Security - said that the small and informal smuggling business has evolved into a powerful web of "literally hundreds of syndicates, some at a low level and some at the kingpin level… Gangs are ripping off aliens from other smugglers and holding aliens captive until they sell them to a buyer." Drug smugglers have turned to alien smuggling.

Prices for transport have increased dramatically, partially to pay for high-tech equipment. Encrypted radios, cell phones, and the internet, used for warning of patrolling U.S. agents have replaced the flashlights that were once used to cross the Rio Grande.

Those that charge the most offer computer generated fake documents, or stolen visas and passports. Migrants from Asia and Europe pay far more than Mexicans -- upwards of $50,000 to get in U.S.

"The flow of illegal aliens has become much more organized, and that has opened the opportunity for these groups to market their services to non-Mexicans," Armand Peschard Sverdrup, director of the Mexico project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies told the Post.

Arrests of coyotes have been publicized for years. A cursory examination of the records of Office of the United States District of Arizona alone reveals numerous arrests monthly this year.

Four Smugglers were arrested after a four-month investigation of the Raul Green and Jose Humberto Marquez human trafficking organization in February 2004. Cesar Balderas-Grandos, a Mexican citizen was convicted of trafficking after a U.S. Border Patrol agent saw the knees and elbows of humans bouncing in the bed of his truck.

Grandos refused to stop. He was arrested after a multi- Border Patrol unit high-speed chase. Eleven undocumented aliens were in the bed of the truck and fourteen in the cab of the truck. The defendant had previously been deported from the United States.

Jose Guadalupe Chairez-Jauragui was indicted in February for smuggling 65 illegal aliens. A canine, conducting a routine sniff around his trailer, made the alert. Border Patrol agents had to remove pallets stacked in the back of the trailer and found the smothering aliens. Also in February Alonso Ruiz Avila was indicted in Arizona for transporting 50 aliens in a Freightliner tractor-trailer. The aliens were stowed behind crates of citrus.

Maria Christina Baez and Laura Gastelum were arrested for smuggling five children. The women were paid $50 for each child and were to turn the children over to a stranger. They did not even know who the children were.

In March, Breton Rodriguez, an illegal alien, attacked a Border Patrol agent, and grabbed the agent's Beretta from his holster. The gun discharged, striking the agent in the groin.

The More Things Change, The More They Stay The Same

The U. S. Mexican Border Has Become a Sieve of Death

By Martin Brass (Part II of V)

Unfortunate Pilgrims

The flood of humans includes many other than Mexican (OTM). Apprehensions of OTMs have increased 42 percent according to Border Patrol spokesperson Rene' Noriega. Migrants come from El Salvador, Cuba, Haiti, the former Soviet Union, Asia, and the Middle East. Most illegal aliens pay their trafficker, from $1,500, up to $50,000 for their journeys.

A Border Patrol agent confirmed, to Warriors for the Truth, that nine Yemenis attempting to enter the United States after 9-11, "can't get a coyote to transport them, and they are offering $30,000 per person with no takers."

"The further the smuggling route, the higher the fee. Smugglers often guarantee success for the high prices they charge, promising to give passage back into the United States to those who are apprehended in route and sent back. Some keep that promise while other smugglers let the customers die in a box car or in the trunk or under the hood of a car," says veteran Border Patrol official J. William Carter.

Illegal immigration busts have doubled this year in Arizona. Two thousand and thirty-eight are being apprehended daily. Yuma agents have captured more than 43,000 this year, a one-third increase over last year.

Witnesses express their outrage and disgust at the destruction left behind by the endless parade of illegal aliens.

Take a border town in Arizona, Whetstone, near the "epicenter of an invasion of contraband and humanity that is unrivaled throughout the western world. Trails are worn into the earth by tens of thousands of human travelers. Landowner fences are either cut by illegal aliens and their smugglers, or bent over and torn down completely.

"So heavy is the illegal smuggling traffic in some parts of Whetstone, Arizona 'suburbs' that local residents have constructed roadblocks made of scrub brush and branches. The smell in many areas is overwhelming, especially in the heat of the summer. The amount of refuse is astounding," says wnd.com.

Elsewhere, in the backcountry, "the foot traffic is so heavy it has the ambience of a garbage dump and smells like an outdoor privy. In places, the land is littered a foot deep with bottles, cans, disposable diapers, sanitary napkins, panties, clothes, backpacks, human feces, used toilet paper, pharmacy bottles and syringes," reports Warriors for the Truth.

"This is a sad, continuing story, particularly in those states that border on Mexico, where we witness a steady, silent, pervasive invasion of the United States by an unarmed army carrying an assembly line of diseases into the heart of America," George Putnam reports in Newsmax.com. He cites "Immigration's Silent Invasion, Deadly Consequences", researched by a registered nurse and a former U.S. Army Medical Service Corps officer. The research presents a "frightening study of how the hordes" of illegal aliens invading our nation have reintroduced tuberculosis, leprosy, smallpox and Chagas disease. Chagas, a parasite, kills 50,000 annually and has infected 18 million people in Latin America. It damages the heart and intestines and may infect through blood transfusions.

"The most serious is multi-drug resistant TB, spread through the air by an infected person. Each TB patient is said to infect ten to twenty others. More than 7,000 new cases of leprosy have been diagnosed in the U.S. in the past three years. The Queens, NY Health Department diagnosed eighty one TB cases among illegal aliens, and concluded that foreigners have an eightfold higher incidence of TB, and that two-thirds of imported cases come from Mexico, the Philippines and Vietnam," reports Newsmax.

"The Dying Season" began in the deserts in the spring of 2003, just as it does every spring, when eighteen Mexicans and Central Americans were found by Native Americans of the Tohono O'odham Nation on their reservation in Southern Arizona," their report concludes.

The More Things Change, The More They Stay The Same

The U. S. Mexican Border Has Become a Sieve of Death

By Martin Brass (Part I of V)

Illegal aliens Face a Gauntlet of Doom: The Border Patrol Faces Dopers, Terrorists, and the Desperate Victims of Coyotes.

The 2,100 mile southern border of the U.S., with its treacherous mountain ranges, canyons, rivers and deserts, has become an uncontrollable stretch of violence, death, rape and exploitation.

Over a decade ago, SOF rode with Border Patrol Agents in Arizona when the situation already seemed out of hand. One of those agents, now retired, recently contacted SOF with a disturbing and frustrated update, reflecting the deterioration of the Mexico-United States border.

"In my career, spanning three decades, many of my friends and partners were killed on duty, enforcing immigration laws, and are listed on our honor rolls. Their deaths, and devotion to duty, are beyond politicians' ability to understand, it seems, and are without meaning. This past year the Patrol has arrested a million illegal aliens, with twelve to fourteen million in country, home free. Mexican military incursions, escorting narcotics, are commonplace. Rival alien smuggling organizations thrive in Arizona, and politicians pander, and grovel to Mexico's demands, in a time of war."

Vulture-like smugglers, drug gangs, entrepreneurs, and corrupt officials cash in on human smuggling into the United States, which has become a multi-billion dollar business.

Refugees from Mexico, and worldwide, come by foot, across blistering hot sand, and are then crammed into trucks and trailers. They wade through the New River, the most polluted river in the United States, to avoid immigration agents. They swim through raw sewage, slaughterhouse remains, and pesticide runoff. They are stuffed in suitcases. Hundreds have died in the Rio Grande.

The more fortunate ones take the faster route, buying their own tickets in Mexico for around $200. Others are flown in by coyotes, and trafficked throughout the United States. Mexicana, the Mexican state owned airline, opened a direct flight several years ago from Oaxaca to Hermosillo, with a stop in Mexico City. With three flights a day, Mexicana station manager Jorge Carrillos estimates that half of 290 daily passengers are heading for the United States.

Three other airlines, originating in Vera Cruz and Chiapas, fly illegal aliens (mojados) to the United States. Migrants tell of being assaulted, robbed or overcharged because they are thought to be carrying lots of money," says the Arizona Daily Star.

CNN reports that in the year 2000, during one of many illegal immigration crackdowns at Sky Harbor Airport in Phoenix, and at McCarran Airport in Las Vegas, within just a few hours, one hundred INS agents apprehended a hundred illegal aliens being smuggled to Chicago, Los Angeles, Dallas and the East Coast.

WE Are Our Own Worse Enemy

No Constitution, No Borders, No USA

6/14/2013 - Diana West

At what point does it become clear that we no longer inhabit America? When we "Press 2," not "1" for English? When a National Social Security Number syncs an electronic identity that the government hospital provided us at birth to track us till death?

When borders are no more, but the Surveillance State always knows where we are?

Ours is the age of dislocation before realization: The United States of America no longer exists. Why? How? The answer is simple, tragic and outrageous: Government officials, elected and unelected, with precious exceptions, no longer preserve, protect and defend the U.S. Constitution. Instead, they do whatever it takes to beat it, flout it and ignore it. Worse, We, the People, let them.

This can't go on. Otherwise our country-'tis-of-thee becomes a melody to be forgotten, a mirage of a tradition more storybook than real every day. Nowhere is this more the case, of course, than in Washington, D.C., where absolute unaccountability corrupts absolutely, where echoing down the cool, white marble halls of power, hollow men and women trample sovereignty and citizenship in a pathway to American betrayal.

And I haven't even gotten to Congress, busy, busy "reforming" the illegal alien crisis they antiseptically refer to as "immigration," while considering passage of a $940 billion "farm bill," 80 percent of which will fund food stamps. These two laws alone can institutionalize the lawlessness of the land and make countless more Americans wards of the state.

Meanwhile, there is in Washington a faceless power-mongery that lives and works in the shadows. City by city, rural state by rural state, its mechanisms of "immigration," "refugee resettlement," and socialist government programs overwhelm a near-impotent citizenry with alien cultures, religions, languages and traditions.

There is no "melting pot" out there, nor is there even residual belief in one -- particularly not on the part of the state. Most of our new peoples will never embrace American constitutional virtues en masse to perpetuate them because their own sponsor, their own lifeline, is the mega-state that brought them here and supports them.

This goes for newcomers from the Hispano-sphere, 75 percent of whom, Pew reported in 2012, believe the U.S. government isn't big enough and want more government services. It also goes for Muslim "refugee resettlement" populations, willfully deployed by this same power-mongery to displace and erase what we may one day look back on as just another indigenous culture that Washington overlords destroyed.

Then there is the faceless power-mongery that transforms the country, ironically, in the name of "national security." How can "national security" be achievable in an America without borders? It is a post-9/11 fact that more than one million Americans, government employees and contactors, now have "top-secret" access. 

They monitor our electronic lives, and collect all of our telephone numbers, something we have learned from the completely unauthorized but vital disclosures of Edward Snowden. This mass monitoring, we are told repeatedly, is what it takes to prevent "another 9/11."

Never mind those pinprick jihad attacks in Boston, Arkansas or Fort Hood. In fact, never mind jihad, period. This same Surveillance State has officially eliminated jihad as a subject to be taught or studied by security agencies and the military. In this way, every one of us becomes a suspect.

"Why do you need every telephone number?" NBC's Andrea Mitchell asked Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. "Why is it such a broad vacuum cleaner approach?"

"Well, you have to start someplace," Clapper replied.

Incredibly, this deaf, dumb and blind vacuum cleaner approach is touted as effective enough to have prevented 9/11 in the first place. So stresses former CIA and NSA chief Michael Hayden, a booster of the warrantless "data mining" of the PRISM program and the mass collection of all Americans' telephone records.

The mendacity of this rationale is as appalling as the hyper-state it enables. Just ask the airline ticket taker in Boston who, constricted by "political correctness" forced herself to tell the al-Qaida hijackers to "have a nice flight" rather than investigate their strange pre-boarding behavior.

If our leaders really wanted to prevent "another 9/11," they would have long ago admitted the obvious: that the world of Islam, from its terrorists to its kings, is engaged in the latest historical cycle of jihad to extend the reach of Islamic law (sharia). They would have decided that "profiling" isn't worse than terrorism.

They would have halted Islamic immigration not only to stop more jihad cells from forming but also to prevent Constitution-endangering, pro-sharia demographics from forming, too. They would have sharply curtailed travel, and particularly return travel from jihad nations such as Chechnya and Pakistan.

They would have long ago blocked U.S. institutions, including colleges, media organizations and banks, from accepting millions of dollars from sharia-ruled dictatorships.

They would have closed down mosques in America where jihad is preached and supported.

Above all, they would have secured our borders rather than leave them open all these post-9/11 years. Of course, that would mean re-establishing and defending those borders, both literally and figuratively.

That's one thing Washington, D.C., will never tolerate.

(Diana West's new book is "American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation's Character" from St. Martin's Press. She blogs at dianawest.net, and she can be contacted via dianawest@verizon.net. Follow her on Twitter @diana_west_.)