I just had to share this from today's San Antonio Express-News, as I laughed and choked on my entomatadas this evening when I read it - but on the more serious side, it's not an isolated incident:

Three National Guard servicemen, sent down here as part of the 'surge' in border enforcement, were arrested with twenty-eight(!) illegal immigrants in an official van, in a sting last month - they were indicted today and the incident finally published to the local papers here. They were only caught because they had been shuttling illegals through the I-35 checkpoint for at least two months, taking them from Laredo to Cotulla or San Antonio; when one was working at the checkpoint, one of the others would bring the van through the service lane and pretend to be discussing official business, or bringing lunch, to him, and then go on through without inspection.

Getting *into* Laredo via one of its five international bridges is trivial, as foot and motor traffic of thousands of Mexican nationals occurs every day as part of everyday life in our single city separated by an international border; but even felons and other other undesirables can skirt scrutiny by getting someone to smuggle them through Customs via a similar arrangement (and occasionally Customs agents are busted for this as well, but more often for allowing drugs across).

Unfortunately, the SA Express-News doesn't have the article posted, but I did find something from the Houston paper online regarding yesterday's indictment:

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ap/tx/4943122.html

Some details of how the transactions went down, including excerpts of the text messages, the three officers were exchanging, can be found in the Ft. Worth Star Telegram initial report on the arrests:

http://www.star-telegram.com/news/story/133693.html

The three soldiers used cell phone text messaging to negotiate the details, price and number of people who would be smuggled north, according to a complaint filed in court Monday."tell them ill only do 1 run @ no more than 20 people @ $150 a person and i want 2 leave @ 1930 hrs and ill go 2 San Anto if they want," Torres typed to Hodge hours before Torres was arrested, according to the complaint.

A message later that day from Pacheco instructed Torres that a trip was a go, with a promised payment of $3,500 for the delivery of 24 illegal immigrants, the document said.

"24 will b tuff 2 fit but ill try," Torres wrote in response, the complaint said.


More interesting is the additional information included in the Austin American-Statesman in the initial report on the arrests:

http://www.statesman.com/news/content/news/stories/local/06/13/13texasimmig.html

Such arrests weren't isolated cases. Since the 2004 fiscal year, according to the inspector general's office in the Homeland Security Department, 282 employees of Customs and Border Protection working on the border from California to Texas have been investigated for corruption, 52 of them this year, compared with 66 for all of last year.

Considering that the overwhelming majority of enforcement personnel stationed here at the border hail from the border region themselves (which tends to have a sanguine attitude with regard to illegal immigration, many residents having family on both sides of the border), and that politics and city managements down here tend to be modelled on the 'patron' system and highly corrupt, this comes as little surprise - I've frequently remarked that we have such a high proportion of the population in some branch of law enforcement that *everyone* is either on one side or other of the law - and often within the same family :).

I believe I also mentioned a while back that the 'fence' that Mr. Chertoff and his lackeys posed in front of, and which is going in down here, is a total joke - laughably flimsy and they're not even clearing the brush in front of them :). While I wholeheartedly support *sincere* efforts to increase interdiction at the border, it also seems quite clear that such efforts are going to be largely ineffectual as long as there are such incentives for people to migrate across - no matter how much we spend on border enforcement, as long as the risk vs reward for people once they have arrived here is minimal (as previously mentioned, it's ridiculously easy for one to get a purloined social security number, the government has no meaningful way of tracking this activity, and penalties to employers for hiring illegals are nonexistant and nonenforced), there will be no closing of the floodgates.

It's 4:30 am and I suppose I don't have any reason for posting this other than providing an absurdity/reality check for those who think that border enforcement is the 'answer' to illegal immigration (especially with the foxes frequently guarding the henhouse, as it were ;) ), or amnesty is, for that matter and thought people might be interested in hearing about/discussing it in light of the most recent abomination of an immigration bill dying in the Senate.

Regards,
Nydia

egad.
The almighty dollar is stronger than the code! Sad :(

Well take a look at the names:



The three Guardsmen — Sgt. Julio Cesar Pacheco, 25, of Laredo; Sgt. Clarence Hodge Jr., 36, of Fort Worth; and Pfc. Jose Rodrigo Torres, 26, of Laredo — were arrested last week after the immigrants were found in a van driven by Torres, according to a complaint filed in U.S. District Court in Laredo.



Doesn't surprise me that they would do it.

You will notice none of the men caught were Specialists .... the E4 Mafia continues it's reign of terror...

Dear Ibudin:

I'd resist the temptation to paint these guys with the 'untrustworthy' or 'inherently corrupt' brush on immigration issues simply because they are Hispanic - not only is it racist, but it is inaccurate even when applied strictly to immigrants as well; there are a LOT of immigrants, legal and naturalized/amnestied illegals, not to mention the descendants of such, that feel very strongly about illegal immigration and are just as disturbed by our government's schizophrenic handling of it as any Smith or Jones is. While, again, not something one should make a blanket statement about, the home city is more likely to be telling whether someone is likely to be a 'risk' in that position simply because certain border towns' residents (not all, but Laredo happens to be particularly bad because of its history) by and large have an almost contemptuous attitude towards this country's immigration laws and so don't see circumventing them as particularly problematic. Alas, I don't have time to reply to this in detail right now but I wanted to stress that I was in no way passing judgement on any given Customs or Border Patrol agents or National Guard units stationed down here simply *because* of their racial extraction (which is why I did not bring up their race in the article) or home town - I do question the wisdom of recruiting large numbers of these troops from the border towns and then stationing them in their home towns, however, precisely because of the potential risk of entrenched corruption.

Regards,
Nydia

So if someone has a German last name they must be a Nazi? I thought we outgrew that kind of ignorance ... sighs.

No but if they were killing jews and are German I would label them a Nazi....trucking illegals in and being of Hispanic back ground...DOES NOT SURPRISE ME. Its just a simple coorelation.

But Clinton?

But Clinton?

Winner.

The basic lesson we keep failing to learn is that trying to put walls between lots of people and lots of money is never a winning proposition, and at some point we need to stop with the border security farce and actually fix our economy.

winner....

Actual enforcement would be a solution, if that's what we were doing. It's been said many times in the past that the best we are doing is crowd control. No politician is yet willing to take the drastic measures needed to actually close a boarder. What's needed is an actual boarder, actual enforcement, and actual punishments if you're caught - not just sending folks home to do it again. Unfortunately Boarder Patrol ends up in a similar situation to CPS - their job is too big for the resources given to them, and like any minimum wage employee enforcing an unpopular policy with a customer, the powers that be tend to not back them up when a problem becomes public knowledge. The end result is that enforcement is a joke, and a story like this doesn't surprise me in the slightest. That's a very sad thing.

Yup, the piss poor fence solution we came up was ineffective.

Do we blame the attempt or the bullshit folks who worry more about the side of the fence they can't control.

Put up real efforts, taser those that approach and dammit make it count imho.

For that matter draw back our efforts to police the rest of the world, to help those in need to protect democracy!!! Fuckem!!

Omg back to the days of isolationism for the win!!

Or, better to try then to flail about blaming the man I guess.

We have corrupt folks in all aspects of society, we can't condem because folks waver imho.

Fandros

How many times must we create a huge black market economy that actively subverts our institutions before we figure out it's a bad idea? There is NO barrier that will keep Mexicans out of the US for work as long as we keep Mexico poor and our agribusiness behemoths and the "economy of the poor" institutions that range from day labor fixers to drug runners make billions off their labor.

It didn't work with prohibition. It didn't work with the war on drugs. It didn't work with Cuba. It didn't work for the natives who lived here before us. When millions of people want something across that imaginary line, something is going to make it happen.

It's all about incentives. You have to remove the incentive for Mexicans to cross the border to find work, and you have to remove the incentive for businesses to hire them. Physical barriers won't do that.

The basic lesson we keep failing to learn is that trying to put walls between lots of people and lots of money is never a winning proposition, and at some point we need to stop with the border security farce and actually fix our economy.

/AGREE!!
All we do is create another black black market.