Bordering on Insanity
By by William F. Jasper
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Source: The New American, July 28, 2003
Bush
Republicans and Clinton Democrats are united in supporting immigration
policies giving thugs and terrorists easy access into America. |
Rookie
police officer Tony Zeppetella was making a routine traffic stop in
Oceanside, California, on June 13th. According to court reports,
Officer Zeppetella was walking back toward his patrol car when the
driver of the vehicle he had stopped opened fire on him. The driver,
Adrian George Camacho, reportedly then got out of the car and continued
to shoot at the wounded officer. Camacho approached the downed
policeman, pistol-whipped him, then executed Zeppetella with the
officer’s own handgun.
Officer Zeppetella, age 27, had served on
the Oceanside Police Department just 13 months before being murdered.
He had previously served six years in the U.S. Navy. He leaves behind a
wife and a six-month-old son.
Adrian George Camacho, the accused
murderer, is a Mexican national who has been repeatedly deported and
has a long arrest and prison history. He was 16 when he was charged
with attempted murder in a 1991 drive-by gang shooting. He was released
from prison last year after serving time for drug offenses. After
murdering Zeppetella, Camacho stole the officer’s gun and patrol car
and fled to the home of relatives in nearby Via Isidro. He was arrested
at the home a few hours later and charged with heroin possession, in
addition to first-degree murder.
A few months earlier in Las
Vegas, Nevada, a similarly routine traffic stop also ended tragically.
Rookie police officer Enrique Hernandez stopped Saul Morales-Garcia on
the evening of December 12th. Morales-Garcia, a 24-year-old illegal
alien from Mexico, was convicted in 1997 of auto burglary and was later
deported to Mexico. However, he later returned illegally. After being
stopped by Officer Hernandez, Morales-Garcia sped off in his vehicle.
Losing control of his car, the fugitive crashed into a light pole and
fled on foot into a nearby apartment. When Officer Hernandez pursued
the suspect into the building, Morales-Garcia opened fire, shooting
Hernandez six times. Officer Hernandez, age 24, survived the shooting,
but Morales-Garcia was killed when he refused to surrender and aimed
his weapon at members of the police SWAT Team.
Adrian Camacho
and Saul Morales-Garcia are but two of the thousands of foreign violent
felons who have entered the United States illegally and are
contributing immensely to our ongoing crime crisis. According to a
recent report in the San Diego Union Tribune, “nearly 10,000 criminal
immigrants were returned to Mexico” from San Diego in 2002, including
felons who had completed jail or prison sentences in other parts of
California. Like Camacho and Morales-Garcia, many of these thugs have
undoubtedly violated our still-porous borders and re-entered the U.S.
Following are a few other examples of the illegal immigrant crime waves resulting largely because we have neglected our borders:
- On
December 19, 2002, a 42-year-old Queens woman and her boyfriend were
walking in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park near Shea Stadium when a gang
of Mexican illegals surrounded and severely beat them. The woman was
dragged to a shanty, brutalized, sodomized, and repeatedly gang-raped
for several hours. Her assailants told her that they would have to kill
her since she could identify them. Undoubtedly, these miscreants would
have carried out that threat if New York Police had not arrived to
rescue her and arrest the assailants.
- On June 27, 2003, a
U.S. Border Patrol agent was nearly run down by drug runners at the
Naco port of entry along the Arizona-Mexico border. The agent fired
repeatedly at the charging vehicle, which crossed back into Mexico. The
van, recovered by Mexican authorities, was loaded with marijuana.
- On
June 21, 2003, an alien-smuggling vehicle rolled over near Tucson,
Arizona, killing a two-year-old girl from Chiapas, Mexico, and a
24-year-old man from Veracruz, Mexico. At least 20 other illegals were
in the truck: Some were hospitalized; 10 were taken into custody; and
some escaped.
- On May 13, 2003, 17 illegal aliens died from
heat and suffocation locked inside a truck trailer near Victoria,
Texas. A federal grand jury in Houston has indicted 14 people in
connection with the smuggling ring and the deaths of the immigrants.
A
recent report by Middle American News of Raleigh, North Carolina, noted
that a study commissioned by the Immigration and Naturalization Service
(now part of the new Department of Homeland Security) “found as many as
5.45 million aliens illegally enter the country at border checkpoints
by simply fooling INS inspectors with fake or doctored travel documents
such as passports and visas.” That number did not include the millions
of illegal aliens who sneak into the U.S. undetected along the
thousands of miles of unmanned border areas.
According to the Middle American News, which closely monitors immigration matters:
The
[INS] study said overworked U.S. personnel at border entry points are
able to spend only a minute or two glancing at a passport, visa, or a
border-crossing card as they grant admission to a foreigner. Random
back-up checks designed to test inspector’s efficiency show a very low
rate of success in spotting illegals.
Computer background checks
of foreigners admitted at border checkpoints found “several million”
foreigners whose backgrounds should have triggered a denial of entry.
More
than 500 million foreign travelers enter the U.S. each year. The study
found that 47 of every 5,614 travelers are erroneously allowed to
enter, and that border personnel are able to stop only 9 to 16 percent
of those ineligible for legal entry.
The U.S. relies on just
9,000 Border Patrol agents to protect a nation’s estimated 4,000 miles
of borders. A recent study by the University of Texas found that nearly
twice that many, 16,000 agents, are needed to adequately patrol the
southwest border alone. The Association of Chief Patrol Agents says the
U.S. needs 20,000 border agents.
While the situation on
our southern border has been in a state of crisis for several decades,
the status of our northern border is serious as well. Vast areas of our
unpopulated and heavily forested border with Canada are wide open to
any and all who care to cross. That is what the U.S. Department of
Agriculture concluded when it audited the U.S. Forest Service recently.
“About
1,000 miles of national forest land bordering Canada and Mexico go
virtually unpatrolled by the U.S. Forest Service, creating wide swaths
for terrorists and criminals to enter the country undetected,” reported
the Associated Press in a May 1st article on the USDA audit.
The
inspector general reported that the Forest Service administers large
areas “that are potentially vulnerable to infiltration by terrorists,
smugglers, and other criminal agents.” The Forest Service supervises
460 miles of land along the 3,000-mile border between the continental
U.S. and Canada, as well as 450 miles between Alaska and Canada, and 60
miles along the border with Mexico. How does the Forest Service patrol
nearly 1,000 miles of border and monitor the nearly 200 million acres
under its jurisdiction with only 620 officers? It doesn’t. According to
the audit, a “relatively small number” of Forest Service personnel
patrol 520 miles of forest land along the borders. And the remaining
450 border miles? They aren’t patrolled at all, the auditors said.
Because
of the 9-11 terrorist attacks, American citizens are being subjected to
increasingly intrusive, inconvenient, costly, and humiliating searches
and controls. The new federal Transportation Security Administration
(TSA) became, virtually overnight, one of the world’s largest police
agencies, with more than 58,000 officers. The White House and Congress
seem to have no problem with TSA agents regularly subjecting millions
of American citizens to intensive searches. But for some reason they
balk at implementing measures to protect our borders and to search out
and deport the illegal aliens in our midst.
Matricula Consular Card Deception
In
fact, the president and the Congress seem united in a bipartisan effort
to blast open the security breaches on our borders still wider, even as
they clamp down ever tighter domestic controls on citizens.
Like
Bill Clinton, George Bush favors granting amnesty to millions of
illegal aliens now residing in the United States. Like Bill Clinton, he
also favors creating a Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) that
would eventually merge the U.S. with Mexico, Canada, and the other
countries of the hemisphere, ultimately eliminating national borders
altogether. The Bush White House is still going full tilt for the FTAA,
but it has temporarily dropped the illegal alien amnesty issue due to
public outcry after the 9-11 attacks and the requisite bows to national
security concerns.*
The Bush administration, however, continues
to wink at the Mexican government’s blatant attempts to effect a
piecemeal amnesty by other means. Mexican President Vicente Fox is
issuing “matricula consular” identification cards that he insists
should be officially recognized within the United States. Since the
beginning of the year, the Fox government has launched an aggressive
lobbying campaign within the U.S. to win acceptance of the matricula
consular by banks, and state and municipal agencies.
The Mexican
campaign has been very effective. According to the Center for
Immigration Studies (CIS), “the matricula is now accepted by 800 local
law enforcement agencies and 74 banks, as well as by 13 states for
purposes of obtaining a driver’s license.”
“Not only does the
matricula subvert U.S. immigration law,” notes the CIS, “it is not even
a secure identity document. Mexico is not authenticating the documents
used to obtain the matricula against computerized data files in
Mexico.”A CIS backgrounder on the matricula consular notes that the
Bush Treasury Department “has given its approval to banks to accept the
matricula for opening bank accounts.”
Rep. Tom Tancredo
(R-Colo.) has taken the lead in exposing and opposing the matricula
scheme. In a June 23rd appearance on MSNBC, Congressman Tancredo
denounced the matricula as an “attempt by — on the part of the Mexican
government to obtain what it could not get through the Congress of the
United States. And that is amnesty for all of those Mexicans living
here illegally.” And, he pointed out, the scheme is not confined to
Mexico. “Mexico started it,” he said. “But now there are at least six
other countries that are following suit. And there will be many more in
a very short period of time.”
From all appearances the Bush
State Department, presided over by Secretary Colin Powell, is smiling
benignly on this dagger pointed at the heart of American security. In a
January 10th letter, Rep. Tancredo warned Secretary Powell that unless
the State Department acted to discourage acceptance of the Mexican
matricula, other governments would follow suit. That is now happening.
On June 12th, Rep. Tancredo again wrote to Secretary Powell asking him
to explain a State Department memo to our embassy in Managua that
appears to approve a Nicaraguan I.D. document similar to the Mexican
matricula.
“How can this memo from Managua (attached) be
interpreted as anything but aiding and abetting attempts by foreign
governments to provide their nationals living illegally in the U.S.
with documentation that would ease their entrance into American
society?” Rep. Tancredo asked, noting that “this is an issue of
enormous significance that has massive implications for our nation.”
The
congressman pointed out in his letter that the State Department’s
actions are directly contrary to the administration’s draft policy on
the matter:
In mid-May the Department of Homeland
Security sent to the White House a Draft Policy Statement on the
matricula consular cards. That Draft Policy Statement, which was the
product of an interagency working group that included the State
Department, expressly prohibits all federal agencies from accepting the
cards or cooperating in their use by foreign nationals.
There
are two very good reasons for opposing these identification cards, Rep.
Tancredo observed. “First, our acceptance of the cards, or our
cooperation in their manufacture or distribution, provides tacit
approval and encouragement for increased illegal immigration into the
United States,” he noted. Persons residing here on legal visas have no
need of the document; it will only serve those here in violation of our
laws. “The second reason for rejecting these documents,” Rep. Tancredo
said, “is that the process for verification of identity of the
individual obtaining the card is very questionable. The only
identification document issued by a foreign government our government
should accept is a valid passport.”
“The State Department’s
current policy of ambiguity on this matter is interpreted as tacit
approval by foreign governments,” Mr. Tancredo’s letter charged. “This
will very likely have disastrous consequences for our nation. If the
Administration has agreed to cooperate with this activity, the American
people have a right to know. If it has not, please advise us of the
steps being taken to halt it.”
The congressman’s office told The
New American on July 1st that he had received no response from
Secretary Powell’s office to either the January or June letters.
While
the Bush administration is providing sub rosa support for Mexico’s
matricula consular attack on our borders, radical Democrats are openly
defending the program. Rep. Luis Gutierrez of Chicago and New Mexico
Governor Bill Richardson are two of the matricula’s outspoken advocates.
Following
a meeting in Mexico City with President Vicente Fox, Gov. Richardson
called for a U.S.-Mexican immigration accord and urged border states to
recognize the matricula cards. Richardson, a former U.S. Representative
and Bill Clinton’s UN ambassador and energy secretary, pointed out that
New Mexico was the first state to accept the cards. “I’d like it if
other states did the same,” he said.
The Mexican matricula
consular card and its imitations from other countries constitute a
serious attack on America’s sovereignty and security. That public
officials — federal, state, and local — charged with upholding and
defending the Constitution and our laws can support this brazen assault
is astounding. Constituents must hold them accountable, before our
security, our liberty, and our political landscape are utterly
decimated.
* For more information about the FTAA threat, go to www.thenewamerican.com/focus/ftaa/.
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