 BORDER NEWS
A group of people from Bisbee, Arizona calling themselves Border Justice Clean-Up have spent the past nine months providing aid to migrants crossing the desert. Along with picking up trash left by the migrants, which helps to eliminate the hostility of landowners, the volunteers have set up aid stations with food, water, clothes and blankets. The Border Patrol has praised the humanitarian effort, but cautions the volunteers to avoid breaking any laws.
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The first INS detention center designed to house entire families has opened in Leesport, Pennsylvania, about 55 miles northwest of Philadelphia. The center will house only families who are seeking asylum, and represents a significant improvement over the current way the INS deals with families. Children and their parents are often separated, or are kept in hotel rooms. There are already 10 families from Colombia living at the center.
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INS agents from the Anti-Smuggling Unit in Los Angeles recently discovered 27 Mexican immigrants and about ,000 in cash in an apartment in south Los Angeles. Officials believe that the apartment was used as a drophouse where smuggled migrants are housed until family members can come up with money for the smuggling fee. The immigrants were all taken into custody and will be deported.
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Two armed men hijacked a delivery truck carrying 6,000 border crossing permits outside Tijuana last week. The men stole the cards, which were being transported to US consulates for distribution to Mexican citizens. Officials assume that the cards will now be sold on the black market. The cards allow Mexican nationals with business or family in the US to enter the US for 72 hours. They are limited to travel within 24 miles of the border.
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A faction of the Sierra Club, an environmental organization, is mailing a proposal to the 600,000 members of the group that will allow them to vote on whether immigration to the US should be limited to protect the environment. The leaders of the organization, who have faced this issue three times in the past ten years, are not supportive of the proposal. Instead, the organization supports improved planning and land use as well as other broader initiatives to end perceived environmental abuses. They also say that the problems of urban sprawl, one of the areas that concerns the dissident faction, is caused more by native born Americans than by immigrants.
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Police in Idaho arrested 23 undocumented immigrants last weekend in what is being called the largest such arrest in the past ten years. Troopers stopped a rental van for speeding, and while letting it go, contacted the Border Patrol to report suspicions that many in the vehicle were undocumented.
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The Coronado National Memorial on the Arizona-Mexico border will be receiving three additional rangers in order to address perceived increases in drug and immigrant smuggling through the park. The National Park Service, which runs Coronado, is also looking into a Border Patrol request that a surveillance tower be erected in the park. According to the Superintendent of the National Park Service, Jim Bellamy, there are conflicting opinions about such a tower, with one view being that it would be a blight on the landscape, and the other being that it is necessary to prevent both smuggling and the environmental degradation that it causes. The number of undocumented immigrants and the amount of drugs coming through the park has tripled over each of the past two years.
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Two people pled guilty this week in federal court of smuggling undocumented immigrants. Under the plea agreement, the maximum sentence for Hyo Young Park, a Canadian citizen, will be 37 months, and will be 52 months for Yu Feng Liu, of Pennsylvania. Five other Canadians are still awaiting trial. All of the defendants were arrested after and INS investigation dubbed Operation Squeeze Play that also reached into China, leading to the indictment of a Chinese government executive and a high ranking police officer.
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The US Attorney and the District Attorney of Cochise County, Arizona, are investigating a report that a local rancher fired a gun at a group of migrants he was detaining. This is not the first time that Roger and Don Barnett have been involved in incidents of migrant detention. Since April 1999, they have, on at least 14 different occasions, detained groups of migrants crossing their ranch outside Douglas, Arizona. In the latest incidents, members of a group of migrants say that while they were walking, two men brandishing guns approached them and when one ran, one of the men fired a shot into the air. The brothers then called the Border Patrol, who picked up the migrants and allowed them to voluntarily return to Mexico.
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Two water stations meant to help migrants crossing the Arizona desert opened this week. They are the first of hundreds that have been planned. The 65-gallon tanks, which are marked with blue flags that are visible for miles, were set up by a humanitarian group, Humane Borders, looking to prevent deaths among migrants crossing the desert during the summer. Last year 41 migrants died of dehydration. Border Patrol officials say that they will not stake out the stations to catch the migrants.
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