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Nickdfresh
08-21-2005, 10:37 AM
Security fears grow at Southwest border
With no detention space, crossers released

By Brian MacQuarrie, Globe Staff | August 21, 2005

HARLINGEN, Texas -- In a storefront courthouse in the baking-hot Rio Grande Valley, next to a ''beauty academy" and across from a sleepy coffee shop, US Immigration Judge David Ayala is a study in effortless efficiency. He pulls blue files one by one from a tall stack, announces the name of an undocumented immigrant caught slipping across the US border, and orders the defendant deported.

There are no cries of protest. The defendants are nowhere to be found. Other than the thwack of a stamp and the judge's voice, the only other sound in the tiny courtroom is the quiet hum of an air conditioner, as Ayala goes through the motions before a Department of Homeland Security prosecutor and a reporter.

Unlike undocumented Mexicans, most of whom are quickly returned to their country after they are arrested, almost all non-Mexicans are charged and released in the United States if they do not have a criminal record and are not deemed a security threat. But like this day, few of the immigrants show up to face charges that they entered the country illegally.

When their names are called, 98 percent of all undocumented aliens ordered to appear at Harlingen Immigration Court do not answer. They are weeks into their new lives in all corners of the United States.

The no-show rate, the highest of those for all 53 immigration courts in the country, has deteriorated as undocumented, non-Mexican immigrants have been crossing the border in exponentially increasing numbers, many from known terrorist breeding grounds such as Pakistan.
Pop-up GLOBE GRAPHIC: Failure to appear

High-ranking federal officials, including retired Admiral James Loy of the Coast Guard, who served as deputy secretary of Homeland Security until March, have warned Congress that terrorists might exploit the porous border with Mexico to enter the United States, where they can take their chances with immigration officials who often have no choice but to release non-Mexicans.

Such infiltration ''is a concern for us," said Roy Cervantes, the US Border Patrol spokesman in Harlingen.

Nationwide, the number of non-Mexicans who are entering the country illegally is skyrocketing, according to the Department of Homeland Security. Through Aug. 9, for the first 10 months of fiscal 2005, a total of 135,097 non-Mexicans had been apprehended out of 1.02 million undocumented immigrants arrested overall. In all of fiscal 2004, the number of non-Mexicans apprehended was 75,392; in fiscal 2003, the figure was 49,545.

The arrivals are coming from all over the globe, using smugglers in Mexico and the United States to ferry them to river crossings and to guide them along dangerous desert trails in their quest for a better life. The inability of the Border Patrol to stem the tide has provoked a fierce debate about immigration policy and security priorities. The governors of New Mexico, Bill Richardson, and of Arizona, Janet Napolitano, both Democrats, declared states of emergency along their southern borders this month.

Big-business interests are concerned that an aggressive federal crackdown on immigration could affect the estimated 10 million undocumented workers in the United States, and who provide a steady source of low-cost labor.

But many lawmakers from border states and others, such as the Minutemen volunteers who monitor the borders, are sounding an alarm.

''The borders are worse today than they have ever been," said US Representative John Culberson, a Houston Republican who has filed a bill to create an armed volunteer militia that would be supervised by border-state governors. ''There's an absolute invasion going on."

Other observers, such as the executive director of the League of United Latin American Citizens, Brent Wilkes, suggest that the outcry against the growing influx of non-Mexican immigrants, many of them from Central and South America, is rooted in racial bias.

''We get concerned when we feel like the security issue is used as a ruse to crack down on Hispanic immigrants who are economic refugees," Wilkes said. ''There's a lot of people playing up the threat of terrorists coming across the Mexican border."
Pop-up GLOBE GRAPHIC: Failure to appear

Immigration officials say they are doing the best they can with what they have. But if they do not release most non-Mexican immigrants, federal officials say, the alternative is to detain tens of thousands of them in a time-consuming deportation process whose difficulties are compounded by a shortage of detention space. With 19,500 beds nationwide all filled, the result ''forces us to make some very difficult decisions," said Dean Boyd, a spokesman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement for the Department of Homeland Security.

Nowhere are those decisions more evident than in Harlingen. In the first nine months of fiscal 2005, which ends on Sept. 30, 16,376 undocumented immigrants failed to appear at court. Only 214 of them were Mexican. In fiscal 2004, 9,166 immigrants did not appear, or 88 percent. In fiscal 2003, the no-show number was 4,868, again a national high at 88 percent.

In the sprawling Rio Grande sector, which includes Harlingen and covers 320 miles of the river, 68,438 non-Mexican immigrants from 65 countries have been arrested this fiscal year, Cervantes said. That number amounts to much more than double the 26,437 non-Mexican immigrants who had crossed illegally into this sector for all of fiscal 2004.

In the border city of Brownsville, 25 miles downriver from Harlingen, the Border Patrol chief, Ernesto Castillo, said the 202 agents in his busy station are insufficient to do the job. The agents from Brownsville are averaging about 60 arrests a day, Castillo said, including three whom he watched being detained recently on a patrol of the levee along the Rio Grande.

Two of the immigrants, a married Mexican couple who spoke no English, clutched each other as agents tended to a deep, bloody wound that the 24-year-old woman had suffered by falling in a drainage ditch. The two were returned to Mexico later that day.

Nationwide, the failure-to-appear rate for fiscal 2005 stood at 36 percent on June 30, or 68,634 of the undocumented immigrants who had been arrested.

In fiscal 2004, the 54,261 suspects who did not appear in court included 530 from Pakistan, 206 from Iran, 164 from Jordan, 93 from Iraq, 80 from Yemen, and 29 from Afghanistan, according to Justice Department figures.

Boyd said that undocumented aliens from a ''special-interest" country, a term the government uses to describe a potential base for terrorists, undergo careful screening and are not released until investigators are confident they do not pose a security threat. ''Because someone comes from Pakistan, that doesn't necessarily mean anything," Boyd said. ''It could be a family with children."

However, the numbers of illegal immigrants from such countries are raising questions about the adequacy and consistency of US border protection. ''I think there's a lack of urgency about this in the White House and Congress," said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, a nonpartisan think tank based in Washington. ''This has the potential to be a really big deal, and there's going to be political hell to pay."

Culberson, the Houston Republican, went further. ''Any day now, we will confront massive truck-bomb explosions in our major cities and catastrophic loss of life inflicted by Middle Eastern terrorists who will laugh at us that they had simply walked across our border and we let them do it," he said.
Pop-up GLOBE GRAPHIC: Failure to appear

Under Culberson's plan, which has 50 cosponsors in the House, volunteers from anywhere in the country could join a state's Border Protection Corps and ''use any means and any force authorized by state law to prevent" illegal immigration. Corps members would be subject to background checks for criminal history and mental illness, he said.

Wilkes, of United Latin American Citizens, bitterly criticized the proposal. ''If you give these people any means necessary to make arrests, when the crime the immigrants is committing is a misdemeanor, it's outrageous; it's sick," Wilkes said.

Border Patrol officials, meanwhile, pointed to a recently implemented program, called ''expedited removal," as a success story. Begun in 2004 in Tucson and in Laredo, Texas, the program was expanded in July to target a huge increase in undocumented Brazilians crossing the lower Rio Grande Valley. As a result, Cervantes said, the flow of Brazilians, who had become the largest non-Mexican group entering the area, has been dramatically curbed.

To qualify for ''expedited removal," an undocumented immigrant must not have a criminal past, must not be a juvenile, must not be an asylum seeker, and must have been arrested within 100 miles of the border and 14 days since crossing the boundary, according to Salvador Zamora of US Customs and Border Protection, an arm of the Homeland Security Department.

Since July, 757 Brazilians have been flown back to their country at US expense, the Border Patrol said. Zamora added that the hope is eventually to extend ''expedited removal" along the entire southwestern border.

Meanwhile, the ebb and flow of the immigration battle is evident at the Border Patrol station here, where most of the undocumented, non-Mexican aliens are released to the street after being questioned and given a court notice.

Once outside the station's chain-link fence, many of the immigrants board a shuttle sent from the Harlingen bus station, where they depart for destinations throughout the country, Cervantes said.

''They've been constantly here," said Jose Degollado, who works at the bus depot.

In Brownsville, Castillo shook his head when asked if he had become frustrated by the no-show rate at court. ''Our job," he said, ''is to apply the law."
© Copyright 2005 Globe Newspaper Company (http://members.boston.com/reg/login.do).

FORD
08-21-2005, 04:08 PM
Nice going, Chimp!

While you have our entire military defending oil fields and the sickening ambitions of fascist Zionism, our own borders sit there with more holes than a 5 pound block of swiss cheese.

Not to mention employees like AssProwler who obviously aren't watching the cameras.

NightProwler
08-21-2005, 04:13 PM
nickie and ford...two ignorant cowards who have no idea what my job entails.

When are you girls going to tell me what it is that you do for a living?

Golden AWe
08-21-2005, 04:17 PM
I know your job includes a lot of surfing in the internet, trolling the Roth Army.

NightProwler
08-21-2005, 04:20 PM
golden awwwwwwww

Why don't you tell me what my job consists of?

you don't even know, why make an ass of yourself and pretend that you do?

Nickdfresh
08-21-2005, 05:11 PM
Originally posted by NightProwler
nickie and ford...two ignorant cowards who have no idea what my job entails.

When are you girls going to tell me what it is that you do for a living?

Not very much apparently...

How's that Borderpatrol tournament of Solitare going?

Unchainme
08-21-2005, 05:12 PM
Originally posted by Nickdfresh
Not very much apparently...

How's that game of Solitare going?

LMAO.

Nickdfresh
08-21-2005, 05:14 PM
Originally posted by NightProwler
golden awwwwwwww

Why don't you tell me what my job consists of?

you don't even know, why make an ass of yourself and pretend that you do?

http://i6.photobucket.com/albums/y240/Nickdfresh/ButtProwler2.jpg

Golden AWe
08-21-2005, 05:19 PM
Originally posted by Golden AWe
I know your job includes a lot of surfing in the internet, trolling the Roth Army.


Originally posted by NightProwler
golden awwwwwwww

Why don't you tell me what my job consists of?

you don't even know, why make an ass of yourself and pretend that you do?

I just told you!

Stop projecting, baby!

Nickdfresh
08-21-2005, 05:48 PM
Originally posted by NightProwler
golden awwwwwwww

Why don't you tell me what my blowjobs consist of? I take time and effort sucking mens' balls!

you don't even know, why suck a guy's ass out unless you're hungry for cock and sphincter like I am!


NighProwler, on the "prowl" for COCK baby!!

http://i6.photobucket.com/albums/y240/Nickdfresh/ButtProwler2.jpg

FORD
08-21-2005, 05:51 PM
Ass Prowler....trolling the Yuma WalMart for the COCK!!

academic punk
08-21-2005, 05:55 PM
Hey, NP< while you're hear bitching to ...well, everyone, wouldn't your time be more productively spentr DOING YOUR JOB AND HELPING THIS COUNTRY???

NightProwler
08-22-2005, 01:58 AM
Here's a clue for you punk...I don't work 24 hours a day.

Do you even HAVE a job?

Golden AWe
08-22-2005, 02:04 AM
so i was right about your job, NP...

uhuhuhuhuhuhuhuhu

Big Train
08-22-2005, 03:11 AM
Prowler,

Let me ask a serious question to you. Do you think you guys can seriously handle the job at hand? If not, what do you think you need to get it done?

LoungeMachine
08-22-2005, 03:31 AM
Originally posted by NightProwler
Here's a clue for you punk...I don't work 24 hours a day.

Do you even HAVE a job?


http://www.rotharmy.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&postid=152075#post152075


350 Third Ave, in Yuma?

;)

NightProwler
08-22-2005, 08:14 AM
350 Third Ave, in Yuma

loungeboy, learn to read.

Did I say that was my HOME address? No, I did not.

Why are you looking up my old posts?

NightProwler
08-22-2005, 08:15 AM
Originally posted by Golden AWe
so i was right about your job, NP...

uhuhuhuhuhuhuhuhu

About as "right" as you were with your ignorant assumption that I don't know how to use the "quote" feature!

LMAO

you're a masochist, aren't you?

NightProwler
08-22-2005, 08:18 AM
Originally posted by Big Train
Prowler,

Let me ask a serious question to you. Do you think you guys can seriously handle the job at hand? If not, what do you think you need to get it done?

We could handle the job at hand, but the government would have to seriously want to stop the illegal aliens (they don't)

To start with they could enforce the laws (people without legal social security numbers wouldn't be allowed to work, illegal aliens cannot get legal social security numbers). Second, they'd give jail time to anyone caught employing an illegal alien.

Nickdfresh
08-22-2005, 08:21 AM
Originally posted by NightProwler
We could handle the job at hand, but the government would have to seriously want to stop the illegal aliens (they don't)

To start with they could enforce the laws (people without legal social security numbers wouldn't be allowed to work, illegal aliens cannot get legal social security numbers). Second, they'd give jail time to anyone caught employing an illegal alien.

Why doesn't the lazy borderpatrol get off their ass and do their job creme-filling slurper?

Golden AWe
08-22-2005, 09:58 AM
Originally posted by NightProwler
We could handle the job at hand, but the government would have to seriously want to stop the illegal aliens (they don't)

To start with they could enforce the laws (people without legal social security numbers wouldn't be allowed to work, illegal aliens cannot get legal social security numbers). Second, they'd give jail time to anyone caught employing an illegal alien.

If you would reply like this all the time, there might actually be some conversation in these threads.

NightProwler
08-22-2005, 11:14 AM
How difficult is it to immigrate to finland?

Does your country have a problem with illegal aliens?

Golden AWe
08-22-2005, 11:25 AM
We have very tight laws on immigrant politics. The rate of receiving approvals is the lowest in Scandinavia, and the percentage of accepted ones is even lower. It's not easy to become a citizen of Funland.

NightProwler
08-22-2005, 11:33 AM
The majority of people in the USA are clueless about what's going on here (I was too until I started working for INS). Back in 1986, ten million illegal aliens were given amnesty (and resident alien cards). Getting a "green card" is the first step towards becoming a citizen. (A person can naturalize and become a US citizen after they have had their card for seven years). What we encounter now are naturalized US citizens who ONLY became citizens so that when they get caught smuggling drugs/aliens they can't get deported after they do their jail time. (US citizens cannot be "deported")

NightProwler
08-22-2005, 12:07 PM
Ever consider moving out of "Funland" and living in another country?

Golden AWe
08-22-2005, 01:06 PM
I have lived a total of two and a half years in Denmark, during two occasions. At the moment I'm considering about moving to England or Spain next.

NightProwler
08-22-2005, 01:08 PM
I considered moving to the Virgin Islands a few years back, but I got this job instead.

See? We CAN both get along!

;+)

Golden AWe
08-22-2005, 01:14 PM
How sweet.

NightProwler
08-22-2005, 05:00 PM
Have you ever considered moving to the USA?

Golden AWe
08-22-2005, 05:19 PM
No.

NightProwler
08-22-2005, 05:20 PM
Why not?

Golden AWe
08-22-2005, 05:22 PM
Your cuntry is not that interesting. I prefer several european cuntries.

NightProwler
08-22-2005, 05:24 PM
"cuntry"?

Obviously finland isn't much on humor.

Golden AWe
08-22-2005, 05:26 PM
You seem to know a lot about Funland, humour and european cultures in general.

NightProwler
08-22-2005, 05:31 PM
When I joined the USAF I wanted to be stationed in europe. Unfortunately it didn't happen.

Golden AWe
08-22-2005, 05:35 PM
...and that is what turned you so sour about everybody else, like on this bored?

NightProwler
08-22-2005, 05:38 PM
"sour"?

LMAO

Obviously you don't know me very well.

Golden AWe
08-22-2005, 05:41 PM
Ok so tell me more about you then. How do you use the information about other posters jobs?

NightProwler
08-22-2005, 05:52 PM
I could use it to bring up different, yet similiar, topics of conversation.

"sour"?

LMAO

I respond to you people in the same manner that you direct posts at me and I'm "sour".

That's a hoot!

NightProwler
08-22-2005, 05:54 PM
Please explain your need to insult me so often?

Golden AWe
08-22-2005, 05:54 PM
So what if someone tells you he's unemployed?

NightProwler
08-22-2005, 06:16 PM
LMAO

It is quite entertaining how often you dodge answering questions.

There's a difference between "unemployed" and "independently wealthy".

Golden AWe
08-22-2005, 06:24 PM
So what if someone would say he's unemployed?