State News
Feds: Gun, cash seizures up at Mexican border
SAN DIEGO (AP) — U.S. authorities on Tuesday reported a spike in seizures of guns and cash along the Mexican border since they began assigning more agents to stem the flow of southbound contraband.
Nearly 600 illegal weapons were seized along the border by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials from March through September, an increase of more than 50 percent from the same period of 2008.
The agencies seized more than $40 million in cash along the border from mid-March through September, nearly double the amount in the year-ago period.
The seizures represent a tiny fraction of business done by Mexican and Colombian drug lords. According to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, those drug lords generate $18 billion to $39 billion in wholesale drug proceeds in the United States each year. Cash proceeds are smuggled across the border to Mexico.
But U.S. officials said the figures demonstrate that heightened enforcement is paying off.
“The increases in seizures is no coincidence,” said John Morton, Homeland Security Department’s assistant secretary for ICE. “It’s a direct result of increased resources, increased emphasis that we are placing on the southwest border.”
Senior officials from immigration, border patrol and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives are meeting in San Diego through Wednesday to discuss ways to combat the flow of guns and drug proceeds south of the border amid Mexican President Felipe Calderon’s nationwide crackdown on drug traffickers.
Mexico asked U.S. authorities to trace 12,073 firearms last year, up from only 2,906 in 2007 and 2,654 in 2006, according to the ATF. Of those successfully traced, the firearms bureau said about 90 percent came from the United States.
Kenneth Melson, acting director of the ATF, said lack of training in Mexico is the main obstacle to increasing weapons traces even more. Weapons tracing involves entering serial numbers and other information into a special computer system.
“I think (Mexico’s) intent is to try to give them all to us,” Melson said in an interview. “They’re just not in a position to be able to do that right now ... It’s a huge effort.”
A Spanish-language version of eTrace, the Web-based method of submitting tracing information, is expected to be available by the end of this year.
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Response before Texas shooting questioned again
COLDSPRING, Texas (AP) — Dispatch records and audio recordings appear to conflict with a southeast Texas sheriff captain’s claim that deputies were too busy to respond to a call from a home where four people were later found shot to death, according to the Houston Chronicle.
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Mexico violence factors in spring break plans
SOUTH PADRE ISLAND, Texas (AP) — Marquette University senior Kelly Magennis wasn’t even up prepping for the start of the biggest spring break week on Texas’ South Padre Island when the first text message arrived from her mom forbidding her from crossing into Mexico.
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Some think of deporting foreign-national inmates
AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — State officials again are considering pursuing deportation for foreign nationals serving time in Texas prisons for nonviolent crime, according to the Austin American-Statesman.The newspaper reported in its Sunday editions that the increase of the population of foreign nationals in Texas prisons and a looming state budget crisis next year is prompting another look at deportation. However, some have raised concerns that deported criminals might be allowed to go free in their home countries.That’s prompting some state officials to consider deportation of a percentage of the nonviolent offenders who are foreign nationals.State Sen. Eddie Lucio, a Brownsville Democrat, supports a plan to move many of nearly 11,400 foreign nationals out of Texas state prisons by turning them over to U.S. immigration officials.“It could mean a lot of jobs, economic development, because the federal government will have to find a place to put them before they deport them,” he said.Federal Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials declined to comment. However, the American-Statesman reported that other states, from Florida to California, are considering similar proposals.Oklahoma passed a law last year to have some nonviolent inmates deported who were in the United States illegally. State Rep. Randy Terrill, a Moore Republican who heads the Oklahoma House committee that oversees that state’s prison system, says the plan has worked so far.“It turned out to be a win for us,” he said. “We’re saving taxpayers the cost of incarcerating illegal aliens who never should have been in this country to start with.”However, some Texas state lawmakers worry that deported felons would merely slip back into the state.“It shouldn’t be a reward to get out of prison early in Texas just because you’re in the country illegally,” said state Rep. Jerry Madden, a Plano Republican and former chairman of the state House Corrections Committee. “If you deport them and they come back and commit another crime, nobody wins.”But Oklahoma Department of Corrections spokesman Jerry Massie one thing might deter inmates deported from his state from returning to the United States illegally.“If they get caught back in the United States, they come back to Oklahoma and serve their whole sentence,” he said. “From what we can tell, that has proven to be a big deterrent.”
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3 with ties to U.S. consulate killed in Juarez
CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico (AP) — Three people with ties to the American consulate were killed in a drug-plagued Mexican city, including a U.S. couple shot to death within sight of the border with their baby in their back seat, officials said Sunday.
- Photographer remembers once-in-a-lifetime shot
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Indiana man who murdered 2 to die in Texas
An Indiana man who embarked on a cross-country crime spree with his girlfriend a decade ago that ended in a gun battle with police in San Francisco faced execution Thursday for robbing and murdering a sheriff's officer in San Antonio.
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Texas ed board set to take 1st vote since primary
Texas' state education board, rocked by primary elections that may push the influential panel's far-right leanings toward the center, is set to take its first vote on a new social studies curriculum that could reverberate in classrooms nationwide.
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Condemned man who killed son loses appeal
DALLAS (AP) — A federal court on Tuesday rejected the appeal of a Houston man sent to death row for the shooting death of his 19-month-old son.
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Texas judge rescinds anti-death penalty ruling
HOUSTON (AP) — A Texas judge criticized for declaring the death penalty unconstitutional took back his controversial ruling Tuesday but scheduled a hearing for next month to hear evidence on the issue.
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2 SE Texas deputies shot; suspect dead
Authorities say they've found a suspect in the shootings of two southeast Texas sheriff's deputies dead.
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Response before Texas shooting questioned again
