Thread: Feds, state officials join to tackle gangs, border crime

http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepubli ... egang.html

Feds, state officials join to tackle gangs, border crime

Daniel González
The Arizona Republic
Nov. 3, 2006 12:00 AM

Gov. Janet Napolitano on Thursday praised a decision by federal immigration officials to join a state effort to combat gang-related criminal activity in Arizona.

"We are finally getting the cooperation from the feds that I have been advocating for the past 18 months," Napolitano said.

Under the agreement, agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement will work with a multi-agency task force that focuses on gang activity and border-related crime, including human smuggling and drug trafficking. The task force includes officers from the state Department of Public Safety and local police and sheriff's departments.
State police also have joined a border task force led by ICE aimed at combating cross-border criminal activity.

The increased cooperation comes two weeks after Alonzo Peña took over as the new special agent in charge of investigations for the ICE office in Phoenix.

Napolitano had complained to Homeland Security officials in Washington, D.C., that the previous ICE boss, Roberto Medina, was unwilling to cooperate with state and local law enforcement officials in combating crime related to human smuggling, a major problem in Arizona.

Peña said that targeting foreign-born gang members who commit crimes in the United States is one of the agency's main priorities.

"If they are criminals, we want to use our authority to remove them from the country in addition to prosecuting them for the crimes they have committed," he said.

But she opposes the building of a border fence. Go figure. I guess she thinks that capturing the illegal criminals and deporting them back to Mexico will guarantee they never come back to do it all over again.


Napolitano bludgeons border-fence proposal
Governor: 'Show me a 50-foot wall and I'll show you a 51-foot ladder'

Despite recent momentum in Washington for the construction of a physical barrier on the Mexican border to prevent illegal aliens from coming into the U.S., some of the strongest opposition is being voiced by the governor of one of the border states.

Gov. Janet Napolitano, D-Ariz., is smashing the idea of a border wall, stating it would be too expensive, take too long to construct, and be ineffective once completed.

"You show me a 50-foot wall and I'll show you a 51-foot ladder at the border. That's the way the border works," Napolitano told the Associated Press. Cont.