Thread: Mexico concerned about U.S. bid to beef up border security

Mexico concerned about U.S. bid to beef up border security

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U.S. Border Patrol surveys the border fence near rancher John Ladd's property adjacent to the Arizona-Mexico border near Naco, Arizona, March 29, 2013.
Credit: Reuters/Samantha Sais

Tue Jun 25, 2013 3:53pm EDT

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - The Mexican government on Tuesday voiced concern about U.S. congressional proposals to beef up security along the U.S.-Mexico border, saying it was divisive and would not solve the problem of illegal immigration.
Immigration plays a significant part in the countries' bilateral relations. Millions of Mexicans live and work on the U.S. side of the border and tens try to enter the United States annually, often at peril to their lives.
"Our country has let the United States government know that measures which affect links between communities depart from the principles of shared responsibility and good neighborliness," Foreign Minister Jose Antonio Meade said in a televised statement.
"We're convinced that fences do not unite, fences are not the solution to the migration phenomenon and are not in line with a modern, safe border."
On Monday, a border security amendment seen as crucial to the fate of an immigration bill backed by President Barack Obama cleared a key procedural hurdle in the U.S. Senate, helping pave the way for the biggest changes to U.S. immigration law since 1986.
The amendment would double the number of agents on the southern border to about 40,000 over the next 10 years and provide more high-tech surveillance equipment to stop illegal crossings at the U.S.-Mexico border. The amendment also calls for finishing construction of 700 miles of border fence.
The bill would also grant legal status to millions of undocumented foreigners, who would be put on a 13-year path to citizenship.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/06/25/us-usa-immigration-mexico-idUSBRE95O1C420130625

June 26, 2013
Judicial Watch

The U.S. proposal to secure the southern border has caused outrage in Mexico, with one renowned Mexican academic claiming in Spanish-language media that deploying more federal agents to the region is tantamount to an increase in “human rights violations.”

Under the immigration reform bill floating around in the U.S. Senate the number of Border Patrol agents will double along the southern border and the amount of drones guarding from above will triple. The measure will also provide funding to complete 700 miles of fencing in the area and around-the-clock surveillance flights by drones.

This has ignited fury in Mexico where officials flooded Spanish-language media to express outrage this week and now some of it is getting picked up by news outlets north of the border. Mexico’s former foreign minister, Jorge Castañeda, says doubling the number of agents along the border is an “unfriendly act” and a “very negative reform for Mexico and the United States.”

Some have taken it further, asserting in a mainstream American newspaper story that the surge plan is an affront to Mexico that should be forcefully opposed by President Enrique Peña Nieto. One Mexican congressman (Fernando Belaunzaran) said “we are ‘friends and neighbors,’ as is repeated ad nauseam, but the U.S. is about to militarize the border with Mexico as if we were at war.”

A respected Mexican columnist and academic, Lorenzo Meyer, took to the airwaves suggesting that Mexico retaliate by booting U.S. intelligence and defense officials in the country collaborating in the never-ending battle against drug cartels. The same highly regarded Mexican figurehead also suggested Mexico could strike back by rejecting more American retirees. The head of a Mexico-based organization called Aztlan Binational Migrants Movement, said an increase in Border Patrol agents will put lives at risk because migrants will be forced to find more dangerous and remote crossings.

The fact remains, however, that the southern border has long been dangerously porous and it’s not just humble migrants seeking work and a better life that exploit this national security weakness. A number of reports have surfaced over the years documenting how serious criminal elements, including drug cartels and Middle Eastern terrorists, regularly use the Southwest border to enter the United States.

A few years ago an investigative committee of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) disclosed that the Mexican border region is infested with violent crimes carried out by organized syndicates that smuggle drugs, humans, weapons and money across the U.S.-Mexico border on a daily basis. Even more alarming, the assessment revealed that a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement investigation found that members of Hezbollah and other deadly Middle Eastern terrorist groups have entered the U.S. through the Mexican border.

As if this weren’t reason enough to secure the border, other probes have revealed similar problems. In 2007 Texas’s top Homeland Security official, Steve McCraw, confirmed that terrorists with ties to Hezbollah, Hamas and al-Qaida had been arrested crossing into the state through Mexico. That news came on the heels of a Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) report that laid out how Islamic terrorists and violent Mexican drug gangs have teamed up to successfully penetrate the U.S. as well as finance terror networks in the Middle East.

The problem has only worsened over the years, according to the government’s own assessments. In 2010 DHS warned Texas law enforcement agencies that a renowned Al Qaeda terrorist was planning to sneak into the U.S. through Mexico. In the alert DHS warn Houston authorities to be on the lookout for a member of a Somalia-based Al Qaeda group called Al Shabab who was planning to cross the Mexican border.

That same year a veteran federal agent accused the government of covering up the growing threat created by Middle Eastern terrorists entering the country through the porous Mexican border. The agent, who spent 30 years in the federal immigration system, revealed that the U.S. Border Patrol had captured thousands of people classified as OTM (Other Than Mexican) along the 2,000-mile southern border and many were from terrorist nations like Yemen, Iran, Sudan, Somalia and Afghanistan. The feds call them SIAs (Special Interest Aliens) and the government doesn’t want Americans to know about them. .

http://www.judicialwatch.org/blog/20...-human-rights/

Caracas,
Wednesday
June 26,2013
Latin American Herald Tribune

MEXICO CITY – “Walls won’t stop migration,” the Mexican government said Tuesday with reference to a Republican amendment to comprehensive immigration reform that calls for stronger border security.

“We’re convinced that walls do not unite, they won’t stop migration, and they’re not consistent with a modern, secure border,” Mexican Foreign Secretary Jose Antonio Meade told reporters.

The U.S. Senate passed on Tuesday “a plan to strengthen” security on the border with Mexico proposed by Republicans John Hoeven and Bob Corker.

The plan contemplates doubling to 40,000 the number of border agents, building walls and barriers along 1,126 kilometers (700 miles) of border, and surveillance by drones and other high-tech tools.

At the height of the immigration reform debate by U.S. senators, Meade recalled that the priority for Mexico is “to achieve a more modern, stable and humane migration system” that would benefit the millions of Mexicans living north of the border, many of whom are undocumented.

He said it is “indispensable to promote the modernization of border crossing points” and at the same time “improve their infrastructure and administration” in an area of voluminous bilateral trade and where “more than a million people cross every day.”

He also recalled that during U.S. President Barack Obama’s visit in early May, both governments agreed to work to make their shared border “a prosperous, secure, sustainable region and a promoter of development.” EFE

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