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Laredo residents gather for Bush visit

LAREDO, Texas -- Rosalia Padilla wasn't about to miss President Bush's visit to Laredo on Tuesday.


She joined a handful of locals, many carrying American flags and standing beneath umbrellas to ward off the searing sun as the president came to the border city to talk about immigration issues.

"It's always an honor to see the president," Padilla, 64, said although the onlookers who gathered at the Laredo International Airport parking lot didn't get a chance to see Bush before he was whisked away to tour the sprawling Border Patrol headquarters in Laredo.

Padilla was here for President Nixon's visit some 30 years ago, she said, and she still had the same flag and Spanish-language welcome banner she unfurled then.

Things have changed from what was then a sleepy border city stretching a few dozen blocks from the Rio Grande, the border with Mexico.

Laredo is a city on the front line of illegal immigration, with immigrants trying to hide on trains that run north from the edge of the river or in the backs of trucks heading to points across America. Border Patrol vans and helicopters are everywhere.

In recent years there has been the threat of deadly drug war violence across the narrow river in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico.

Bush stepped off Air Force One to greet a small group including Gov. Rick Perry and Mayor Betty Flores before they visited the Border Patrol headquarters. Before that, Bush stopped at the Border Patrol training facility in New Mexico. He has promised to double the Border Patrol and he told those at the facility that they'd be busy.

At the Border Patrol headquarters, the main base of operations for 116 Texas counties, he repeated a call for an immigration plan that would address the issue of immigrants who had been here a long while and for a guest worker program allowing legal work permits for foreigners.

It's a debate that divides America, and despite being nearly 90 percent Mexican-American, it divides Laredo too.

Padilla, the youngest of nine children of immigrants who came from Mexico at the dawn of the 20th Century, sees illegal immigration as wrong.

"They're breaking the law," she said. "I wouldn't go down to Monterrey, Mexico, without a permit. I wouldn't do it."

Flores has long been outspoken about the toll illegal immigration and border violence has taken on border communities like hers.

Tuesday, she said she was encouraged by Bush's guest-worker idea and his promise to beef up the Border Patrol.

"The reality is that you have to do what you have to do," she said. "We'd asked him to bring up a more continuous force, someone who's going to be there permanently and not constantly be moving around."

Jose Joel Elizondo, an 81-year-old World War II veteran, and his wife, Gracie Garcia, 77, said they weren't sure how immigration problems could be solved, but they had seen former presidents Roosevelt, Eisenhower and Nixon in Laredo and didn't want to miss Bush.

"It's going to have to be very difficult to come to a solution, but God bless America and the president," she said, adding "at least we got to see the plane."