Thread: How Stupid... Do You Think We Are...

How Stupid… Do You Think We Are…


07/14/2014News, Opinion, Politics

Are we suppose to believe, over 100,000 parents decided, to just give up their kids. They all decided to hand their kids over to traffickers, which cost money by the way. We know its costing a fortune to house and feed these kids. What we need to know “who is paying for these kids to get here” Who is paying the people, that are escorting these kids, across Mexico? If these kids are coming from poverty, their parents can’t afford to pay traffickers. Is the American tax payer, paying the cartel, to transport these kids? Let’s face it the cartel doesn’t work for free. Trey Gowdy you might want to request an audit of our money, to see who’s paying these people. As long as the IRS doesn’t have the records, you should be able to find them.

Let’s put ourselves in their shoes for a moment. You are not going to walk across Mexico overnight. You need food and water which cost money. When traveling you need a route to travel. Would any of you allow your kids to walk across a country by themselves. Especially with a human smuggler that you don’t even know? If you are poor, you can’t pay them, before they set off. These parents, had to be sure the money would be paid, on the back side. These people don’t hand these kids over until they are paid. How many times have we seen families being held in homes throughout this country. They don’t care about their well being. They only care about money. Are we suppose to believe these kids are handed over at the border, because they care about them.

Then we have people in Washington that insult our intelligence. We are told that this is a act of kindness. These kids are running from poverty, hunger, and disease. I have traveled this world and seen hunger. They don’t look that hungry to me. Well lawmakers don’t mistake our kindness as weakness. We care about these kids but we care about ours to. We have millions of our own children who are hungry. They suffer with hunger as you read your papers and eat. You expect us to believe you care about those kids, after you show how you care about ours. Tell the people how hard things are, after having your dinner, on a ten thousand dollar plate. Put the American people before yourselves. You take care of their kids, and they will take care of you. You allow harm, to come to one of these kids, and I wouldn’t want to be you. You say you care about these kids then “put your money where your mouth is” and prove it.

Seal our borders and send these kids back home to their parents. Your so called experts will tell you every kid should be with their parents. Family judges rule on what’s in the best interest of the child. The best interest of these children is they belong with their mom. The fact is “Bad people are using these kids for many different reasons” Even terrorist are using them to sneak across our border. These kids are being put in grave danger, while doing the same to ours. If we find out tax payer money is being used to fund this. Shame on you, but I look forward to the excuses. We have come to a critical crossroad in this world. One road is bright and full of hope for everyone. The other is dark, and it’s the one we are headed towards. Whether you believe in God or not, He believes in you. He has shown me what you are doing, and I pray you change your mind. The choice is ours to make, and I say we turn right. The wrong turn will still get us there, but take a whole lot longer. This is not about politics. This isn’t about you or me. It’s about all of mankind. God bless this Country, and God bless this World… Semper Fi, Shep

Author: MikeShepard
Born August 27, 1967. Raised in Selma Alabama, till the age of twelve. Grew up in Pasadena Texas from 1979 to 1986. October of 1986, I stood on the yellow footprints, to become a United States Marine. I served nine years from 1986 to 1995. My loyalty is to God, Country, family in that order. What I write is my opinion and not persuaded by anyone else. I believe complaining about the way things are get us nowhere! We need to start sharing thoughts and ideas for our future. Yesterday is in the books and I believe there is hope for our future. I don’t care what color of skin, the Church You attend, or your lifestyle choices. You are important to God, and We are All important to this Country…Semper Fi, Shep

http://dcgazette.com/how-stupid-do-you-think-we-are/

One has to wonder, being assigned to foster "sponsor's", how many of these children will become the "new domestic slaves?" Even Christian people will assign grunt work to these kids, especially those well enough off to buy their Susy a new car just because who turned 16.

"Pedro, Susy's car needs washed before 7!" "I just washed it at 6 this morning" Parent "I know, but she took it shopping for the prom tonight, it needs washing, but before you do that hand and steam the wrinkles from her new outfit. Start on the car early enough to give it a full detail job, too."

They don't walk across Mexico.
Most women and children ride the bus north to the U.S.
though some women and children ride on the outside of freight trains with the teen aged boys and men.

Migrants Ride a 'Train of Death' to Get to America & We're Ignoring the Root of the Problem

Posted: 07/08/2014 4:02 pm EDT Updated: 07/08/2014 4:59 pm EDT

The evening news in Mexico regularly features footage of a ramshackle freight train known as La Bestia (The Beast) making its way across the country bearing a cargo of illegal immigrants trying to reach the United States's southern border. One can see hundreds of men, women and children perched on the roof, crammed between the boxcars, clinging to the sides. The trains are loaded with cement, iron, quartz, wheat, corn, diesel, vegetable oil, fertilizer, or wood, but the human cattle along for the ride have no food, drink or guarantee of safety.

To reach the depot at Arriaga, in the state of Chiapas, across the border from Guatemala, from which La Bestia departs every two or three days, migrants walk for days, even skirting mountains to avoid immigration checkpoints and roadblocks. The U.S. border is two weeks from here on the back of the Beast. Along the way pregnant women, mothers with infants, teenagers and adults will sleep on the streets or, if lucky, in makeshift or more permanent church-run shelters. During the long journey, accidents often happen, and passengers tumbling off the roof have their limbs severed. An aid group in Honduras has counted more than 450 migrants who have returned mutilated. Derailments are common, with cars flying off the tracks, leading to injuries and death.

Murders, muggings, extortions, gang rapes of women and kidnappings (some 20,000 a year) are committed by the rapidly expanding Central American Mara Salvatrucha gangs or by Mexican drug traffickers such as the bloodthirsty Zetas. They often infiltrate the groups of travelling migrants on the trains or in shelters, selling them drugs, tricking girls into prostitution, luring boys into gangs or murdering perceived informers. And at each stop, the migrants are prey to local police, who demand bribes up to several hundred dollars a head in exchange for allowing them to continue on their way.

At crowded safe houses along the Beast's route, the migrants' smugglers may coach their charges in how to reply to questioning or fake a Mexican accent. Forged birth certificates and other documents are available at a price, either to migrants or to their traffickers.

Everyone knows the road to the American dream runs through the Mexican nightmare and that many passengers on "the train of death" will either perish during the journey, disappear by the wayside or be wounded, robbed or mutilated.

Who reaps the profits from La Bestia? Why do officials turn a blind eye while thousands of women are trafficked inside Mexico or abroad? What laws are broken to allow the transport of undocumented aliens across the country by tri-national smugglers acting as travel agents, risking lives and creating a humanitarian crisis? How much do the railroad engineers charge? Human despair has been turned into a commodity, a flourishing business for illicit enrichment.

The Bestia line once belonged to Genesee & Wyoming Inc., which bought the 1,119-mile Ferrocarriles Chiapas-Mayab freight concession in 1999 during the presidency of Ernesto Zedillo, when the government-owned Ferrocarriles Nacionales was privatized. After the havoc wrought on the track by Hurricane Stan in 2005, GWI sought to end its 30-year concession and suspend freight service. The government threatened sanctions and transferred service to the semi-public Ferrocarril del Istmo de Tehuantepec, and after years of legal wrangling, extended the latter's concession to fifty years. The concession clearly states that it is for carrying freight, not passengers, so the company is in constant violation of the law.

These days many migrants prefer to take a bus and risk detection at a checkpoint, where a payoff may allow them to continue. Others are crammed into airless trucks for the trip north. A former National Migration Institute agent reported that the going fee at each checkpoint for a truckload of migrants is around $20,000 dollars, divvied up "fairly" among the employees. Coyotes and polleros (literally "chicken herders") charge upwards of $5,000 dollars per migrant to shepherd him or her across the U.S. border.

For years refugees have started their journey north by crossing the Suchiate River, the border between Guatemala and Ciudad Hidalgo, in Chiapas. Lately the number of unaccompanied children who pay $1.50 to cross on an inner-tube raft has grown, as has the business that services them. Three ad hoc unions control the crossing, and the rafters, who are also money changers, are on call 7/24 for U.S.-bound migrants or mere shoppers, as well as for running drugs, guns and cash. A Catholic priest working with migrants estimates that 60 percent of the underage children come from Honduras, mostly driven out by extortion or running from gang recruitment. These thousands of migrant children, some barely able to understand Spanish due to their Indian heritage, have been an easy prey.

In Tapachula, half an hour's drive from the border, up to 1000 migrants are held at a time (or "lodged," in official parlance) at the Siglo XXI Migratory Station prior to being repatriated (read: "deported"). Mexico deports 250,000 foreigners a year to Central America. Meanwhile countless girls, young women and boys who have been sold into prostitution are working in Tapachula, which the founder of the Center for Investigation and National Security has compared to Sodom and Gomorrha. Elsewhere in Mexico, corpses of migrants have been found with their organs harvested.

Smugglers have been spreading false rumors about lenient U.S. policies to drum up business for themselves, convincing parents that after their children turn themselves into the Border Patrol, they will be allowed to remain in the country if they can furnish the name of a relative already in the U.S. More than 52,000 unaccompanied minors have been apprehended at the border since the start of the year, more than twice last year's total of 24,000.

Chronic illegal migration and trafficking of persons can only be tackled if the U.S., Mexico, Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala work together on combatting the underlying causes: a reign of terror and violence imposed by organized crime, relentless poverty in the migrants' home countries, lack of opportunities and employment, and weak law enforcement and corruption at the official level. Family businesses close as owners can no longer pay off the criminals who threaten them, and even street vendors have to hand over some of their earnings. Teenagers face a future of gangs, prostitution, and drugs. Perhaps the time has come for a Central American Marshall Plan. And what about UNICEF, and the UN Refugee Program?
The situation is very complex. What are the options? Deporting 52,000 children, at least two thirds from Central American countries embroiled in violence tantamount to civil war, to become victims of gangs or sex slaves, with slim chances of survival? They are war refugees and deserve treatment guaranteed by international agreements to which the U.S. is a signatory. Or allowing them to join family members already in the United States, legally or not, sending a message that this is the way to go? And turn the U.S. border into Lampedusa?

The Obama administration has not looked south of the border at failing states.

Human rights experts estimate that 10,000 undocumented immigrants are kidnapped every year during their passage through Mexico. Mexico is legally obliged to guarantee the safety of these migrants. Should Mexico close down the border crossing at the Suchiate River?

Hondurans, Salvadorans and Guatemalans escape from hell, journeying through the limbo of Mexico to be held in the purgatory of shelters at the U.S. border, always striving towards the paradise of rejoining family members in the promised land.

Is it morally acceptable -- or even legal -- to send thousands of children back to hell?

Mr. Obama, while you ride in the comfort and safety of The Beast (as the Secret Service calls the armored presidential limousine), give some thought to the hopeful passengers on the Bestia.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/homero...b_5568288.html

RELATED

THE TRAIN IS OWNED AND OPERATED BY A U.S. COMPANY.

http://www.alipac.us/f9/la-bestia-wi...grants-307275/

7/15/2014

. . . He's explaining his rates: $2,500 from Chetumal, Mexico, all the way to Matamoros — 1,200 miles. The actual river crossing is another $500 to $1,000, "depending on the size of the kid."

The Wolf says he used to smuggle adults, but now he specializes in children because it's easier and just as profitable. First, his organization can take a group of Central American children in a bus through Mexico and more easily evade Mexican authorities, who are looking for adult immigrants to deport.

Second, once he crosses the Rio Grande he doesn't have to continue with the group to San Antonio or Houston — the most perilous part of the journey. "Children just give themselves up [to the Border Patrol]," he explains. "Adults have to flee."

In low tones, he confides that he is not part of the Gulf Cartel or Los Zetas, which control all river access on the Mexican side of the lower Rio Grande Valley. Like all freelance smugglers, to use the river he has to pay the cartel un derecho de piso, a user's fee, of 10 percent of the contract.

Parallels

A Flood Of Kids, On Their Own, Hope To Hop A Train To A New Life

Federal border authorities demonize coyotes as ruthless criminals who kidnap, rape and abandon their clients. But it's more complicated than that. There are, to be sure, bad coyotes who do abuse their clients. But, as in any business, not everyone is the same.

Parallels

Deportation Threat Doesn't Diminish Young Migrants' U.S. Hopes

Five years ago, I interviewed a petite, 29-year-old female coyotewho worked out of Piedras Negras, Mexico, who was in high demand for her considerate treatment of her clients. This came to me from a local priest, who counted her among his congregation.

"Being known in the communities and having a good reputation matters," says David Spener, a sociologist at Trinity University in San Antonio, who has studied human smuggling networks along the U.S.-Mexico border. "I mean, would any parent in their right mind want to leave their child in the hands of Los Zetas?"

I ask El Lobo about the terrible reputation coyotes have in the media.

"We specialize in smuggling young kids — 13 and below," he explains.

"The youngest we've smuggled was 2 years old. We have to make sure nothing happens to them, that they eat, that they're protected and they arrive well."

He continues, "We try to treat our clients well, and this helps to get us repeat business. If you have a good reputation, you get more work."

http://www.npr.org/blogs/parallels/2...oss-the-border