Bored patrol?

I was kind of taken aback that some saw yesterday’s post on the murder of a Border Patrol agent Robert Rosas was taken as an attack on the Border Patrol (or its agents).  I noted some contradictions in Mexican news reports, and that this was an unusual event — the last time Border Patrol agents where shot at the border was over a decade ago.

I also questioned — as I always do — whether the very quick arrest of suspects meant the crime was solved.  In Mexico, it’s all too common for high profile crimes to lead to immediate arrests… of people who turn out not to have anything to do with the crime in question.  And, for U.S. writers, to assume all border incidents are caused by drug smugglers (which leads to the question of whether they’re not caused by drug users, but that’s another story).  As it is, the “usual suspects” rounded up in this case are “people smugglers.

What I noticed when I was writing my post was how many agents who died on duty were killed working on their own — it’s dangerous to be out in the desert at night and falling off cliffs is a very real hazard.  And from my time in rural west Texas, I’m well aware of the problem the Border Patrol has in being expected to function as a local constabulary on top of  enforcing national policies that aren’t always realistic.

Among those national policies is the quasi-militarization of the borders, which requires a paramilitary police force in the first place.  And — absent a well-defined military objective, that leads to a completely different set of problems.

From the Wayne County (New York) Star, comes this bizarre story of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents with wayyyy too much time n their hands… and wayyyy too little common sense.

RED CREEK – The U.S. Attorney’s Office and the Department of Homeland Security, at the request of Wayne County District Attorney Richard Healy, are investigating posts on the Wayne County Star’s website that purport to have been made from U.S. Border Patrol/Homeland Security computers.  There were three posts showing different Border Patrol/Homeland Security Internet Protocol addresses in response to a story on the Star’s website about a June 12 Border Patrol detention of Mexican nationals on Lake Ontario.

One post pretended to be from a woman with a Mexican boyfriend; the other two posts insinuated the boat had come from Cuba, berated farmers, accused them of breaking the law and praised the Border Patrol for doing a good job.

The posts, which were made anonymously on June 20 and 21, identified themselves on the public part of the website with fake Internet addresses: Imaapplehog2@yahoo.com, poorbabies@hotmail.com and hahaha@hotmail.com. The Star discovered they all had Internet protocol addresses that showed as originating from cbp.dhs.gov. Dhs.gov is the homepage of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

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