All posts tagged Texas

Mexico Threatens U.S. For Absolving BP In Illegal Alien Shooting

by Admin on May 2, 2012 in Border Patrol, Brian Terry, Crime and Border Security, Homeland Security, Justice Department - Eric Holder, Tyrrany with No comments

Via: Judicial Watch

Mexico has issued the U.S. government what amounts to a diplomatic threat for exonerating a Border Patrol agent who shot an illegal immigrant near the Texas border nearly two years ago after being assaulted with rocks.

The shooting occurred in the summer of 2010 when the federal agent, Jesus Mesa, spotted a group of Mexicans crossing the Rio Grande near El Paso. U.S. authorities say Mesa fatally shot a teen (Sergio Hernández-Guereca) traveling with the group in self-defense after the teen and his friends threw rocks at the agent.

Last year a Texas judge dismissed a wrongful death lawsuit against the U.S. government but allowed a lawsuit against the agent to proceed. The Obama Department of Justice (DOJ) has spent the last two years conducting a “comprehensive and thorough investigation into the shooting” in an effort to file federal criminal charges against the Border Patrol agent.

But a few days ago the DOJ conceded that there is “insufficient evidence” to pursue federal criminal charges against Mesa. “The U.S. government regrets the loss of life in this matter, and the Civil Rights Division, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Texas, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security devoted significant time and resources into conducting a thorough and complete investigation,” the DOJ says in a statement.

The lengthy probe was conducted by an army of federal officers from the FBI, Homeland Security Inspector General and top prosecutors from the DOJ’s bloated Civil Rights Division. They interviewed dozens of law enforcement and civilian witnesses and collected, analyzed and reviewed evidence from the scene of the shooting. This included civilian and surveillance video, police radio traffic, emergency recordings and volumes of Border Patrol agent training and use of force material.

Agent Mesa’s training, disciplinary records and personal history were also scrutinized. The team of experienced DOJ prosecutors examined the shooting as a possible violation of U.S. criminal and civil rights laws, but the incident did not meet the standard. Evidence indicated that the “agent’s actions constituted a reasonable use of force or would constitute an act of self-defense in response to the threat created by a group of smugglers hurling rocks at the agent…” the feds concluded.

They further determined that no federal civil rights charges could be pursued in this matter since applicable statutes require prosecutors to establish beyond a reasonable doubt that a law enforcement officer willfully deprived an individual of a constitutional right. That means with the deliberate and specific intent to do something the law forbids. Again, after a thorough review, the experienced federal prosecutors and FBI agents concluded that the evidence was insufficient.

The decision has been met with anger among Mexican government officials who have threatened to launch an international investigation. The Spanish-language news media presented the story as the exoneration of the American agent who assassinated a Mexican youth. In a diplomatic note from its secretary of foreign relations, Mexico’s government chastised the DOJ’s decision not to criminally charge the Border Patrol agent.

Mexico has also threatened to conduct its own investigation into the DOJ’s handling of the case and has warned the U.S. to assure that Mexicans’ fundamental rights are being respected. The teen’s family, which lives in Mexico, has sued Agent Mesa despite the DOJ’s decision not to criminally charge him.

Read more about Border Patrol, DOJ, illegal immigration

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Ron Paul supporters plunge Denver GOP meeting ‘into madness’ [VIDEO]

by Admin on March 12, 2012 in GOP, Ron Paul, Tyrrany with 1 Comment

Republican presidential candidate, Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas speaks during a rally, Friday, March 9, 2012, in Topeka, Kan. (AP Photo/Charlie Riedel)

In Colorado on Saturday morning, video correspondent Kelly Maher videotaped a meeting of the Denver County Republican Assembly. When a group of Ron Paul-pledged delegates arrived, she told The Daily Caller, things got crazy — and Coloradans may have caught a sneak peek of Republican events to come later this year.

Maher told TheDC on Thursday that trouble was likely, and that she would be rolling video.

“The Ron Paul chair here went around the GOP chair and committed $900 worth of security from the Denver Police,” she warned. “And now they’re sending out strategy emails on how to ‘shanghai’ the assembly.”

And shanghai they did. The meeting, Maher said afterward, “descended into madness” when Paul’s supporters “started screaming from the floor.”

Maher told The Denver Post after the meeting that “the Ron Paul people showed up with an alternate set of rules and calendar for the day.”

“[One woman] was standing at the mic and kept demanding to be recognized. She kept calling ‘point of order,’ and that was the first yelling. Once the rules were adopted, the Ron Paul people demanded they be read aloud.”

“So [chairman] Danny [Stroud] called up [secretary] Brett [Moore] to read them, which made everyone flip out again because he did it in his ‘fast reader’ voice (he used to be the reader for the state House.)”

Watch:

“If what we saw at the Denver County assembly is a harbinger of what we’re going to see at state and national levels,” Maher concluded, “definitely keep one eye on the news.”

UPDATE: Denver County GOP chairman Danny Stroud sent TheDC a statement about Saturday’s meeting, saying among other things that “we can never let passion trounce on the rights of others. Unfortunately, that was exactly what was attempted at the Denver GOP Assembly.  A small, loud group attempted to hijack the assembly and trample on the rights of those who took time out of their busy lives to participate in the political process.”

Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2012/03/11/ron-paul-supporters-plunge-denver-gop-meeting-into-madness-video/#ixzz1os3Qp48a

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Thirteen suspected criminal gangs members were killed in Nuevo Lared

by Admin on March 3, 2012 in Mexican Cartel War, Sinaloa cartel, Zetas with 1 Comment

Thursday afternoon heavy gunfire was reported in the city Laredo (Texas, United States), , no casualties reported bygovernment forces

Thirteen suspected criminal gangs members were killed in Nuevo Laredo

Thirteen suspected criminal gangs members were killed in Nuevo Laredo

 

NUEVO LAREDO, March 1. – Thirteen suspects were killed during a shootout with the Mexican Army and police in the border city of Nuevo Laredo, the military said.

This afternoon, heavy gunfire was reported in that city, on the border with Laredo (Texas, United States), on the southern bank of the Rio Grande and where several areas of the town were blocked.

The sources corresponding by telephone said, the military zoned off the area and that thirteen suspected criminal gangs members were killed in the fighting, and added that government forces had no casualties. They did not specify whether anyone was arrested during the operation.

The state of Tamaulipas, Nuevo Laredo has been one of the most affected by the violence generated by drug cartels in the country.

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The Deadliest Place In Mexico

by Admin on March 3, 2012 in Mexican Cartel War, Sinaloa cartel, Zetas with No comments

Who’s killing the people of the Juarez Valley?

The Deadliest Place In MexicoPhotos by Julian Cardona

TO REACH THE DEADLIEST PLACE IN MEXICO you take Carretera Federal 2, a well-paved stretch of highway that begins at the outskirts of Juarez, east for 50 miles along the Rio Grande, passing through cotton and alfalfa fields until you reach the rural Juarez Valley, said to have the highest murder rate in the country, if not the world.

The Juarez Valley is a narrow corridor of green farmland carved from the Chihuahuan desert along the Rio Grande. Farmers proudly say it was once known for its cotton, which rivaled Egypt’s. But that was before the booming growth of Juarez’s factories in the 1990s left farmers downstream with nothing but foul-smelling sludge to irrigate their fields. After that, the only industry that thrived was drug smuggling. Because of the valley’s sparse population and location along the Rio Grande’s dried up riverbed, a person can easily drive or walk into Texas loaded down with marijuana and cocaine.

For decades, this lucrative smuggling corridor, or “plaza,” was controlled by the Juarez cartel. In 2008, Mexico’s largest, most powerful syndicate—the Sinaloa cartel, run by Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman—declared war on the Juarez cartel and moved in to take over the territory. The federal government sent in the military to quell the violence. Instead the murder rate in the state of Chihuahua exploded. The bloodshed in the city of Juarez made international news. It was dubbed the “deadliest city in the world.” So much blood was being shed in Juarez that few outside the region noticed the violence spilling into the rural valley to the east, where killings and atrocities began to occur on a daily basis. Police officers, political leaders and community activists were shot down in the streets. By 2009, the valley, with a population of 20,000, had a shocking murder rate of 1,600 per 100,000 inhabitants—six times higher than its neighboring “deadliest city in the world”—according to government estimates. In one particularly gruesome stretch in 2010, several valley residents were stabbed in the face with ice picks, and a local man aligned with the Juarez cartel was skewered with an iron bar, riddled with bullets, then roasted over an open fire. The Juarez newspapers began to call the rural farming region the “Valley of Death.”

Keep reading…

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US Border Patrol in Shoot-out With Mexican Drug Cartel Across the Rio Grande

by Admin on March 3, 2012 in Crime and Border Security, Mexican Cartel War with No comments

Roma sits on the banks of the Rio Grande and is adjacent to Miguel Aleman on the Mexican side

(Reuters) – U.S. Border Patrol agents and Mexican drug traffickers fought a gun battle across the Rio Grande river in south Texas, authorities said on Friday, the latest of a spate of cross-border shootings in recent months.

The Border Patrol said gunfire erupted on Wednesday after agents confronted a group of smugglers loading bundles of marijuana into two vehicles on the banks of the Rio Grande west of Roma, Texas, a town about 250 miles south of San Antonio.

The agents opened fire after smugglers fleeing in a vehicle attempted to run them over. Armed traffickers on the Mexican side of the river then shot at the agents, who returned fire into Mexico, the Border Patrol said in a statement.

“Our agents had a posed threat,” Rosalinda Huey, a spokeswoman with the Border Patrol’s Rio Grande sector told Reuters. “They’re trained to deal with that situation,” she added.

No agents were injured by the gunfire and it is unclear whether any smugglers in Mexico were struck by bullets, she said.

Agents subsequently recovered nearly two tons of marijuana, with a value of more than $3 million. No arrests were made and the incident remains under investigation.

Drug traffickers in Mexico’s northern Tamaulipas state frequently use rafts and ropes to haul marijuana over the Rio Grande to Texas, often under the protection of gunmen.

Huey said traffickers opening fire on agents was “just another tactic” as they sought to move drugs across the U.S. border, where additional agents, equipment and infrastructure have contributed to tightening security in recent years.

“Obviously, they’ve gotten more desperate,” she said. “They’re going to use more tactics to avoid apprehension or seizure of their narcotics.”

The stretch of the Rio Grande – which is known as the Rio Bravo in Mexico – has recorded one other shooting incident involving Border Patrol agents since October 2011, she said. No injuries were reported.

Concern runs high among U.S. politicians over so-called “spill over” violence from Mexico, where about 50,000 people have been killed in raging drug violence since President Felipe Calderon launched an army-backed offensive against the powerful drug cartels after taking office in late 2006.

In response to a pattern of violence on the border river, Texas earlier this week unveiled the second of six new ‘interceptor’ gunboats to patrol the waterway. They are similar to Navy swift boats that plied the rivers of Vietnam during the Vietnam War.

A tally of recent cross-border shooting incidents in Texas include an exchange of shots last year between U.S. law enforcement officials and suspected drug runners near the south Texas town of Abram, according to news reports. In a separate incident, a West Texas road crew in Hudspeth County, east of El Paso, also came under fire from Mexico.

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CNN Guest Says It’s Devilish to Use the Term ‘Illegal Immigrant’

by Admin on March 2, 2012 in Illegal Immigration, Immigration with No comments

A CEO of a company dealing with Latinos went on CNN Friday morning and lambasted what he saw as the devilish way of dealing with illegal immigrants – calling them “illegal.” The guest, Charles P. Garcia, had also written an op-ed for CNN.com titled “Imagine a Day Without a Mexican.”

“I think on our shoulder we have the proverbial angel, and we have the devil over here who’s dressed up as Wyatt Earp. And Wyatt Earp is the law man, and he uses the term illegal,” sounded Garcia, CEO of Garcia Trujillo.

While crusading against bigotry, Garcia then adopted a mocking “redneck” tone to impersonate the “Wyatt Earp” character he railed against. “They’re just a bunch of il-legal aliens, and they’re takin’ away our jobs, and they don’t pay taxes, and they’re free-loaders, and Martha, we should just build a thousand-foot wall,” he said imitating the “law man” side of the immigration debate.

Keep reading…

Read more: http://newsbusters.org/blogs/matt-hadro/2012/03/02/cnn-guest-says-its-devilish-use-term-illegal-immigrant#ixzz1o0el2JSZ

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Mexican drug cartel invasion in Texas

by Admin on February 22, 2012 in Crime and Border Security, Homeland Security, Mexican Cartel War, Obama Foreign Policy with 1 Comment

Agriculture commissioner details letter he sent to White House over growing danger of cartels

Agriculture Commissioner, Todd Staples, “America is under attack and it’s happening on Texas soil. Meanwhile our pleas for help are being met with denial and lame jokes”. See press conference video below: House, Homeland Security Subcommittee on Oversight, Investigations and Management.

Download (PDF, 1.81MB)

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CNN: Sheriff’s last stand

by Admin on February 20, 2012 in Crime and Border Security, Hezbollah, Illegal Immigration, Immigration, Mexican Cartel War with 1 Comment

CNN’s Thelma Gutierrez takes us to the Texas border where a sheriff is making a stand against the Mexican drug cartel.

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TX MISSIONARIES FOUND MURDERED IN MEXICO — DRUG VIOLENCE FEARED

by Admin on February 2, 2012 in Gulf Cartel, Mexican Cartel War, Sinaloa cartel, Zetas with 1 Comment

Missionaries John and Wanda Casias Murdered in Monterey, MexicoMEXICO CITY (AP) — A couple from Texas who moved to a remote and violence-plagued area of northern Mexico to run a Baptist church were found slain at their ransacked home, their children said.

John and Wanda Casias was originally from Amarillo, Texas, but relatives said they moved to an area outside the city of Monterrey in the late 1970s or early 1980s and made it their home

Valerie Alirez, the eldest child of John Casias, told The Associated Press from her home in Greeley, Colorado, that one of her brothers found her father and stepmother on Tuesday dead in their home in Santiago, Nuevo Leon.

John Casias was a Baptist preacher and the couple ran the First Fundamentalist Independent Baptist Church in Santiago, Alirez said.

Her brother, Shawn Casias, who lives in Monterrey, said he went to his parents’ home around 4 p.m. Tuesday to pick up a trailer. After he had hooked up the trailer outside he went into the home to say goodbye. He said he found Wanda Casias lying on the floor with an electrical cord around her neck and a gash from a blunt object on her head.

Missing from the house were a couple of computers, a plasma television and a safe that had been chiseled out of the wall.

The couple’s Chevrolet Suburban was also missing, and Casias said he initially thought his father had been kidnapped.

But about four or five hours later, he said, a forensic investigator informed him that his father’s body had been found in a storage room of a small building on the property. His father also had an electrical cord around his neck.

Fighting between the Zetas and Gulf drug cartels has brought a surge of violence and other crimes to Monterrey and the surrounding region since 2010. In poorer suburbs, entire blocks have been held up by gunmen and young people snatched off the streets.

Casias said a sister-in-law in Dallas had spoken to their mother around 11 a.m. Tuesday and everything was fine. So he believes there was about a five-hour window when the killings could have occurred before he showed up.

He said the killers did not take everything they could have, leaving two of the three TV sets. He said perhaps they were warned that he was coming, because anyone watching the winding road approaching the home could have alerted them.

“They’re scum. They’re not sophisticated,” he said.

Speaking from his parents’ home, Casias said the house was burglarized two years ago when the couple were on one of their periodic visits to the United States to talk at churches about their work in Mexico.

“We‘re convinced that it’s somebody he knew,” Casias said of the killers. He said authorities had some leads based on people seen around the home.

John Casias was 76. He had recently priced a knee replacement because he couldn’t walk more than 100 yards (100 meters) without having to sit down, Shawn Casias said. Wanda Casias was 67.

Casias said his parents held services and prayer meetings at a church about 3 miles (5 kilometers) from their home.

The couple maintained a website, http://www.casias.org , with details of their lives and their missionary work

“The only hope for the Mexican people today is Jesus in them, the HOPE of glory,” they wrote in one dispatch from last summer. “I confess that it’s getting easier to witness to the wealthy, at least they are listening. The wealthy are fleeing to Canada and the USA for protection. The only problem is that when they return to re-new their visas the cartel is waiting, and either kill them of (sic) kidnap them for thousands of dollars, in some cases millions. The cartel has NO mercy or value for life. They are ruthless murderers!”

It was the second slaying involving American missionaries in a year in the Mexican region bordering Texas.

In January 2011, a Texas couple who had been doing missionary work in Mexico for three decades were attacked at an illegal roadblock in one of the country’s most violent areas.

Nancy Davis, 59, was fatally shot in the head while her husband, Sam, sped away from suspected drug cartel gunmen who may have wanted to steal their pickup truck, authorities said.

The Davises were driving along the two-lane road that connects the city of San Fernando with the border city of Reynosa in the state of Tamaulipas, which borders Nuevo Leon.

—

Associated Press writer Katherine Corcoran reported this story in Mexico City and Christopher Sherman reported from McAllen, Texas.

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Well, well, well, the Texas Christmas Day massacre of 7 people, including the killer, was a MUSLIM honor killing, after all.

by Admin on December 28, 2011 in Creeping Sharia, Immigration, Islamization of America, Islamo-Fascism with 1 Comment

'Disobedient' Daughter Nona Yazdanpanah

BareNakedIslam

Truth be told, I quickly discounted my initial reaction that Muslims might be involved because the killer was reported to be in a Santa costume. Stupid me. The ‘Santa’ who massacred his family on Christmas morning was a Muslim who was enraged that his daughter was dating a non-Muslim.

As usual, the media ignored the obvious honor-killing elements of this massacre. Aziz Yazdanpanah had lost control of his family. His wife had left him. His daughter was dating a non-Muslim. And he killed them all. Just as the Ft. Hood Jihadist Massacre was labeled “Workplace Violence,” the Obama-subservient  media are trying to pass off this mass honor killing  as “Holiday Blues.” 

Cousin Sahra Zarei

“Neighbors horrified at news of family’s slayings in Grapevine,” by Gloria Salinas and Scott Goldstein for the Dallas Morning News.(H/T Jihad Watch)

Citing public records and interviews with friends and neighbors, media reports identified Aziz Yazdanpanah and others who had died: his estranged 55-year-old wife, Fatemeh Rahmati, their 19-year-old daughter, Nona Narges Yazdanpanah, and 15-year-old son, Ali Yazdanpanah. Friends of the family said Fatemeh Rahmati’s 58-year-old sister, Zohreh Rahmaty, and her husband, Hossein Zarei, 59, and daughter Sahra Zarei, a 22-year-old pre-med student at the University of Texas at Arlington, also were killed.

Aziz Yazdanpanah seemed to be losing control of his life in recent months — his wife left him, his house was in foreclosure, and his 19-year-old daughter was dating a young man he didn’t like.

Yazdanpanah, a volunteer high school debate coach described as a doting father, is the focus of suspicion a day after a Christmas morning massacre in which a man dressed as Santa Claus killed six relatives and then committed suicide.

Aziz Yazdanpanah, Muslim father honor killer

Grapevine police arrived at the Lincoln Vineyard Apartment Homes a few minutes before noon and discovered bodies sprawled among opened presents and wrapping paper. The victims were ages 15 to 58. . . .

Yazdanpanah said he bought a gun after expressing concern that his daughter’s boyfriend was stalking him. He also insisted on picking up his daughter from her job at a phone kiosk inside Sam’s Club in Grapevine because of concerns about the alleged stalker. The boyfriend has not been publicly identified.

Wife: Nasrin Rahmaty, center

Neighbors said the family was Muslim but had always hung Christmas lights on their home — except this year. . . .

But a more ominous portrait emerged of Yazdanpanah in interviews with some of his daughter’s other classmates.

“She would come to school crying and telling us her dad was crazy,” said Lacie Reed, 18. “He wouldn’t let her wear certain things. He was always taking her phone away, checking her call history and checking her text messages.”

The Zarei family – Hossein Zarei, Zohreh Rahmaty and Sahra Zarei

Friends said Nona’s father had installed cameras all around the home so he could watch the family’s comings and goings. Others said he nailed her bedroom window shut so she could not sneak out at night and see her boyfriend.

Son: Ali Yazdanpanah, 15,

“She couldn’t date at all until she was a certain age, but when he was going to let her date she couldn’t date anyone outside of their race or religion,” Reed said. “He would take her phone away and her mother would give it back to her and her brother would let her use his phone,” Alvarenga said. “She was doing good. She was just excited that her life was going to start and she was going to have control of it.” . . .

H/T  

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