Category Archives: Gangs and Crimes

When Do Murders by Illegals Become a Crisis?

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A murder a day? The numbers are tracking to be almost accurate as Barack Obama’s prisoner release policy of illegals is killing Americans.

Senator Grassley needs our help as his office is demanding answers. It is also most important to track this bill making its way through the congressional legislative path. The sponsors of this bill are also questionable including Congressman Duncan Hunter, (R-CA).

There are on average 44 murders a day in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Assuming murders by illegal immigrants were prorated as a percentage of the U.S. population, it is not unreasonable to assume one to two murders a day are committed by illegal immigrants.

121 murders attributed to illegals released by Obama administration

Washington Times:

More than 100 immigrants whom the Obama administration released back into the community went on to be charged with subsequent killings, according to government data released Monday that raises more questions about whether immigration authorities are doing enough to detail illegal immigrants awaiting deportation.

In one case, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement acknowledged that its agents didn’t find out about an illegal immigrant’s death threats and court injunctions against him — which should have put him back in detention — until after the man was accused of murder.

That case, involving Apolinar Altamirano, is the latest instance of someone who went through the Obama administration’s deportation system and was released, only to go on to be charged with major crimes.

 

ICE officials say they don’t regularly notify local authorities when they release an immigrant and don’t have a way of finding out from those authorities whether a former detainee gets into trouble with the law, so they didn’t know whether Mr. Altamirano’s $10,000 bond should have been revoked.

“ICE was not aware of the injunctions against Mr. Altamirano until after his January 22, 2015 arrest for first-degree murder, armed robbery and related offenses,” the agency said in a letter to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, Iowa Republican, and Sen. Jeff Flake, an Arizona Republican in whose state the killing occurred.

All told, 121 immigrants who were held but eventually released by ICE went on to commit “homicide-related offenses” from 2010 through 2014, the agency said.

It said 33 of those were ordered released by immigration courts and another 24 were released because of a 2001 Supreme Court decision capping the time an immigrant can be detained to six months. But a majority of the releases were at ICE’s discretion.

In a statement Monday, ICE said that a criminal record isn’t enough to qualify for mandatory detention under agency policies.

“When making custody determinations, ICE performs an individualized review of the individual’s immigration history and criminal history, pursuant to the Immigration and Naturalization Act (INA),” the agency said. “In accordance with the requirements of the INA, not all criminals are subject to mandatory detention and thus may be eligible for bond.”

Detention cannot be used as a further punishment for their crimes or for being in the country illegally, but rather must be used as a tool for further deportation.

Still, ICE stiffened its policies this year, insisting that a supervisor approve cases when the agency plans to release immigrants with serious criminal records.

Even those released are usually monitored in some fashion, though The Washington Times reported last week that most of those under electronic monitoring violated some conditions of their release. Few violations were deemed serious enough to have their release revoked.

Critics who have been pushing for stiffer immigration enforcement said the violence rate for released immigrants is probably much higher and the 121 charged are only those who have been caught.

“Illegal immigration is not a victimless crime,” said Maria Espinoza, co-founder of the Remembrance Project, which advocates for victims of crimes committed by immigrants. “This further supports what we have been fighting for. The safety and welfare of Americans must be the priority of the administration and the Republican-led Congress.”

Don Rosenberg, whose son was killed in a traffic accident by an illegal immigrant driving without a license, said the government lacks the willpower to deport people and to do it quickly.

“These people can and should be deported. We have that option, and we don’t want to take it, and this is what happens,” he said. “I guess until somebody who has the responsibility to make these decisions has one of their loved ones killed, it’s going to continue to happen.”

In the case of Mr. Altamirano, he was put in deportation proceedings on Jan. 3, 2013, and released after posting bond four days later. His first hearing before the immigration court wasn’t until April 9, 2014, and he was still awaiting a final deportation order in January this year when he was arrested on charges of shooting a convenience store clerk in Mesa, Arizona.

Mr. Grassley and Sen. Jeff Sessions, Alabama Republican and chairman of the immigration subcommittee, are seeking answers from Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson, Attorney General Loretta Lynch and Secretary of State John F. Kerry.

The senators want to know why Mr. Kerry hasn’t put more pressure on other countries to take back their citizens whom the U.S. wants to deport. Under the 2001 Supreme Court ruling known as the Zadvydas case, the U.S. generally cannot detain foreigners longer than six months if their countries won’t accept them. Every year, thousands of immigrants are put back on the streets because of Zadvydas.

Republicans have long pressured the State Department — under President George W. Bush and now under President Obama — to use diplomatic tools such as denying visas to top officials try to force other countries to take back their citizens.

The Times reported that ICE releases hundreds of Cuban criminals into U.S. communities every year because the island nation refuses to take them back.

 

 

Obama, the Conductor of Chaos

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Barack Obama holds the baton to an anti-American orchestra of tuned, tested, rehearsed instruments. The production is mismanaged, sour to the ears and causes people to leave the arena when the verses are not American and in cadence with allies. The entire governmental score is tyrannical and abusive.

His performance however, is well driven by inside marxist, communists and socialist operators who themselves have tuned, tested and rehearsed instruments where it is in harmony with enemies of America. How about Hugo Chavez, Mohammed Morsi or the Taliban? Then there is Iran.

Three branches of government have been reduced to one, where Conductor Obama has ruled with a pen and a phone and otherwise political extortion. Up to the point where Senate majority leader, Harry Reid lost his leadership post, he functionally stopped and paralyzed the people’s work on Congress to protect Barack Obama.

All the while, Maestro Obama had his was working his intonations on the Supreme Court with his choice picks of Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor, swinging the black robe influence to a more left octave. The court is broken when one sees the real dissention between the justices when not on the bench.

Obama has led an opus where the very social and civil structure in America has been thrown into turmoil. Border Patrol has no clue how to enforce immigration laws, they abide to DHS memos written by Secretary Jeh Johnson. Historical flags and icons are to be removed and gender designated bathrooms are now without any designation.

The fundamental security of government personnel and documents of several agencies has been compromised by an epic cyber intrusion and that finale is from over as the damage will be ongoing for years.

The very personal concern of having access to healthcare has reached a crisis pitch such that insurance deductibles are financially bending and having a doctor’s appointment is a future dream. Nothing is more demonstrative of this condition than that of the Veteran’s Administration where there is a slow death waltz.

Barack Obama performed a medley of government fraud and extortion using the IRS, the EPA, the DoJ, ATF, Education, HUD and HHS to name a few.

Off our shores, conditions are much worse. Barack Obama has modulated a score of retreat while his measure of sympathy to Islam in pure nocturne. His administration led of early in 2009 with the Cairo speech where the ligature plays out today throughout the Muslim world. The retreat from Iraq and his shallow threat of a ‘red-line’ have prove deadly in the whole region, a modern day holocaust. And mostly sadly of all was allowing 4 Americans to perish in Libya with no hope of security, support or rescue.

The most grave of the Obama coda is the terror and dying of Christians.

The building crescendo of Obama will be the nuclear agreement with Iran where Israel, Saudi Arabia, Europe and America as the great Satan will be his encore.

The stretto of the Obama symphony is defined here in an excellent summary by Stephen Hayes of The Weekly Standard.

There are several months left for the conductor of chaos to work his baton and that tremolo is clearly upon us and the world.

 

 

 

 

 

ISIS Called for Ramadan Day of Terror

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Day of terror: Islamist attacks around world follow ISIS’ Ramadan message

Terrorists gunned down dozens of tourists on a Tunisian beach, left a severed head atop a fence outside a French factory and blew up a Kuwaiti mosque Friday in a bloody wave of attacks that followed an ISIS leader’s call to make the month of Ramadan a time of “calamity for the infidels.”

There was no confirmation that the attacks were a coordinated effort ordered by ISIS, but the suspects who attacked a U.S.-owned gas factory in southeastern France left the terrorist army’s flags next to the severed head of their victim, and an ISIS affiliate claimed responsibility for the deadly Kuwait blast.

If the attacks were indeed an answer to ISIS spokesman Abu Muhammad al-Adnani’s recent call for savagery, it would represent a hideous perversion of Islam’s most holy period, which began June 17 and ends July 17.

“The attack was of a terrorist nature since a body was discovered, decapitated and with inscriptions.”

– French President Francois Hollande

Jihadists should make Ramadan a time of “calamity for the infidels … Shi’ites and apostate Muslims,” Al-Adnani said in a recent audio message. “Muslims everywhere, we congratulate you over the arrival of the holy month. Be keen to conquer in this holy month and to become exposed to martyrdom.”

The attack in France occurred first, Friday morning in Saint-Quentin-Fallavier, northwest of the Alpine city of Grenoble. Two suspects dressed as deliverymen crashed a car into an industrial gas plant operated by Allentown, Pa.,-based Air Products & Chemicals, stormed inside and killed at least one person. The head of the victim was left on a fence, with Arabic phrases scrawled on it and ISIS flags nearby, Sky News reported, citing French legal sources.

The unnamed victim was a businessman at a local transportation company and the boss of a man arrested in connection with the attack.

Nearly simultaneously, a gunman opened fire with an automatic rifle on a beach in Sousse– a Tunisian coastal town popular with tourists– killing at least 37 and wounding 36. The Health Ministry said the dead include Tunisians, Brits, Germans and Belgians.

A third attack killed at least 25 and wounded more than 200 in a Shia mosque in Kuwait City, the  Ministry of Interior said. A suicide bomber purportedly from ISIS affiliate Najd Province targeted Shiite worshippers after midday prayers at the Imam Sadiq Mosque in the residential neighborhood of al-Sawabir in Kuwait’s capital, Kuwait City. It was the first terrorist attack in Kuwait in more than two decades.

ISIS is comprised of Sunni Muslims, and its members have a long and bloody history with Shia Muslims, as evidenced by Al-Adnani’s call. The attack came immediately following Friday prayers. There was no claim of responsibility, but ISIS has claimed responsibility for bombings at two different Shiite mosques in Saudi Arabia in recent weeks.

French officials wasted no time labeling Friday’s attack an act of terrorism.

“The attack was of a terrorist nature since a body was discovered, decapitated and with inscriptions,” French President Francois Hollande told a news conference in Brussels, where he cut short his attendance at an EU summit to return to France.

Hollande and his Tunisian counterpart Beji Caid Essebsi expressed “solidarity in the face of terrorism,” according to a statement by Hollande’s office, France24.com reported.

Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said at least one man–a 30-year-old extremist known to authorities named Yassin Sahli– was under arrest following the France attack. The suspect from Lyon was seized by an alert firefighter.

Other people, including the man’s wife, were also taken into custody after the attack, A second suspect arrested at his home in Saint-Quentin-Fallavier was reportedly seen driving back and forth past the factory before the attack, the Dauphine Libere newspaper reported. A manhunt is underway for any other suspects involved.

Minister Cazeneuve, speaking from the scene, described the attack as “barbarous” and a “terrible terrorist crime.” He said the suspect had been known to foreign intelligence services since 2006, but that police monitoring of him had ceased in 2008. The man did not have a criminal record, the minister added.

French authorities told Fox News that approximately 10 people were injured.

The factory is operated by Air Products & Chemicals, an Allentown, Pa.,-based company that makes industrial gases.

“Our priority at this stage is to take care of our employees, who have been evacuated from the site and all accounted for,” the company said in a statement. “Our crisis and emergency response teams have been activated and are working closely with all relevant authorities.”

A local official confirmed the nation is on high alert.

“The terrorism threat is at a maximum,” Alain Juppe, mayor of Bordeaux, told Fox News.

The United Nations, the U.S and other countries condemned Friday’s attacks. U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said those “responsible for such appalling acts of violence must be swiftly brought to justice” and Interpol offered its help to all three nations.

In Washington, Pentagon spokesman Col. Steve Warren said it was too soon to tell whether the three attacks were the work of Islamic State extremists but added “we unequivocally condemn these terrorist attacks.

Terrorism analysts said the attacks could be so-called “lone wolves” answering the call to attack ISIS enemies during the holy period.

“It is very likely that ISIS’ supporters acted due to the call for attacks during Ramadan,” said Ryan Mauro, of the New York-based terrorism research institute Clarion Project. “It is appealing to ISIS supporters on a personal level because it gives their attacks some more religious significance.”

France’s anti-terrorism prosecutor has opened an investigation into the incident. The country went on high alert after a series of attacks in January that left 20 people dead in and around Paris region, including the Islamic terrorists. In the Jan. 7 attack at the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, two radical Muslim brothers, Saïd and Chérif Kouachi, heavily armed and incensed over the publishing of caricatures of Muhammad, stormed the magazine’s offices and killed 12, including staffers and a police officer.

Authorities hunted down the Kouachi brothers for three days, until finally cornering them in a Paris printing house and killing them in a shootout. As police searched for the brothers’, a friend and fellow home grown Islamic terrorist Amedy Coulibaly, took at least 15 people hostage at a kosher supermarket in Paris. After a long standoff,  police stormed the market, killing him. Four hostages were also killed in the incident.

Ramadan is the ninth month of the Islamic lunar calendar when Muslims celebrate the Koran. They also often fast– primarily from eating and drinking– from sunrise to sunset every day of the month to teach empathy for those who have less. Fasting and reading the Koran during Ramadan should encourage charity, kindness and social justice, especially to the needy and poor.

National Preparedness is up to YOU

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At no other time in American history has the United States been so vulnerable to national security threats. The text below is for you benefit, take is seriously and don’t rely on FEMA, you are your own best resource.

National Preparedness Report

Main Content

This page provides information on the 2015 National Preparedness Report, including the overarching findings on national issues, preparedness progress, and opportunities for improvement. This page is for anyone interested in seeing how preparedness can inform priorities and community actions.

National Preparedness Report

The 2015 National Preparedness Report marks the fourth iteration of this annual report. Required annually by Presidential Policy Directive 8: National Preparedness, the National Preparedness Report summarizes progress in building, sustaining, and delivering the 31 core capabilities described in the 2011 National Preparedness Goal (the Goal). Each year, the report presents an opportunity to assess gains that whole community partners—including all levels of government, private and nonprofit sectors, faith-based organizations, communities, and individuals—have made in preparedness, and to identify where challenges remain.

The intent of the National Preparedness Report is to provide the Nation with practical insights on preparedness that can inform decisions about program priorities, resource allocations, and community actions. The 2015 National Preparedness Report focuses primarily on preparedness activities undertaken or reported during 2014, and places particular emphasis on progress made in implementing the National Planning Frameworks (the Frameworks) across the Prevention, Protection, Mitigation, Response, and Recovery mission areas. The Frameworks describe how the whole community works together to achieve the goal of a secure and resilient Nation.

Overarching Findings on National Issues

In addition to key findings for each of the five preparedness mission areas, the 2015 NPR identifies overarching national trends that cut across multiple mission areas:

  • Incorporating Emergency Preparedness into Technology Platforms: Businesses and public-private partnerships are increasingly incorporating emergency preparedness into technology platforms, such as Internet and social media tools and services.
  • Challenges Assessing the Status of Corrective Actions: While Federal departments and agencies individually assess progress for corrective actions identified during national-level exercises and real-world incidents, challenges remain to comprehensively assess corrective actions with broad implications across the Federal Government.
  • Response Coordination Challenges for Events that Do Not Receive Robert T. Stafford Disaster Relief and Emergency Assistance Act (Stafford Act) Declarations: Recent events, including the epidemic of Ebola virus disease, have highlighted challenges with coordinating the response to and recovery from complex incidents that do not receive Stafford Act declarations.

The Nation Continues to Make Progress

The 2015 NPR identifies three new core capabilities – Environmental Response/Health and Safety, Intelligence and Information Sharing, and Operational Coordination – as meeting acceptable levels of performance but requiring sustained effort to maintain capability and meet emerging challenges. These capabilities join five others from the 2014 report that future National Preparedness Reports will revisit to determine if they are still meeting performance goals.

Opportunities for Improvement

The 2015 National Preparedness Report also highlights key preparedness challenges remaining for the Nation. Three core capabilities—Cybersecurity, Housing, and Infrastructure Systems—have persisted as areas for improvement across all four National Preparedness Reports. A fourth core capability, Long-term Vulnerability Reduction, repeats as an area for improvement from last year, due in part to questions surrounding the long-term solvency of the National Flood Insurance Program and nascent national efforts for climate change adaptation and green infrastructure. Preparedness data further revealed that the Federal Government, states, and territories are also struggling to build capacity for the Access Control and Identity Verification and Economic Recovery core capabilities. These areas for improvement are a reminder that preparedness gains are gradual and that solutions to complex challenges will not materialize without sustained support from the whole community.

Key Factors for Future Progress

The 2015 NPR represents the fourth opportunity for the Nation to reflect on progress in strengthening national preparedness and to identify where preparedness gaps remain. Looking across all five mission areas, the NPR provides a national perspective on critical preparedness trends for whole community partners to use to inform program priorities, to allocate resources, and to communicate with stakeholders about issues of shared concern.

Resources

Core Capabilities

Main Content

The National Preparedness Goal identified 31 core capabilities—these are the distinct critical elements needed to achieve the goal.

These capabilities are referenced in many national preparedness efforts, including the National Planning Frameworks. The Goal grouped the capabilities into five mission areas, based on where they most logically fit. Some fall into only one mission area, while some others apply to several mission areas.

Download the capabilities crosswalk to see how the legacy Target Capabilities List compares with the new core capabilities.

Planning

  • Mission Areas: All
  • Description: Conduct a systematic process engaging the whole community as appropriate in the development of executable strategic, operational, and/or community-based approaches to meet defined objectives.

Public Information and Warning

  • Mission Areas: All
  • Description: Deliver coordinated, prompt, reliable, and actionable information to the whole community through the use of clear, consistent, accessible, and culturally and linguistically appropriate methods to effectively relay information regarding any threat or hazard, as well as the actions being taken and the assistance being made available, as appropriate.

Operational Coordination

  • Mission Areas: All
  • Description: Establish and maintain a unified and coordinated operational structure and process that appropriately integrates all critical stakeholders and supports the execution of core capabilities.

Forensics and Attribution

  • Mission Area: Prevention
  • Description: Conduct forensic analysis and attribute terrorist acts (including the means and methods of terrorism) to their source, to include forensic analysis as well as attribution for an attack and for the preparation for an attack in an effort to prevent initial or follow-on acts and/or swiftly develop counter-options.

Intelligence and Information Sharing

  • Mission Areas: Prevention, Protection
  • Description: Provide timely, accurate, and actionable information resulting from the planning, direction, collection, exploitation, processing, analysis, production, dissemination, evaluation, and feedback of available information concerning threats to the United States, its people, property, or interests; the development, proliferation, or use of WMDs; or any other matter bearing on U.S. national or homeland security by Federal, state, local, and other stakeholders. Information sharing is the ability to exchange intelligence, information, data, or knowledge among Federal, state, local, or private sector entities, as appropriate.

Interdiction and Disruption

  • Mission Areas: Prevention, Protection
  • Description: Delay, divert, intercept, halt, apprehend, or secure threats and/or hazards.

Screening, Search, and Detection

  • Mission Areas: Prevention, Protection
  • Description: Identify, discover, or locate threats and/or hazards through active and passive surveillance and search procedures. This may include the use of systematic examinations and assessments, sensor technologies, or physical investigation and intelligence.

Access Control and Identity Verification

  • Mission Area: Protection
  • Description: Apply a broad range of physical, technological, and cyber measures to control admittance to critical locations and systems, limiting access to authorized individuals to carry out legitimate activities.

Cybersecurity

  • Mission Area: Protection
  • Description: Protect against damage to, the unauthorized use of, and/or the exploitation of (and, if needed, the restoration of) electronic communications systems and services (and the information contained therein).

Physical Protective Measures

  • Mission Area: Protection
  • Description: Reduce or mitigate risks, including actions targeted at threats, vulnerabilities, and/or consequences, by controlling movement and protecting borders, critical infrastructure, and the homeland.

Risk Management for Protection Programs and Activities

  • Mission Area: Protection
  • Description: Identify, assess, and prioritize risks to inform Protection activities and investments.

Supply Chain Integrity and Security

  • Mission Area: Protection
  • Description: Strengthen the security and resilience of the supply chain.

Community Resilience

  • Mission Area: Mitigation
  • Description: Lead the integrated effort to recognize, understand, communicate, plan, and address risks so that the community can develop a set of actions to accomplish Mitigation and improve resilience.

Long-term Vulnerability Reduction

  • Mission Area: Mitigation
  • Description: Build and sustain resilient systems, communities, and critical infrastructure and key resources lifelines so as to reduce their vulnerability to natural, technological, and human-caused incidents by lessening the likelihood, severity, and duration of the adverse consequences related to these incidents.

Risk and Disaster Resilience Assessment

  • Mission Area: Mitigation
  • Description: Assess risk and disaster resilience so that decision makers, responders, and community members can take informed action to reduce their entity’s risk and increase their resilience.

Threats and Hazard Identification

  • Mission Area: Mitigation
  • Description: Identify the threats and hazards that occur in the geographic area; determine the frequency and magnitude; and incorporate this into analysis and planning processes so as to clearly understand the needs of a community or entity.

Critical Transportation

  • Mission Area: Response
  • Description: Provide transportation (including infrastructure access and accessible transportation services) for response priority objectives, including the evacuation of people and animals, and the delivery of vital response personnel, equipment, and services into the affected areas.

Environmental Response/Health and Safety

  • Mission Area: Response
  • Description: Ensure the availability of guidance and resources to address all hazards including hazardous materials, acts of terrorism, and natural disasters in support of the responder operations and the affected communities.

Fatality Management Services

  • Mission Area: Response
  • Description: Provide fatality management services, including body recovery and victim identification, working with state and local authorities to provide temporary mortuary solutions, sharing information with mass care services for the purpose of reunifying family members and caregivers with missing persons/remains, and providing counseling to the bereaved.

Infrastructure Systems

  • Mission Area: Response, Recovery
  • Description: Stabilize critical infrastructure functions, minimize health and safety threats, and efficiently restore and revitalize systems and services to support a viable, resilient community.

Mass Care Services

  • Mission Area: Response
  • Description: Provide life-sustaining services to the affected population with a focus on hydration, feeding, and sheltering to those who have the most need, as well as support for reunifying families.

Mass Search and Rescue Operations

  • Mission Area: Response
  • Description: Deliver traditional and atypical search and rescue capabilities, including personnel, services, animals, and assets to survivors in need, with the goal of saving the greatest number of endangered lives in the shortest time possible.

On-scene Security and Protection

  • Mission Area: Response
  • Description: Ensure a safe and secure environment through law enforcement and related security and protection operations for people and communities located within affected areas and also for all traditional and atypical response personnel engaged in lifesaving and life-sustaining operations.

Operational Communications

  • Mission Area: Response
  • Description: Ensure the capacity for timely communications in support of security, situational awareness, and operations by any and all means available, among and between affected communities in the impact area and all response forces.

Public and Private Services and Resources

  • Mission Area: Response
  • Description: Provide essential public and private services and resources to the affected population and surrounding communities, to include emergency power to critical facilities, fuel support for emergency responders, and access to community staples (e.g., grocery stores, pharmacies, and banks) and fire and other first response services.

Public Health and Medical Services

  • Mission Area: Response
  • Description: Provide lifesaving medical treatment via emergency medical services and related operations and avoid additional disease and injury by providing targeted public health and medical support and products to all people in need within the affected area.

Situational Assessment

  • Mission Area: Response
  • Description: Provide all decision makers with decision-relevant information regarding the nature and extent of the hazard, any cascading effects, and the status of the response.

Economic Recovery

  • Mission Area: Recovery
  • Description: Return economic and business activities (including food and agriculture) to a healthy state and develop new business and employment opportunities that result in a sustainable and economically viable community.

Health and Social Services

  • Mission Area: Recovery
  • Description: Restore and improve health and social services networks to promote the resilience, independence, health (including behavioral health), and well-being of the whole community.

Housing

  • Mission Area: Recovery
  • Description: Implement housing solutions that effectively support the needs of the whole community and contribute to its sustainability and resilience.

Natural and Cultural Resources

  • Mission Area: Recovery
  • Description: Protect natural and cultural resources and historic properties through appropriate planning, mitigation, response, and recovery actions to preserve, conserve, rehabilitate, and restore them consistent with post-disaster community priorities and best practices and in compliance with appropriate environmental and historical preservation laws and executive orders.

Truck Hijacked in Mexico, Visas Stolen

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Sheesh, can it get worse?

MEXICO CITY (AP) — The U.S. Embassy in Mexico says a truck carrying visas was hijacked in northern Mexico and the visas stolen.

The embassy says in a statement Wednesday that the theft occurred on June 7 “in northern Mexico,” without specifying where.

The truck was making a trip from the United States to U.S. Consulates in the cities of Monterrey and Guadalajara.

Some approved border crossing cards also were stolen. An electronic alert has been issued so that the stolen cards cannot be used to cross the border.

The cards were re-issued for the intended holders, but they have also been advised of the robbery in case the cards are used in attempts at identity theft.

***

The Vice Admiral of the Coast Guard delivered testimony on drug interdiction on the waterways. In part:

Emerging Threats: Transnational Organized Crime, Violence, and Instability
One of the goals of the Coast Guard’s drug interdiction program is to interdict illicit traffic as close to the source zone1 as possible. This helps to keep the drugs from reaching the shores of Central America where it is transported over land into Mexico, and then to the United States, where the proceeds from the sale of drugs fuel TOC networks. These nefarious organizations operate with impunity throughout Central America while vying for power through drug-fueled violence and corruption of government officials; in fact, eight out of the ten most violent nations in the world are along these trafficking routes in the Western Hemisphere. Traffickers have also increasingly moved product through the Central and Eastern Caribbean vector. Corresponding with this movement, the homicide rate in Puerto Rico is five times that of the rest of the United States. Drug trafficking has destabilized regional states, undermined the rule of law, terrorized citizens, and driven both families and unaccompanied children to migrate to the United States. To be clear, the flow of illicit drugs funds TOC networks which pose a significant and growing threat to national and international security.

Then Border Patrol has their terrifying summary. Yes, it can get worse and Border Patrol is telling the media just how bad it is, but who is really listening, who will address the issues and how is this breaking national security policy? The clarion call is being made, but is there a busy signal?

From the LA Times in full:

Rank-and-file Border Patrol agents are furious that they have lost some of their favorite enforcement tools and say that intense public criticism of border shootings has led to a morale crisis.

“We lack the political will to enforce the law and allow our agency to be effective,” said National Border Patrol Council spokesman Shawn Moran in a conference call with reporters Wednesday. The call was coordinated by the union that represents the agents.

Among the most far-reaching and damning accusations from agents working entry points in Arizona, Texas and California was that the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol administration in Washington does not want agents to make drug busts and has taken away their ability to do so.

Shane Gallagher, an agent in the San Diego sector, said roving interdiction patrols — in which agents would stop suspicious vehicles north of the border — were extraordinarily successful at nabbing border crossers with drugs. But those patrols would then create uncomfortable questions for the ports through which the vehicles had just passed, he said.

“Now the port of entry has to explain who was in the primary lane, what actions were taken, if the vehicle was inspected, so you can see there’s a whole host of implications,” he said.

Though rank-and-file agents saw the value in drug interdictions, Gallagher said, agency leadership did not and drastically reduced the number of agents doing such work.

“There was a lot of pressure for us to get out of the [drug] interdiction game,” Gallagher said.

The decision to speak with reporters comes as rank-and-file agents have come under intense criticism for their involvement in fatal cross-border shootings – including the slaying of a 15-year-old boy who was walking home from a basketball game in Nogales, Mexico, when he was hit by a bullet fired by an agent on the Arizona side of the border.

According to records released last month, only 13 out of 809 abuse complaints sent to Customs and Border Protection’s office of internal affairs between January 2009 and January 2012 led to disciplinary action, and last week, the agency’s head of internal affairs was removed from his post.

A Customs and Border Protection spokesman declined to comment Wednesday when reached by the Los Angeles Times.

The agency also handcuffed agents by instituting civil liberties protections for potential targets of investigations at public transit stations or on agricultural land, colloquially known as a “farm and ranch check,” Moran said.

For such checks, Moran said, agents are required to create an “operations plan” and be able to show supervisors some kind of intelligence that connects targets of investigations to potential criminal activity. No longer, he said, can Border Patrol agents simply question random people.

Amid a flood of women and children turning themselves in at the border, agents also criticized administration directives to lend help to neighboring agencies.

The Border Patrol “grew but other agencies didn’t grow,” said Tucson sector Agent Art Del Cueto. “They’ve been butchering our agency to assist other agencies.”

According to Agent Chris Cabrera of the Rio Grande Valley sector in southern Texas, in one hour last week, 80 people, mostly women and children, turned themselves in to the Border Patrol in the Rincon Village area of his sector.

Overall, the agency finds itself holding 500 people in the Rio Grande Valley sector each day, he said, down from 700 people each day last year, when a flood of women and children from Central America overwhelmed the U.S. immigration sector.

Typically, one or two agents are stationed near Rincon Village to get people into a shelter and check them for weapons. Those agents can handle 10 or 15 people at once, Cabrera said. But when scores arrive, the agency must call on other agents to respond.

“You’re leaving large swaths of the area unprotected,” Cabrera said. “You take a few agents from the field, then you take a few more, and before you know it, you’re down to five agents covering a 53-mile stretch of river.”

Agents criticized the Border Patrol as top-heavy, with a ratio of four or five agents per each supervisor, a ratio that the agents said should be closer to 10 agents per supervisor.

Cabrera said the issue isn’t a lack of resources, but the way in which they’re used.

“We do not have what we need,” he said, “to do the job we need done.”