Category Archives: Southern Border War

Game on: Eric Holder Hired to Fight Trump

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So, as California is officially a sanctuary state, you can bet there will be additional states collaborating and joining the fight like Illinois. The Left has been colluding for several weeks and here is but one decision that is part of the search and destroy mission of the new Trump administration.

Immigrants and illegals are a protected class and they along with a state legislature are mobilizing for a fight that affects Americans, America, the sovereignty and standing law.

Immigrants now have an official lobby operation as they get full representation by Eric Holder and his law firm. This is likely an operation that has passed through the offices of the White House.

One must wonder if DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson or Loretta Lynch from the DoJ will join this battle-plan as well….

California Democrats hire Eric Holder to fight Trump

LOS ANGELES— Democratic lawmakers in the California legislature have retained former US Attorney General Eric Holder to help in any legal battles with President-elect Donald Trump’s administration, The New York Times reported on Wednesday.

The move is an indication that lawmakers in the nation’s most populous state, where Democrats hold two-thirds majorities in both houses of the legislature, are girding for possible court battles after Trump takes office on January 20.

Last month, leaders of both houses introduced bills to protect immigrants living in the country illegally from anticipated efforts by a Trump administration to increase deportations. In addition, Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown has made combating climate change a priority for the state.

“Having the former attorney general of the United States brings us a lot of firepower in order to prepare to safeguard the values of the people of California,” Kevin de León, the Democratic leader of the state Senate, told The Times. “This means we are very, very serious.”

A representative from de León’s office could not immediately be reached for comment early Wednesday.

“I am honored that the Legislature chose Covington to serve as its legal adviser as it considers how to respond to potential changes in federal law that could impact California’s residents and policy priorities,” Holder said in a statement, according to The Times.

California voted decisively for Democrat Hillary Clinton in the November 8 presidential election, choosing the former first lady over Trump by 28 percentage points.

**** Covington and Burling has been a legal lobby operation for corrupt entities for a while. Please note this particular example below:

Western SaharaResource Watch (WSRW) has been writing since 2008 about Covington & Burling’s collusion with OCP. In particular, WSRW has investigated a secret “independent opinion,” written by Covington that has “been used by phosphate importing firms to defend their unethical trade.” Despite repeated attempts to get a copy of that opinion, WSRW has reported: “the opinion has never been released to the public. The law firm consistently refuses to reply to requests from civil society or Saharawis.” An April 2012 paper from one of the U.S. importers, PotashCorp, titled “PhosphateRock from Western Sahara,” gives us, however, a pretty good picture of Covington’s point of view.  Acknowledging that they had “recently received, on a confidential basis” two legal analyses by Covington & Burling and DLA Piper, they tell us that those opinions “concluded that OCP’s operations in the region directly benefit the people of the region and are consistent with international legal obligations.” This conclusion is directly contradicted by any number of reports and analyses that the indigenous Sahrawi benefit little from the phosphate trade, hold few of the phosphate industry jobs, and have never been consulted on or acquiesced in the exploitation. While it would certainly be enlightening to see a copy of Covington’s opinion, they are obviously basing their conclusion on the condition of the several hundred thousand illegal settlers who have been lured to the territory with subsidies and jobs. The Fourth Geneva Convention specifically prohibits colonizing occupied territories. This is directly akin to concluding that life on the West Bank is lovely, based on the living conditions of the illegal Israeli settlers. WSRW supplies us with a good list of Recommended Reading on all this.

Covington lobbying on behalf of OCP has been hard to trace, specifically because they have chosen to register their work under the LDA, which does not require the registrant to list contacts or activities (see more on this below). All we really learn from the listings is their intention to lobby several governmental agencies and Congress on “Promoting economic integration in the Maghreb and enhanced economic relations between the Maghreb and the United States.” It does not appear to be a coincidence, however, that two of Covington’s registered OCP lobbyists, Stuart Eizenstat and Marney Cheek, should turn up in 2009 as participants in a thing called the North Africa Policy Paper Project that produced the seriously flawed and thoroughly biased policy paper, Why the Maghreb Matters: Threats, Opportunities, & Options for Effective US Engagement in North Africa. Eizenstat is listed as co-chair (along with I.William Zartman) and Cheek as staff. In a nutshell, the report identifies resolution of the stalemate over the Western Sahara as the key to unlocking the potential of greater Maghrebian integration and controversially endorses “the [Moroccan] formula of autonomy/sovereignty now before the UN” as “a basis for a viable solution.” The Moroccan autonomy plan has been widely condemned by international legal scholars – including our foremost self-determination authority, Hurst Hannum – as illegal under international law because it doesn’t provide for an expression of the will of the original inhabitants of the territory. More details here.

FBI: 7,700 Terrorist Encounters in USA in 2015

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In a wide-ranging request for documents and analysis, President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team asked the Department of Homeland Security last month to assess all assets available for border wall and barrier construction.

Reuters: The team also asked about the department’s capacity for expanding immigrant detention and about an aerial surveillance program that was scaled back by the Obama administration but remains popular with immigration hardliners. And it asked whether federal workers have altered biographic information kept by the department about immigrants out of concern for their civil liberties.

The requests were made in a Dec. 5 meeting between Trump’s transition team and Department of Homeland Security officials, according to an internal agency memo reviewed by Reuters. The document offers a glimpse into the president-elect’s strategy for securing the U.S. borders and reversing polices

The requests were made in a Dec. 5 meeting between Trump’s transition team and Department of Homeland Security officials, according to an internal agency memo reviewed by Reuters. The document offers a glimpse into the president-elect’s strategy for securing the U.S. borders and reversing polices

The requests were made in a Dec. 5 meeting between Trump’s transition team and Department of Homeland Security officials, according to an internal agency memo reviewed by Reuters. The document offers a glimpse into the president-elect’s strategy for securing the U.S. borders and reversing policesput in place by the Obama administration. 

Trump’s transition team did not comment in response to Reuters inquiries. A spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security and U.S. Customs and Border Protection declined to comment.

In response to the transition team request, U.S. Customs and Border Protection staffers identified more than 400 miles along the U.S.-Mexico border, and about the same distance along the U.S.-Canada border, where new fencing could be erected, according to a document seen by Reuters.

Reuters could not determine whether the Trump team is considering a northern border barrier. During the campaign, Trump pledged to build a wall and expand fencing on parts of the U.S.-Mexico border but said he sees no need to build a wall on the border with Canada.

One program the transition team asked about, according to the email summary, was Operation Phalanx, an aerial surveillance program that authorizes 1,200 Army National Guard airmen to monitor the southern border for drug trafficking and illegal migration. Much more here from Reuters.

For perspective:

FBI: 7,700 Terrorist Encounters in USA Last Year

The jihad is crossing the southern border: a majority of encounters in Arizona were with Islamist groups.

From 9/2016: Breitbart news has received a collection of leaked documents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation that show a massive number of terrorist encounters, especially in border states.  The documents are not classified, though they are marked sensitive.  7,712 terrorist encounters occurred from July 20, 2015 and the same date a year later — last year, in short.

Some of the documents pertain to the entire U.S., while others focus specifically on the state of Arizona.  The states with the highest encounters are all border states. Texas, California, and Arizona–all states with a shared border with Mexico–rank high in encounters…. Most significantly, the map shows that many of the encounters occurred near the border outside of ports-of-entry, indicating that persons were attempting to sneak into the U.S.

Page Six shows a pie chart indicating that the majority of encounters in Arizona were with Islamic known or suspected terrorists, both Sunni and Shi’a.

 

That last is surprising, as one would expect drug cartels to make up the majority of such encounters.  The leak comes at a time when the FBI’s crime reporting shows an increase in violent crime across the country.

The Shiite terrorist organization Hezbollah has developed connections with the Latin American drug cartels because of its prominent role in heroin.  Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) controls the opium trade from the poppy fields in Afghanistan to the Levant, and they provide a great deal of opium to Hezbollah.  Hezbollah has a refining capacity in Lebanon that allows them to provide a substantial part of the world’s heroin.  They trade heroin to the Latin American drug cartels for other illegal money-making opportunities, forged documents, and access to the Americas.  Hezbollah’s operations produce between ten and twenty million dollars in revenue for its American operations, which are based out of a large Lebanese immigrant community in what is called the “Tri-border region,” an area between Paraguay, Brazil, and Argentina.

In addition to its money-making ventures, Hezbollah provides the cartels with military training.  As one of the world’s foremost guerrilla organizations, Hezbollah finds that its military trainers are sought after commodities.  They are able to parley those connections in order to perform operations in Mexico.  Their ability to infiltrate the United States, in order to conduct terrorist violence in service to Iran, is highlighted by these leaked FBI documents.

The role of Sunni groups is less fully understood, but it was a concern for the intelligence section of the United States military’s Southern Command according to another set of leaks earlier this year.

Sunni extremists are infiltrating the United States with the help of alien smugglers in South America and are crossing U.S. borders with ease, according to a U.S. South Command intelligence report.  The Command’s J-2 intelligence directorate reported recently in internal channels that “special interest aliens” are working with a known alien smuggling network in Latin America to reach the United States….  Army Col. Lisa A. Garcia, a Southcom spokeswoman, did not address the intelligence report directly but said Sunni terrorist infiltration is a security concern.

“Networks that specialize in smuggling individuals from regions of terrorist concern, mainly from the Afghanistan-Pakistan region, the Middle East, and East Africa, are indeed a concern for Southcom and other interagency security partners who support our country’s national security,” Garcia told theWashington Free Beacon….  “In 2015, we saw a total of 331,000 migrants enter the southwestern border between the U.S. and Mexico, of that we estimate more than 30,000 of those were from countries of terrorist concern,” she said….

[T]he Southcom intelligence report revealed that the threat of Islamist terror infiltration is no longer theoretical. “This makes the case for Trump’s wall,” said one American security official of the Southcom report. “These guys are doing whatever they want to get in the country.”

Here at CounterJihad, we reported on Southern Command’s commander, Admiral Kurt Tidd, and his testimony before Congress on the threat.  Tidd reported that a number of terrorists were transiting the region who had gone to Syria and fought for the Islamic State (ISIS) and other radical groups.  Their ability to return to Latin America was smooth, given that they actually had legal travel documents.

Whether they can then pass into the United States is an open question.  The leaked FBI documents only talk about actual law enforcement encounters with people on terrorist lists.  How many are infiltrating without encountering law enforcement?

DHS Officials Took Bribes, and Billions $ Left the U.S. for Mexico

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Valerie Jarrett during a recent interview said that the Obama administration was scandal free.

Okay, stop laughing, hold on…there are countless scandals and this whole administration is delusional. There are two items below is a huge sidebar scandal when it comes to DHS and illegals. Breathe deeply….you can do it and read on.

Report: Homeland Security Officials Took Millions in Bribes to ‘Look the Other Way’ on Drug Cartels

TownHall: A stunning case of corruption inside the Department of Homeland Security was overshadowed by headlines about Russia and Israel this past week. Yet, federal employees accepting millions of dollars in bribes to avoid doing their job, is certainly worth a look.

Hundreds of DHS employees have “looked the other way” as drugs crossed the border because cartels have made them offers they can’t refuse. Other employees have sold green cards and other documents illegally. More from The New York Times:

It was not an isolated case. A review by The New York Times of thousands of court records and internal agency documents showed that over the last 10 years almost 200 employees and contract workers of the Department of Homeland Security have taken nearly $15 million in bribes while being paid to protect the nation’s borders and enforce immigration laws.

No wonder our immigration system is so broken.

In order to address the internal issues, the department has hired more investigators, offered ethics training and is administering polygraph tests to new applicants, The Times reports.

The Times report does not include the gifts, trips or money that DHS employees have stolen, the editors note.

Once the inside corruption is taken care of, Donald Trump’s administration can get to work on building a wall along the southern border, install better aerial surveillance and send more agents down there to be on the patrol.

****

Wait, wait, wait….there are more implications. Every action has a reaction:

Reuters: Remittances to Mexico posted their biggest jump in over ten years in November in a possible reaction to the U.S. election victory of Donald Trump, who threatened to block the transfers and eroded confidence in the peso currency during the campaign.

Mexicans abroad sent home nearly $2.4 billion in transfers in November, 24.7 percent higher than a year earlier, marking their fastest pace of expansion since March 2006, according to Mexican central bank data on Monday.

President-elect Trump ran a campaign steeped in anti-Mexican rhetoric and threatened to halt transfers from Mexican nationals unless Mexico agreed to pay for the massive wall he has vowed to build on the U.S. southern border to keep out illegal immigrants.

Trump’s surprise Nov. 8 election triumph also sent the Mexican currency to record lows in a sell-off fueled by his threats to scrap a trade deal between Mexico and the United States, and to levy punitive tariffs on Mexican-made goods.

Goldman Sachs economist Alberto Ramos said in a client note the weak peso fanned the remittance surge, noting workers could be “strategically front-loading” transfers to avoid potential taxes or restrictions from the incoming U.S. administration.

The value of the remittances considerably exceeds that of Mexico’s oil exports, Ramos noted.

The payments from Mexicans living in the United States are a key source of income for many families in Mexico, where around half the population lives in poverty.

Bank BBVA Bancomer has forecast that those Mexicans will have sent a record $27 billion in remittances into Mexico in 2016, an increase of more than $2 billion over 2015.

Mexico’s central bank governor Agustin Carstens said last month that a rise in remittances was due to a weak exchange rate, more U.S. jobs and fears over Trump’s policies.

Mexico’s government said in November that it is ready to lobby the U.S. Congress and use all legal means possible to stop Trump blocking remittances.

He Was Deported 19 Times, Raped her on a Bus

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Seems we may have a district attorney or two that need to be sued, disbarred and jailed as accomplices. In fact this could have been done under edict by the White House and the Department of Justice.

WICHITA, Kan. (AP)— A Mexican man accused of raping a 13-year-old girl on a Greyhound bus that traveled through Kansas had been deported 10 times and voluntarily removed from the U.S. another nine times since 2003, records obtained by The Associated Press show.

Three U.S. Republican senators — including Kansas’ Jerry Moran and Pat Roberts — demanded this month that the Department of Homeland Security provide immigration records for 38-year-old Tomas Martinez-Maldonado, who is charged with a felony in the alleged Sept. 27 attack aboard a bus in Geary County. He is being held in the Geary County jail in Junction City, which is about 120 miles west of Kansas City.

U.S. Sen. Charles Grassley, from Iowa and chairman of the judiciary committee, co-signed a Dec. 9 letter with Moran and Roberts to Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson, calling it “an extremely disturbing case” and questioning how Martinez-Maldonado was able to re-enter and remain in the country.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement said it has placed a detainer — a request to turn Martinez-Maldonado over to ICE custody before he is released — with Geary County. ICE declined to discuss his specific case beyond its October statement regarding the 10 deportations.

Court filings show Martinez-Maldonado has two misdemeanor convictions for entering without legal permission in cases prosecuted in 2013 and 2015 in U.S. District Court of Arizona, where he was sentenced to serve 60 days and 165 days respectively.

A status hearing in the rape case is scheduled for Jan. 10. Defense attorney Lisa Hamer declined to comment on the charge, but said, “criminal law and immigration definitely intersect and nowadays it should be the responsibility of every criminal defense attorney to know the possible ramifications in the immigration courts.”

Nationwide, 52 percent of all federal prosecutions in the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30 were for entry or re-entry without legal permission and similar immigration violations, according to Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University.

It’s not unusual to see immigrants with multiple entries without legal permission, said David Trevino, a Topeka immigration attorney also representing Martinez-Maldonado. Most of Martinez-Maldonado’s family lives in Mexico, but he also has family in the United States, and the family is “devastated,” Trevino said.

“(President-elect Donald Trump) can build a wall 100 feet high and 50 feet deep, but it is not going to keep family members separated. So if someone is deported and they have family members here … they will find a way back — whether it is through the air, under a wall, through the coast of the United States,” Trevino said.

He declined to comment on his client’s criminal history and pending charge.

Records obtained by AP show Martinez-Maldonado had eight voluntary removals before his first deportation in 2010, which was followed by another voluntary removal that same year. He was deported five more times between 2011 and 2013.

In 2013, Martinez-Maldonado was charged with entering without legal permission, a misdemeanor, and subsequently deported in early 2014 after serving his sentence. He was deported again a few months later, as well as twice in 2015 — including the last one in October 2015 after he had served his second sentence, the records show.

ICE said in an emailed statement when it encounters a person who’s been deported multiple times or has a significant criminal history and was removed, it routinely presents those cases to the U.S. attorney’s office for possible criminal charges.

Cosme Lopez, spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office for the District of Arizona, declined comment on why prosecutors twice dismissed felony re-entry after deportation charges against Martinez-Maldonado in 2013 and 2015 in exchange for guilty pleas on misdemeanor entry charges.

Arizona ranks third in the nation — behind only the Southern District of Texas and the Western District of Texas — for the number of immigration prosecutions among the nation’s 94 federal judicial districts for the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, TRAC records show.

Moran told the AP in an emailed statement that the immigration system is “broken.”

“There must be serious legislative efforts to address U.S. immigration policy, and we must have the ability to identify, prosecute and deport illegal aliens who display violent tendencies before they have an opportunity to perpetrate these crimes in the United States,” he said.

**** And the FBI is putting out a warning: Hear the FBI podcast here.

Mollie Halpern: During this busy holiday travel season and beyond, the FBI is asking those who cross our nation’s borders, use airports, and other ports of entry to keep an eye out for border corruption.

Teresa Tampubolon: You just have to keep your eyes open and be situationally aware. And if you see a screener doing something they shouldn’t be, you see an official taking money—if you see something that’s suspicious, then you have to report it.

Halpern: That was Supervisory Special Agent Teresa Tampubolon, who says not only does border corruption lead to drug, weapon, and sex trafficking, it can jeopardize our country’s national security.

Tampubolon: National security is border security, it really is. To protect our nation, we’ve got to protect our borders, everything. National security is border security, and the threat is real.

Halpern: Don’t turn a blind eye. Report border corruption to the FBI at tips.fbi.gov. Support the effort on social media using #ReportBorderCorruption. With FBI, This Week, I’m Mollie Halpern of the Bureau.

 

ISIS in Latin America, Terror Funding Operations

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Islamists population report, including those in Cuba is found here. Latin America has a long history of nefarious connections starting with those in support of Nazis and harboring many that fled to the region after the fall of the Third Reich. There is Paraguay, then Argentina and Chile, even Brazil.

Now we have the modern day threat of militant Islam as a neighbor.

 Wisc.edu

 Jamaica

 Buenos Aires

 El Paso

Spanish Military Report: Islamic Terrorists Operate, Raise Cash in Latin America to Attack U.S.

JW: Latin America is a hotbed of Islamic terrorism where groups like ISIS and Hezbollah operate freely and raise large sums of money to finance terrorist activities in other countries, mainly the United States, according to a new report released by Spain’s Defense Ministry. “Latin America represents an important region for Islamic radicalism because conditions enable the free, almost undetectable, movement of their members throughout the region,” the defense document states.

Governments in the region consider Islamic terrorism to be a foreign problem, the report says, and intelligence agencies are ill equipped to handle the threat they represent. “The ignorance involving the threat of jihadist terrorism in Latin America has been such that some governments have refused to cooperate with U.S. authorities and other intelligence services,” the disturbing assessment reveals. The report was released this month by the division of Spain’s Defense agency known as Instituto Español de Estudios Estratégicos (IEEE), Spanish Institute of Strategic Studies. The document, authored by a counterterrorism expert, is titled “El radicalismo islámico en América Latina. De Hezbolá al Daesh (Estado Islámico),” Islamic Radicalism in Latin America, from Hezbollah to ISIS.

The Lebanese group Hezbollah is identified as having the largest fundraising operations in the region, though others, such as ISIS, are also prominent. The terrorist organizations have teamed up with established drug trafficking conglomerates to raise and launder large quantities of cash. The report identifies a group called El clan Barakat in Paraguay and Joumaa in Colombia as two examples of drug trafficking enterprises that have long worked with Islamic jihadists to launder money. Spain’s military experts refer to the relationships as a “marriage of convenience” between Latin American organized crime and Muslim terrorists with different objectives and interests. “Each takes advantage of the benefits that the relationship provides,” the report states.

ISIS is expanding quickly in Latin America, the report warns, revealing that around 100 individuals from the region’s large Muslim community have traveled to Syria and Iraq to join terrorist groups recently. Argentina and Brazil have the largest Muslim populations in Latin America with more than 1 million each, the report says. Venezuela, Mexico, Peru and Chile also have large and rapidly growing Muslim populations. Trinidad and Tobago, Caribbean islands on the northern edge of Latin America, are identified as “especially worrisome” because local authorities reported that 70 of their citizens traveled to Syria and Iraq to join ISIS. Additionally, nine of the islands’ citizens were detained in Turkey attempting to cross the border into Syria. The report cites a 2012 article in a military publication from Trinidad that compares the growth of radical Islam in the country to a group of violent Muslims that tried to overthrow the government in 1990.

The strong connection between Islamic terrorists and Latin America has been developing for years and Judicial Watch has reported it extensively, especially when it comes to Mexico. With a dangerously porous southern border, the collaboration between Muslim terrorists and Mexican drug cartels has created a critical threat to the United States. Last year Judicial Watch reported that ISIS is operating a camp just a few miles from El Paso, Texas, in an area known as “Anapra” situated just west of Ciudad Juárez in the Mexican state of Chihuahua. Judicial Watch also broke a story about Mexican drug cartels smuggling foreigners from countries with terrorist links into a small Texas rural town near El Paso. The foreigners are classified as Special Interest Aliens (SIA) by the U.S. government and they are being transported to stash areas in Acala, a rural crossroads located around 54 miles from El Paso on a state road—Highway 20.

Earlier this year Judicial Watch uncovered State Department records confirming that “Arab extremists” are entering the U.S. through Mexico with the assistance of smuggling network “cells.” Among them is a top Al Qaeda operative wanted by the FBI. The government documents also reveal that some Mexican smuggling networks actually specialize in providing logistical support for Arab individuals attempting to enter the United States. The top Al Qaeda leader in Mexico was identified in the State Department records, via a September 2004 cable from the American consulate in Ciudad Juárez, as Adnan G. El Shurkrjumah. In December, 2014 Shukrijumah was killed by the Pakistan Army in an intelligence-borne operation in South Waziristan. But before he died Shukrijumah helped plan several U.S. attacks, including plots to bomb Oprah Winfrey’s studio and detonate nuclear devices in multiple American cities. For years Shukrijumah appeared on the FBI’s most wanted list and, despite being sought by the agency, he crossed back and forth into the U.S. from Mexico to meet fellow militant Islamists in Texas. Back in 2014 Judicial Watch reported that, as one of the world’s most wanted terrorists, Shukrijumah piloted an aircraft into the Cielo Dorado airfield in Anthony, New Mexico.