FLE

Border Patrol agent who shot illegal entrant charged with murder A U.S. Border Patrol agent who fatally shot a Mexican illegal entrant in January has been charged with murder by the Cochise County Attorney who said Monday that the shooting was not justified. On Monday, Cochise County Attorney Ed Rheinheimer filed a complaint against agent Nicholas Corbett charging him with four counts of homicide: first-degree and second-degree murder, manslaughter and negligent homicide. Monday's filing comes more than three months after Corbett, 39, shot and killed Francisco Javier Domínguez Rivera, 22, of Puebla, Mexico, on Jan. 12 about 150 yards north of the border between Bisbee and Douglas. The shooting occurred while Corbett was trying to apprehend Domínguez Rivera and three others who were trying to enter the country illegally. "Based on the extensive investigation presented to this office by the Cochise County Sheriff's Department, as well as the physical evidence itself, we must come to the unfortunate but inescapable conclusion that this shooting was not legally justified," said Rheinheimer in a written statement released Monday. "The evidence shows that at the time he was shot, Mr. Dominguez Rivera presented no threat to agent Corbett and agent Corbett did not act in reasonable apprehension of imminent death or serious physical injury," the statement says....
Agents: No confidence in border chief The leaders of the U.S. Border Patrol's rank-and-file agents have unanimously voted a no-confidence resolution against Chief David V. Aguilar, citing, among other things, his willingness to believe the "perjured allegations" of criminal aliens over his own agents. The resolution won endorsement from all 100 top leaders of the National Border Patrol Council (NBPC), which represents all 11,000 of the U.S. Border Patrol's nonsupervisory field agents, and targeted Chief Aguilar's lack of support for field agents, several of whom have been prosecuted on civil rights grounds involving arrests of illegal aliens and drug-smuggling suspects. "Front-line Border Patrol agents who risk their lives protecting our borders have every reason to expect that the leadership of their own agency will support them," T.J. Bonner, NBPC president, told The Washington Times yesterday. "When this does not occur, and instead they are undermined by their so-called leaders, no one should be surprised when they express a loss of confidence in those managers." The group will release the resolution to the public today. The NBPC leadership and rank-and-file agents have criticized the chief for failing to publicly support Agents Ignacio Ramos and Jose Alonso Compean, convicted in Texas and sentenced to lengthy prison terms for violating the civil rights of a drug-smuggling suspect they shot in the buttocks as he fled back into Mexico after abandoning 743 pounds of marijuana....
On tighter US border with Mexico, violence rises The harder it gets to sneak illicit cargo – immigrants or drugs or other contraband – into the US, the more violence-prone the border has become, not only for border-crossers but also for law officers trying to halt the smuggling. The escalation in violent crime is most pronounced here in Arizona, where border-tightening measures have put a clamp on the preferred route of "coyotes" and smuggling rings. During the first three months of the year, roaming bandits, heavily armed and looking to hijack valuable payloads, waged at least eight attacks on illicit shipments of people or drugs traversing Arizona. Though no US border patrol agents have been killed, they've been assaulted more often by illegal immigrants this year – 112 attacks, an 18 percent jump – in the state, compared with the same three-month period a year ago. Along the entire US-Mexico border, there's been a 3 percent increase in such attacks. Recent federal raids at drop houses in metropolitan Phoenix, say officials with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), have also turned up bigger and more sophisticated weapons caches, along with people suspected of illegal entry. "It is an unintended consequence of the hardening of the border," says Alonzo Peña, special agent in charge of ICE for Arizona. "Because of stronger border patrol, it's harder for the smugglers to get their commodity – whether drugs or aliens – across. It's costing [the smugglers] more, so the value for that commodity goes up, as does the level of protection, usually through violence." The law-enforcement agencies that track crime along the border – county sheriffs' offices, ICE, the border patrol – report an uptick in almost every category of crime in recent months, a period corresponding to the US border crackdown. Few are surprised, however....
Deputies along border to be trained in U.S. immigration law Border-crime deputies will be cross-trained in immigration law and certified by the federal government, Sheriff Clarence Dupnik said today. But he said that is not a change in his position of not enforcing federal immigration law at the expense of local law enforcement in the county. The certification will allow deputies to set up roadblocks to stop people and determine their residency status in the United States. Those would not be permitted under state law, which allows only for anti-DUI roadblocks, Dupnik said. He said any illegal immigrant would be detained briefly to be turned over to the Border Patrol, as has been the department's practice for years. They would not be arrested and booked into jail by sheriff's deputies. It costs $50 to $60 a day to incarcerate one person, for which the county is reimbursed at 3 cents on the dollar by federal law enforcement agencies, according to Pima County Supervisor Sharon Bronson, who attended today's news conference with Dupnik....
Border Patrol hiring goals raise concerns about quality of new agents The U.S. Border Patrol's push to expand the number of agents on the lookout for illegal crossings has some current and former agents worried that the pressure will lead to corner cutting and jeopardize public safety. Raising the Border Patrol's numbers from about 12,000 to 18,000 by the end of 2008 is a key element of President Bush's plan to improve security along the border, crossed by tens of thousands of illegal immigrants each year. The sprawling Border Patrol Academy in southeastern New Mexico recently started launching two 50-student classes each week, compared to one class every two or three weeks before the expansion plan was announced nearly a year ago. Some critics worry that pressure to meet the hiring goal will lead the agency to admit recruits with integrity problems. "That's a very real fear that a lot of agents have, that they will lower the standards," said T.J. Bonner, president of a union representing agents. "They have done it before." Nearly 5,000 new agents were added in a five-year period that began in 1996. That expansion was criticized for poor screening that let in some agents who were later accused of wrongdoing....
Our benevolent surveillance state The expansion of the Surveillance State is endless. Buried within an ABC report on the Virginia Tech shootings is this paragraph (h/t reader DT): Some news accounts have suggested that Cho had a history of antidepressant use, but senior federal officials tell ABC News that they can find no record of such medication in the government's files. This does not completely rule out prescription drug use, including samples from a physician, drugs obtained through illegal Internet sources, or a gap in the federal database, but the sources say theirs is a reasonably complete search. Is there any good reason whatsoever why the federal government should be maintaining "files" which contain information about the pharmaceutical products which all Americans are consuming? The noxious idea has taken root in our country -- even before the Bush presidency, though certainly greatly bolstered during it -- that one of the functions of the federal government is to track the private lives of American citizens and maintain dossiers on what we do. If that sounds hyperbolic, just review the disclosures over the course of recent years concerning what data bases the Federal Government has created and maintained and the vast amounts of data they contain -- everything from every domestic telephone call we make and receive to the content of our international calls to "risk assessment" records based on our travel activities to all sorts of information obtained by the FBI's use of NSLs. And none of that includes, obviously, the as-yet-undisclosed surveillance programs undertaken by the most secretive administration in history. The federal government data base which contains all of our controlled substance prescriptions, for instance, was mandated by a law -- The National All Schedules Prescription Electronic Reporting Act -- passed in 2005 by the Republican-controlled Congress (though with full bipartisan support) and signed into law by the "conservative" Leader. That law appropriates funds to each state to create and maintain these data bases which are, apparently, accessible to federal agencies, federal law enforcement officials, and almost certainly thousands of other state and federal employees (as well as, most likely, employees of private companies). Along these lines, the Department of Homeland Security last month promulgated proposed regulations for enforcement of the so-called Real ID Act of 2005 (.pdf). Those regulations require that every state issue technologically compatible Driver's Licenses which enable, in essence, uniform and nationwide tracking of all sorts of private information about every individual. Just as the Prescription Drug Tracking Law is "justified" by the Drug War, these national ID cards are justified by the War on Terrorism....
REAL ID Act hurts Michigan If you think going to the Secretary of State's office is a pain now, wait until the REAL ID Act takes effect in May of next year. If Michigan complies, it will be required to overhaul its drivers' licenses to meet strict federal guidelines, creating a de facto national ID card. Data on every American driver would be entered into a national database. Understandably, many people have privacy concerns about REAL ID. But this is just one reason for Michigan to join the three other states that have already refused to comply with the act. For starters, there are significant cost concerns. Originally estimated by the National Conference of State Legislatures to cost $11 billion nationwide, the Department of Homeland Security now says implementing the law will cost $17 billion. This burden would fall disproportionately on Michigan because of its large population. The reason the feds are imposing these costs is because they think it will increase national security. Many people are fixated on the Sept. 11 attack, and it was a significant event, to be sure. But we must build our security systems to address future attacks coming from any number of threats. REAL ID would be, at best, a modest inconvenience to foreigners plotting an attack, and no inconvenience at all to domestic attackers -- well, no more inconvenience than every American would have to suffer in line at the secretary of state's office. Identification is not a defense against the threats that matter most, and we should not rely on the secretary of state employees for our security. REAL ID's costs in privacy and civil liberties are not to be ignored. A nationally standardized card would be used by governments and corporations alike to harvest data about all of us, increasing the power of organizations over individuals. Ironically, REAL ID may also increase identity theft. Hackers have repeatedly broken into the Department of Veterans Affairs' veteran health care records. In 2005, Bank of America lost computer tapes containing records on 1.2 million customers. There is no reason to think that REAL ID's nationally available databases would be any less vulnerable -- and they would contain information on every American with a driver's license....
White House seeks boost to spy powers The proposal would revise the way the government gets warrants from the secretive FISA court to investigate suspected terrorists, spies and other national security threats. The administration wants to be able to monitor foreign nationals on American soil if they are thought to have significant intelligence information, but no known links to a foreign power. Under current law, the government must convince a FISA judge that an individual is an agent of a government, terror group or some other foreign adversary. The administration also wants new provisions to ease surveillance of people suspected of spreading weapons of mass destruction internationally. And the administration wants to allow government lawyers to decide whether a FISA court order is needed for electronic eavesdropping based on the target of the monitoring, not the mode of communication or the location where the surveillance is being conducted. One effect of such a change: the National Security Agency would have the authority to monitor foreigners without seeking court approval, even if the surveillance is conducted by tapping phones and e-mail accounts in the United States. Most often used by the FBI and the NSA, the 1978 FISA law has been updated several times since it was first passed, including in 2001 to allow government access to certain business records. Among other tools available now, the government can break into homes, hotel rooms and cars to install hidden cameras and listening devices, as well as search drawers, luggage or hard drives....