Why the Mexican border moves south each weekend

Raoul Lowery Contreras

Unbeknown to most Americans, the U.S. border with Mexico moves south every weekend. Joining U.S. Border Patrol checkpoints just north of the border, units of the Mexican Army, Mexican federal police and members of the new Mexican National Guard man checkpoints on Mexican streets and highways doing what Americans do on the American side. The border moves south every Friday afternoon, when a giant crush of traffic flows south from Los Angeles, Orange County, San Diego and the Inland Empire counties of San Bernardino and Riverside to Tijuana and coastal Baja California. Mexicans going home for a weekend and Americans looking for breaks from the hundred-miles-an-hour life of California. Fifteen hundred miles of Mexican Baja California oceanfront are peppered with ocean front homes owned by Americans who delight in buying beach homes and condominiums for strong dollars at hugely reasonable prices unheard of in California. The border moves north on Sunday afternoons and Monday mornings when those thousands return to the United States. Several kilometers south of the border, all drivers and cars must make their way north through a Mexican Army checkpoint at a toll plaza of the scenic coast-hugging Mexican Federal Highway 1. In standard desert camouflage uniforms and American-style kevlar helmets, each soldier carries a new Mexican FX automatic rifle; the soldiers are covered by a 7.62 millimeter automatic weapon – machine gun – mounted on a Humvee aimed by a soldier to protect the individual soldiers who eye-ball each car and driver they stop. U.S. Supreme Court decisions of 40-50 years ago allow for U.S. federal agents to otherwise violate the Constitution up to 100 miles from the border. All they need is a “suspicion” that a federal law is being violated. The Constitution’s Fourth Amendment requiring “probable cause” and a “warrant” for arrest does not apply at our borders or for a hundred miles from the border. Needless to say, arrests of people who look Hispanic are heavily publicized if drugs are involved. Not well publicized is the fact that seldom is a major arrest made because sleuthing Border Patrol agents are good at their jobs. When a major arrest is made at checkpoints on Interstates 8, 5 and 15, it’s usually because Mexican cartel people call in tips to the Patrol about specific cars, people and trucks. The Mexican snitches alert agents that drugs or people are being smuggled — by Americans. Why? Because they are handsomely rewarded for doing so. Ten percent of the estimated street value is routinely paid for the tips that result in busts. Meanwhile, millions of dollars of deadly fentanyl is crossing all borders into the United States by U.S. mail. Most is manufactured in China...MORE

One of the more interesting links provided by Contreras is to a 2018 article in National Review, When Border Searches Become Unreasonable. I would encourage everyone who lives within a hundred miles of the border to read this article. Have your rights as an American citizen been diminished within this 100-mile zone? And if so, how did this politically/legally happen? It is all there.