Posted by
Cary Wesberry on Friday, July 11, 2008 10:29:35 PM
EL PASO, Texas — Dozens of Mexicans — including police officers, businessmen, at least one prosecutor and a journalist — are asking for political asylum in the U.S. in a desperate and probably hopeless bid to escape an unprecedented wave of drug-related killings and kidnappings south of the border.
Under U.S. law, fear of crime is not, in itself, grounds for political asylum.
But the sharp spike in asylum applications from the areas wracked by drug-cartel violence — and the willingness of asylum-seekers to sit behind bars in the U.S. for months while they await a decision — are a measure of how bad things are in Mexico and how fearful people have become.
"It's hard. I've been doing this work for 25 years. I've been a reporter for 25 years," said newspaperman Emilio Gutierrez Soto, who is seeking asylum. "We had a life there, a house, my family. It's my country. But it's not safe for a journalist."
Between October and July, at least 63 people have sought political asylum at border crossings in West Texas and New Mexico, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection. That is almost double the 33 claims made for the entire fiscal year that ended in October. Elsewhere in South Texas, asylum applications are also up sharply.
In other sectors along the 1,969-mile border, asylum applications are coming in at the usual pace.
Immigration lawyers say they believe most of the asylum claims in the West Texas and New Mexico sector are motivated by the bloodshed in Mexico, the worst of which is just across the Rio Grande in Ciudad Juarez and surrounding Chihuahua state.
Juarez, a city of 1.3 million, has seen a record-breaking 500-plus murders so far this year. High-ranking police officers are shot in broad daylight. Businessmen who are not necessarily mixed up in the drug trade are kidnapped, held for ransom and gruesomely killed if their families don't pay up. Children have been caught in the crossfire.
"There's been nothing like this in terms of cartel activities," said George W. Grayson, a Mexico expert with the College of William and Mary in Virginia. "In the 1970s there were guerillas in several very poor southern states. But there's not been any kind of violence like this."
Immigration lawyers representing the El Paso-area asylum-seekers say they have never seen such a flood of people seeking a haven from violence in Mexico.
It is well past time to militarize our southern border, and strike a death blow to the assorted drug cartels while we are at it. Throwing billions of dollars at the ever-corrupt Mexican government will not even begin to address the issue. What we need is a show of force to protect our soveriegnty and the lives of both Mexican and American Citizens who live in the region. Innocent people have a God-given right to live. This is literally at our own backdoor.
The fact that our borders are completely unsecured during a time of war is beyond unacceptable. Government officials and politicians should be resigning for this insanity and the failure to uphold their oaths of office. Much less than 200,000 soldiers are in Iraq, there is no excuse for narco-terrorists running rampant across our southern border and well into our country at will. Juarez alone has seen 500 murders this year and it's only July! People from Mexico show-up at our border checkpoints, demand asylum, and are placed in a detention cell without bail until their petition is decided upon. These people are so terrified they would rather sit in a cell than live with the constant threat of being murdered.
Drug cartels and gangs control huge areas of land across the southern border on both sides. Our law enforcement has been begging for more funds with which to fight them, but instead our geniuses in Congress decided to give all the recent money to the Mexican government instead of protecting U.S. Citizens like they are supposed to do. The longer our government waits to take action, the worse it will get. The 500 murders in six months Juarez has been made to endure is nothing compared to what those numbers will look like in a year, and Juarez is hardly the only one. The violence will continue to spill over into our own country from cities like Juarez.
The southern border is already a verifiable warzone existing in our own country. There's one tiny problem though. We aren't participating in the war other than to bury our dead.