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The El Paso border sector, which includes all of New Mexico and two Texas counties, reports an increase of border arrests year-to-date. The Border Patrol Chief testified in Congress last week that overall border arrests were down for the past few months, but news reports usually added that border crossings usually decline at the peak of summer heat.

Meanwhie, in a story about Nevada troops soon to be baking in the Arizona sun, the AP continues to hint that the border deployment is not keeping up to schedule, a claim that has in the past drawn attention from the White House response team. Still, we would love to see the plan for Operation Jump Start so we can judge for ourselves.

We do have an FOI request that has been forwarded to Washington. With all the celebration of guard troops as citizen-soldiers, we hope for a day when citizen-journalists will have value in the eyes of the nation, too.–gm Arrests along N.M.-Mexico border increase

July 27, 2006, 10:56 AM

WASHINGTON — Arrests of would-be illegal immigrants along a section of the Mexican border that includes New Mexico have increased 13 percent in the last 10 months, the U.S. Border Patrol said.

The increase comes as arrests along the entire U.S.-Mexico border have dropped since President Bush ordered the military to help tighten the border.

Border Patrol Chief David Aguilar said Tuesday that New Mexico arrests were up because the area had been shortchanged on resources to fight illegal immigration in the past.

The Border Patrol “had not been able to do a very good job” in the Deming and Lordsburg areas, Aguilar said.

“We just didn’t have any resources,” he said.

Spurred by complaints from New Mexico politicians, the Border Patrol added 305 agents to the El Paso Sector of the border, which includes all of New Mexico and Texas’ two westernmost counties.

Doug Mosier, a spokesman for the El Paso sector, said 1,642 agents are assigned to the sector with plans to raise that number to 1,900 by year’s end.

New Mexico also has 692 of the 4,500 National Guardsmen that Bush ordered deployed to California, New Mexico, Texas and Arizona.

From Oct. 1, the start of the federal fiscal year, through Sunday, 110,217 illegal immigrants were caught in the El Paso sector of the border. That compares with 97,194 arrests during the same period the previous fiscal year.

Along the entire U.S.-Mexican border, Aguilar reported a 45 percent decline in the number of people arrested from May 16, a day after Bush announced he would deploy National Guard troops to the border, to July 23.

Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M., said for the last several years he has been urging the Bush administration to deploy more resources to New Mexico’s border.

“I’m glad that the White House has finally recognized that things have, in fact, not been under control and has begun to take the problem seriously,” Bingaman said.

Rep. Steve Pearce, R-N.M., said there has been a “dramatic” change since August, when “high-ranking officials in El Paso seemed unaware and unconcerned about the problem, and unwilling to make significant changes.”

A spokesman for Gov. Bill Richardson says the increased arrests in New Mexico show why the governor declared a state of emergency along the border last year and freed up $1.75 million in state funds to help county law enforcement along the border.

“The National Guard deployment is a helpful stopgap, but the governor still believes that what are needed are additional, permanent Border Patrol agents along the New Mexico border,” Goldstein said.

Copyright 2006 Associated Press.

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130 Nev. Guardsmen will arrive Saturday

the associated press

Tucson, Arizona | Published: 07.28.2006

CARSON CITY, Nev. — About 130 members of the Nevada Army and Air National Guard leave Saturday for duty along the Arizona-Mexico border as part of Operation Jump Start, designed to keep illegal immigrants from crossing into the United States.
Members of the 152nd Civil Engineering Squadron, based in Reno, and soldiers from the 150th Maintenance Company based in Carson City and Las Vegas, will travel to several locations in Arizona as part of two- and three-week rotations.

They’ll assist U.S. Customs and Border Protection personnel near Phoenix, Nogales, Tucson and Yuma.
President Bush’s “Jump Start” plan called for 6,000 troops to be on the border in support roles by this weekend. But officials in border states have said the Guard would likely need more time to meet that mark.

Bush has said the mission will free up thousands of officers now on other duties to actively patrol the border. Guardsmen are building fences, conducting routine surveillance and taking care of other administrative duties for the border patrol.

Bush’s plan called for all 50 states to send troops, but not all states immediately signed commitments. Some state officials argued that they couldn’t free up Guard members because of responsibilities in their home states.

Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse

Greetings. TRAC’s new report on Immigration Judges shows vast differences in the rate at which the nation’s 200-plus immigration judges decline hundreds of thousands of applications for asylum in the United States.
In one recent period, for example, while ten percent of the judges denied asylum in 86% or more of the their decisions, another ten percent denied asylum in only 34% of theirs. The Immigration Court, a branch of the Justice Department, asserts in a mission statement that it is committed to the “uniform application of the immigration law in all cases.” Yet at one end of the scale was a Miami judge who turned down 96.7% of the asylum requests. At the other end was a New York judge who rejected only 9.8%.

To see the new study — complete with graphics and judge-by-judge data — go to http://trac.syr.edu/immigration/reports/160/ . The report is part of a new site devoted exclusively to immigration issues. This site — http://trac.syr.edu/immigration/ — has other reports on the Border Patrol apprehensions, Border Patrol staffing, the inspection process at official ports of entry, the criminal enforcement of the immigration laws, etc. Also available is a plain English glossary of words and phrases common to the immigration world and a special library of immigration studies from the GAO, Congressional Research Service and the inspectors general of several agencies.

But we ain’t on it. Texas earned three mentions Friday from Frida Berrigan as she briefed Amy Goodman on the role of the USA in supplying Israeli weapons.

Texas gets attention from Berrigan as the location where Lockheed-Martin co-manufactures the Sufa F-16 fighter, a double-seated holy terror of incoming air attacks.
Lockheed Martin does the finishing work on these 45-million-dollar weapons after they are started in Israel. The contract to build 102 Sufas will be financed by taxpayers of the USA. When the Sufas are completed, Israel will have a stock of 362 F-16s, second largest only to the US Air Force.

Boeing and Raytheon also make Berrigan’s list of arms suppliers to Israel. Both companies make missiles. Boeing, as we know, also makes planes and helicopters.

When Berrigan mentions these big names in weaponry, she hits three of the five finalists for the huge SBInet border contract that is scheduled to be let in the Fall of 2006. Is it not deeply chilling to think that these powers are competing for security along the Rio Grande?

I think we have to dissent while there is still time. We should seek to grow better things than these in the name of homeland security.

Rahul Mahajan, the former Green Party candidate for Governor, had courage enough to campaign for a de-militarized Texas.

“Homeland Security is part of a pre-planned program for domestic repression, occasioned, among other things, by fear of the possibilities of the so-called anti-globalization movement,” said that former candidate for Governor.

We now have quite a spectacle of candidates we’ll be hearing from lots and loudly. By comparison to Mahajan, ain’t they all whistlin’ Dixie?

Paul Craig Roberts argues in the subscriber edition of CounterPunch that declines in pay and availability of USA employment can be best explained by ‘free trade’ policies that encourage export of middle-class work. We offer some excerpts, beginning with another indication of suppressed public information–gm

“If outsourcing jobs offshore is good for U.S. employment, why won’t the U.S. Department of Commerce release the 200-page, $335,000 study of the impact of the offshoring of U.S. high-tech jobs? Republican political appointees reduced the 200-page report to 12 pages of public relations hype and refuse to allow the Technology Administration experts who wrote the report to testify before Congress.
Democrats on the House Science Committee are unable to pry the study out of the hands of Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez. On March 29, 2006, Republicans on the House Science Committee
voted down a resolution designed to force the Commerce Department to release the study to Congress. Obviously, the facts don’t fit the Bush regime’s globalization hype.”

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American economists, some from incompetence
and some from being bought and paid for, described globalization as a “win-win” development. It was supposed to work like this: The U.S. would lose market share in tradable manufactured goods and make up the job and economic loss with highly educated knowledge workers. The win for America would be lower-priced manufactured goods and a white-collar work force. The win for China would be manufacturing jobs that would bring economic development to that country.

It did not work out this way, as Morgan
Stanley’s Stephen Roach, formerly a cheerleader for globalization, recently admitted. It has become apparent that job creation and real wages in the developed economies are seriously lagging behind emtheir historical norms as offshore outsourcing
displaces the “new economy” jobs in “software programming, engineering, design, and the medical profession, as well as a broad array of professionals in the legal, accounting, actuarial, consulting,
and financial services industries”.

The real state of the U.S. job market is revealed by a Chicago Sun-Times report on January 26, 2006, that 25,000 people applied for 325 jobs at a new Chicago Wal-Mart. According to the BLS payroll jobs data, over the past half-decade (January 2001 – January 2006, the data series available at time of writing) the U.S. economy created 1,050,000 net new private sector jobs and 1,009,000 net new government jobs for a total five-year figure of 2,059,000. That is seven million jobs short of keeping up with population growth, definitely a serious job shortfall.

The BLS payroll jobs data contradict the hype from business organizations, such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, that offshore outsourcing is good for America. CounterPunch subscriber edition Vol. 13, No. 13

By TOM HARRIS / KVUE News

A controversy is brewing over whether or not the state of Texas should provide prisoners with free condoms.

One of the reasons this topic is coming into light is because Texas ranks No. 2 in the nation for the number of inmates diagnosed with AIDS.

Texas ranks third for number of prisoners with HIV.

About twenty ACT UP Austin members marched to the offices of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.

They are group working to stop the spread of HIV and they think condoms in prisons will help.

“It’s not just an issue that is contained behind bars people come out of the prisons they come back to our communities and bring with them anything they got in prison,” said Ruth True of ACT UP. Source: KVUE