Thursday, March 18, 2010

MEXICAN TERRORIST On Our Open & Undefended BORDERS

MEXICANOCCUPATION.blogspot.com

THIS SUNDAY RACIST FASCIST PARTY OF LA RAZA WILL ONCE AGAIN MARCH WAVING THEIR MEX FLAGS AND THREATENING THAT ILLEGALS WILL NOT VOTE FOR OBAMA, UNLESS HE GETS BACK TO HISPANDERING LIKE THEY’VE TOLD HIM. …. He will!
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TEN MOST WANTED CRIMINALS IN CALIFORNIA ARE MEXICANS!
http://ag.ca.gov/wanted/mostwanted.php?fid=mostWantedFugitives_2010-01

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MEXICANS ARE THE MOST RACIST AND VIOLENT PEOPLE IN THE HEMISPHERE. THEY HAVE LOPPED OFF MORE HEADS ON OUR OPEN & UNDEFENDED BORDERS THAN OVER IN IRAQ!!!!!!
IN CALIFORNIA ALONE THERE HAVE BEEN MORE THAN 2,000 AMERICANS MURDERED BY MEXICANS THAT FLED BACK OVER THE BORDER TO AVOID PROSECUTION! WHERE IS THE OUTRAGE?
AND YET THE LA RAZA DEMS ARE WORKING BEHIND OUR BACKS, AND AGAINST OUR EXPRESSED WILLS, FOR AMNESTY!
500 – 1,000 MEXICAN GANG MURDERS IN LOS ANGELES YEARLY.
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“The agent's corpse bears traces of the drugs a doctor administered to keep him alive during some 30 hours of interrogation, as his torturers crushed his jaw, ribs and windpipe, and drilled a hole into his skull.”

latimes.com
Editorial
Countering the cartels
The war on Mexico's drug traffickers has produced little but more violence. Will increased spending on social problems help?
3:32 PM PDT, March 17, 2010
The decomposing bodies of a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agent and his pilot are discovered wrapped in plastic bags at a ranch about 60 miles from the Guadalajara streets where they were kidnapped by the cartel controlling drug trafficking in central Mexico. The agent's corpse bears traces of the drugs a doctor administered to keep him alive during some 30 hours of interrogation, as his torturers crushed his jaw, ribs and windpipe, and drilled a hole into his skull. "We are in a war and cannot accept that Enrique Camarena died in vain," the U.S. ambassador says.

That was 25 years ago. Last weekend, a U.S. consular official, her husband and the husband of another consulate employee were fatally shot after attending a children's birthday party in Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano called the killings "brutal, unconscionable and unforgivable." This was another crime in a different city controlled by a different cartel. But it is all part of the same war of attrition that has been underway for more than a quarter of a century. What progress do the United States and Mexico have to show for it? Drug consumption in the U.S. has continued unabated, and the violence has only increased.

In the first 2 1/2 months of this year, nearly 500 people have been killed in Ciudad Juarez's drug violence, many of them bystanders to the battles among competing drug gangs and between cartels and government troops. That's in addition to the more than 2,600 killings there last year -- not across the globe in Baghdad or Kabul, but in a city on our border. The violence has driven out a quarter of Juarez's residents in the last two years.

We don't yet know whether consulate official Lesley Enriquez or her companions were personally targeted or if perhaps traffickers wanted to send a generic message to U.S. and Mexican officials. The Aztecs gang, lowly foot soldiers for the Juarez cartel, is suspected in the slayings.

President Felipe Calderon has deployed thousands of troops to Juarez in recent years, but since the killing of 15 youths at a teenager's birthday party in January set off a wave of protests by parents, he has visited the city three times and promised an infusion of money for social programs -- a kind of counterinsurgency program designed to draw unemployed toughs and gunmen away from the cartels. We hope this broader approach will have more success. The U.S. government must continue to work with Calderon not only to fight the traffickers, but to create jobs, strengthen government institutions and professionalize a legal system sadly overburdened by the need to bring the killers of Enriquez and so many others to justice.
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ACCORDING TO SENATOR LAMAR SMITH OF TEXAS, WHEN CHALLENGING SO- CALLED “HOMELAND SECURITY = PATHWAY TO CITIZENSHIPS” LA RAZA JANET NAPOLITANO, AS TO WHY OUR BORDERS ARE WIDE OPEN TO NARCOMEX, OBAMA HAS CUT ENFORCEMENT BY MORE THAN 60% IN ALL AREAS.
Obama soft on illegals enforcement

Arrests of illegal immigrant workers have dropped precipitously under President Obama, according to figures released Wednesday. Criminal arrests, administrative arrests, indictments and convictions of illegal immigrants at work sites all fell by more than 50 percent from fiscal 2008 to fiscal 2009.

The figures show that Mr. Obama has made good on his pledge to shift enforcement away from going after illegal immigrant workers themselves - but at the expense of Americans' jobs, said Rep. Lamar Smith of Texas, the Republican who compiled the numbers from the Department of Homeland Security's U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE). Mr. Smith, the top Republican on the House Judiciary Committee, said a period of economic turmoil is the wrong time to be cutting enforcement and letting illegal immigrants take jobs that Americans otherwise would hold.
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! YOU LIE! THE BELOW IS EXACTLY WHAT THE DEMS DO TO US EVERY DAY. THEY LIE ABOUT DEFENDED OUR BORDERS, JOBS, AND CULTURE, WHILE THEY CONTINUALLY PUT OUT INDUCEMENTS FOR MORE ILLEGALS TO CLIMB OUR BORDERS, AND HEAD FOR THE VOTING BOOTHS!
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Lou Dobbs Tonight
And there are some 800,000 gang members in this country: That’s more than the combined number of troops in our Army and Marine Corps. These gangs have become one of the principle ways to import and distribute drugs in the United States. Congressman David Reichert joins Lou to tell us why those gangs are growing larger and stronger, and why he’s introduced legislation to eliminate the top three international drug gangs.
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Lou Dobbs Tonight
Monday, September 28, 2009

And T.J. BONNER, president of the National Border Patrol Council, will weigh in on the federal government’s decision to pull nearly 400 agents from the U.S.-Mexican border. As always, Lou will take your calls to discuss the issues that matter most-and to get your thoughts on where America is headed.

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“The president's straddling can work for the time being. But unless he wants to end up in the sawdust, acrobat Obama will eventually have to hop on one horse and lead the way. That would have to be the horse named "Enforcement First." CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR
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“What's needed to discourage illegal immigration into the United States has been known for years: Enforce existing law.” ….. CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR


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You can contact President Obama and let him know of your opposition to amnesty for illegal aliens:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/CONTACT/

BARACK OBAMA 1600 Pennsylvania Ave, NW Washington, DC 20500 comments@whitehouse.gov Comments: 202-456-1111 Switchboard for live listener: 202 456 1414 Fax: 202-456-2461
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Here is the Department of Homeland Security's Hotline for reporting suspected illegal employees and employers: 866-347-2423 (YOU MAY BE WASTING YOUR TIME HERE. HISPANDERING OBAMA SELECTED LA RAZA JANET NAPOLITANO TO HEAD “HOMELAND SECURITY = PATHWAY TO CITIZENSHIP” FOR OPEN AND UNDEFENDED BORDERS)



FIGHTING FOR AMNESTY, UNDEFENDED BORDERS, MORE WELFARE FOR ILLEGALS, NO ID FOR ILLEGALS TO VOTE, NO ENGLISH ONLY, NO ICE, NO ENFORCEMENT OF LAWS PROHIBITING THE HIRING OF ILLEGALS, CHAIN MIGRATION TO DOUBLE THE ILLEGAL POPULATION, NO E-VERIFY, NO WALL.

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CALL NANCY PELOSI Washington , DC - (202) 225-4965 San Francisco , CA - (415) 556-4862 EMAIL NANCY PELOSI sf.nancy@mail.house.gov EMAIL FORM FOR NANCY PELOSI www.house.gov/pelosi/contact/contact.html If you are out of her district, you can still make your feelings heard: Americanvoices@mail.house.gov Senator Harry Reid 202-224-3121 in Washington DC 775-686-5750 in Reno , NV www.reid.senate.gov

THE LA RAZA OBAMA HEALTH CARE PLAN: Who Does It Benefit? BIG DRUGSTERS & ILLEGALS

MEXICANOCCUPATION.blogspot.com
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Easiest way to depress wages is to hand out inducements for even more illegals to walk across our borders, into our jobs, welfare lines, hospitals and jails!
IT IS THE LA RAZA “THE RACE” OBAMA AMNESTY PLAN

latimes.com
Opinion
Stop the bleeding in California
By Harold Meyerson
March 18, 2010
As Congress finally prepares to vote on healthcare reform -- the culmination of a battle begun 65 years ago when Harry Truman sent the first proposal for national healthcare up to the Hill -- California is awash in bad healthcare news.

Not to put too fine a point on it -- fewer and fewer Californians are insured.

A study released Monday by UCLA's Center for Health Policy Research reported that the number of uninsured Californians jumped by more than 25% from 2007 to 2009. In the earlier year, before the recession began, 6.4 million Californians were uninsured. By last year, that number had risen to a staggering 8.2 million, or 24.3% of the state's population.

Worse yet, those numbers are almost certain to rise. Anthem Blue Cross, the state's largest vendor of individual policies, recently announced it was raising premiums by nearly 40%, and with the governor determined to strike children from the state healthcare rolls to diminish the state's chronic deficit, it's entirely possible that nearly 3 in 10 Californians may be without insurance by year's end.

If California ever needed the federal government to enact a universal plan of its own, that time is now.

To be sure, the Democrats' plan wouldn't ride to the rescue immediately or completely. The exchanges, on which people will be able to buy policies -- with the assistance of government subsidies if needed -- won't be up and running until 2014, and many reforms won't take place until then. Undocumented immigrants, millions of whom live in California, won't be able to buy policies on the exchanges, which means that many of them will remain uninsured.

But the legislation will almost immediately give the secretary of Health and Human Services broad new power to regulate insurance companies, including telling them what they must cover and calling them to account for unreasonable rate increases. And it will, by 2014, cover roughly 31 million of the nation's 47 million uninsured -- 4.2 million of them in California, according to a study released Wednesday by the House Committee on Energy and Commerce.

In short, this is a plan that will provide Californians with some desperately needed help, though some parts of California need that help more than others. In October, the Urban Institute produced a study measuring the percentage of people under 65 without either public or private medical insurance in each of the nation's 435 congressional districts in 2008, and the results from California's 53 congressional districts are revealing.

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EXPAND THE MEXICAN WELFARE STATE
ANOTHER SOLUTION TO THE HEALTH CARE CRISIS WOULD BE IF WE SIMPLY STOPPED BEING MEXICO’S WELFARE AND PRISON SYSTEM. DAILY MORE ILLEGALS WALK RIGHT OVER OUR BORDERS AND INTO OUR JOBS, WELFARE LINES, AND “FREE” MEDICAL EMERGENCY ROOMS, NOW RESULTING IN THEIR MELTDOWN! WELFARE FOR ILLEGALS IN MEX OCCUPIED LOS ANGELES COUNTY IS $50 MILLION PER MONTH!
AND THEN WE HAVE THE ISSUE THAT IF THERE WERE NOT 38 MILLION ILLEGALS IN THIS COUNTRY, AND IN OUR JOBS, EMPLOYERS OF ILLEGAL MIGHT HAVE TO PAY LIVING WAGES! THAT WOULD CAUSE A CIVIL WAR! THE REASON WE HAVE OPEN AND UNDEFENDED BORDERS, AND MASSIVE WELFARE FOR ILLEGALS, IS TO INDUCE EVER MORE OVER OUR BORDERS AND KEEP WAGES DEPRESSED. IT’S CERTAINLY WORKED. THE ASSAULT ON THE AMERICAN MIDDLE-CLASS BY WALL STREET AND THE MEXICAN GOVERNMENT HAS BEEN DEVASTATING, EVEN WHILE THE NUMBER OF BILLIONAIRES AS INCREASED SIGNIFICANTLY!
FOR OUR INFORMATION, THE RICHEST MAN IN THE WORLD IS NO LONGER BILL GATES (AN OPEN BORDERS ADVOCATE) IT IS MEXICAN CARLOS SLIM!

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Some of the districts in eastern L.A. County are among the districts with the highest share of uninsured -- not surprising, since they are also among the most heavily immigrant districts in the nation. There are other clusters of the uninsured in the agricultural districts from Fresno to Salinas, in the rural north of the state and in the desert districts from the Mexican border up through the northern Mojave.

Some of these districts are represented in Congress by Democrats, who will be voting for the bill. Others are represented by Republicans, who are all on record opposing it.

In 2008, Republican Mary Bono Mack's Riverside County district ranked 54th among the nation's 435 districts in its rate of uninsured, with an un-insurance rate of 24.1% (and it has surely risen considerably since then, as unemployment has skyrocketed in the Inland Empire). Republican Devin Nunes' Fresno-area district had an un-insurance rate of 23.8%, which ranked it 59th. Six of the state's 19 Republican congressional representatives represent districts in which the percentage of uninsured ranks in the top 30% nationally.

The Energy and Commerce Committee's report found that the Democrats' bill would extend coverage to 113,500 currently uninsured residents in Nunes' district, and 126,500 in Bono Mack's.

So why would a representative whose constituents have so much to gain oppose the reform package? On her website, Bono Mack says she is "against putting the government in charge of medical decisions that should be made by patients and their doctors." Putting aside the fact that the Democrats' plan doesn't put the government in charge of these decisions, what's glaring in Bono Mack's boilerplate is that she fails to understand that thousands upon thousands of her constituents don't even have doctors and couldn't afford to see them if they did.

Like her fellow congressional Republicans, Bono Mack supports an alternative GOP proposal, which the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office says would extend coverage to a paltry 3 million uninsured Americans. To say that Bono Mack is unresponsive to some of the most basic needs of her constituents is to understate.

She and her Republican colleagues are also devastatingly unresponsive to the needs of their state. Californians are losing their insurance at a record rate, a process that their strapped state government is making worse. The sole solution on the table for Californians' plight is the bill that Congress will vote on, in all likelihood, this weekend. Voting "no" may seem to Republicans the politically smart move, but it would be a disaster for California should they prevail.

Harold Meyerson is the

MEXICAN TERRORIST - Should We Just Hand Them AMNESTY & OPEN BORDERS? OBAMA THINKS YES!

MEXICANOCCUPATION.blogspot.com
Become a blog follower – cut and paste

THIS SUNDAY! LA RAZA “THE RACE” MARCH FOR OBAMA’S AMNESTY BAILOUT = DEPRESSED WAGES AND NEW VOTERS!


WHO GETS THE LA RAZA OBAMA AMNESTY? THE ARTICLE BELOW IS A GLIMPSE OF THE PEOPLE WHO HAVE INVADED AND OCCUPIED THIS NATION!
THERE ARE 38 MILLION OF THEM HERE NOW, AND THEY’RE BREEDING FASTER THAN BUNNIES “LEGAL” MEXICAN FLAG WAVERS (SEE LA RAZA ANCHOR BABIES ON MEXICANOCCUPATION.blogspot.com). THE FASTEST GROWING POLITICAL PARTY IN AMERICA IS THE MEXICAN FASCIST PARTY FOR MEXICAN SUPREMACY of LA RAZA “THE RACE”.
MEXICANS ARE THE MOST RACIST, VIOLENT, AND CORRUPT SOCIETY IN THE HEMISPHERE.
THE ONLY REASON HISPANDERING BARACK OBAMA SELECTED JUDGE SOTOMAYER TO THE HIGH COURT WAS BECAUSE SHE HAD PROVEN TO BE A CORPORATISTS, ONE THAT PUTS THE INTERESTS OF WALL ST. ABOVE ALL ELSE, AS DOES OBAMA, AND SHE’S A “WISE LATINA BITCH”. SOTOMAYER REFERS TO CRIMINALS THAT WALK OVER OUR BORDERS AS “UNDOCUMENTED ALIENS”. OBAMA REFERS TO THEM AS HIS “NEW LA RAZA PARTY VOTERS”. IF YOU DON’T THINK ILLEGALS ARE VOTING, LOOK AT THE NUMBER OF THREATS THESE NO BORDERS – AMNESTY ADVOCATES ARE HURLING ABOUT THE “LATINO VOTE”.

IF YOU THINK THIS NATION IS IN MELTDOWN FROM THE LA RAZA DEMS, AND THEIR BANKSTER DONORS, LOOK AT WHAT THE MEXICAN INVASION HAS DONE!
IN MEX INVESTED “SANCTUARY CITY and COUNTY” of LOS ANGELES, CHARACTERIZED BY THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR AS “MEXICAN GANG CAPITAL of AMERICA”, THERE ARE 500 TO 1,000 MEX GANG MURDERS YEARLY! THESE COST NEARLY A MILLION DOLLARS EACH TO PROSECUTE.
ACCORDING TO JUDICIAL WATCH. org, THIS COUNTY PAYS OUT $600 MILLION IN WELFARE TO ILLEGALS, AND THAT DOES NOT INCLUDE HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS FOR COUNTY JAILS!
WHO WILL GET THE OBAMA LA RAZA SELLOUT?
MEXICANS TERRORIST LIKE THE ONES BELOW THAT ALREADY KNOWS THAT OBAMA IS WORKING HARD TO KEEP OUR BORDERS OPEN AND UNDEFENDED. IT’S HIS “HOMELAND SECURITY=PATHWAY TO CITIZENSHIP THAT LEADS TO THE VOTING BOOTH” SELLOUT!


latimes.com
Mexico border city relives nightmare of violence
Renewed feuding in Nuevo Laredo between drug gangs spurs old fears amid dozens of deaths.
By Ken Ellingwood
March 18, 2010
Reporting from Nuevo Laredo, Mexico
Residents of this scruffy border town thought they had seen the worst of the violence five years ago, when rival drug gangs staged wild gunfights in the streets and a new police chief was slain just hours after being sworn in.

The warfare gave way to an uneasy calm after one of the warring groups took de facto control. The number of deaths here ebbed, even as violence soared out of control in other border cities, such as Ciudad Juarez, about 500 miles to the northwest.

Now, like a recurring nightmare, dread again hangs over Nuevo Laredo amid a new bloody feud that has ignited widespread fear of a return to the earlier carnage.

Dozens of people have been killed along the border in recent weeks in clashes between northeastern Mexico's most powerful gangs: the Gulf cartel and onetime allies known as the Zetas. Both are based here in Tamaulipas -- a pistol-shaped state that hugs the Texas border and Gulf of Mexico.

Adding to the potential for skyrocketing violence, the Gulf cartel has reportedly reached out for help against the Zetas by enlisting the heavily armed trafficking group headed by Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, based in the northwestern state of Sinaloa.

U.S. officials say they have yet to confirm the alliance, but take the reports seriously. Such an alignment would reshuffle Mexico's drug underworld and could produce prolonged and bitter warfare here.

"You'd hate to have that, where Sinaloa does reinforce Gulf or Gulf is able to sustain itself in a way that this conflict between them just keeps going on and on and escalating," said a senior U.S. law enforcement official in Mexico City.

If so, Tamaulipas would be the latest battle zone along the U.S.-Mexico border. In Ciudad Juarez, a turf war between the Sinaloa group and a locally based cartel has left more than 4,000 people dead since early 2008. Last weekend, gunmen in Juarez killed two U.S. citizens -- a consular employee and her husband -- and a Mexican man married to another staff member at the U.S. Consulate there.

Here in Tamaulipas, friction between the Gulf group and the ultra-violent Zetas, which once served as its armed wing, erupted into open fighting after a Zeta leader, Victor Perez Mendoza, was slain in the border city of Reynosa in January, apparently by a member of the Gulf group.

Violent jousting may also have been stoked by the closed-door sentencing of the former leader of the Gulf cartel, Osiel Cardenas. Cardenas was sentenced on drug and money-laundering convictions Feb. 24 in a U.S. federal court in Houston to 25 years in prison, a surprisingly light sentence that has led many people to conclude that he gave authorities information about his former colleagues.

In recent weeks, a broad triangle along the Texas border from Nuevo Laredo east to the Gulf of Mexico and south into neighboring Nuevo Leon state has seen hours-long shootouts, grenade attacks on police stations and cases of gunmen commandeering cars from motorists to use as roadblocks against foes.

Residents in the area of Matamoros and Reynosa, near the Gulf of Mexico, have reported convoys carrying armed men and emblazoned with the letters "CDG," the Spanish initials of the Gulf cartel. Banners promising to extinguish the Zetas were signed by the "Cartels of Mexico United Against the Zetas."

Officials and some analysts said the feud has the potential to draw in even more Mexican trafficking groups, such as La Familia in the western state of Michoacan.

Amid a spate of shootings in late February, the U.S. Consulate in the northern industrial hub of Monterrey warned Americans to avoid traveling to Nuevo Laredo and Reynosa. It has since advised against traveling the main highways between Monterrey and those two cities.

In addition, the Texas Department of Public Safety has advised college students not to venture into Mexican border cities over spring break.

In Nuevo Laredo, a major crossing for cargo trucks, the clashes have revived frightening memories of the rampant killing that erupted when the Sinaloa group made a push for control. During the worst of the mayhem in 2005, gangs traded automatic weapons fire in the streets in broad daylight.

The conflict turned Tamaulipas into a forerunner of the extreme violence that has raked many spots around Mexico since President Felipe Calderon launched his government's war against cartels in December 2006. More than 18,000 people have since died in the drug-fueled slaughter.

The relative calm in Tamaulipas since 2005 was attributed by residents to an agreement that left it under the control of the Gulf cartel and its Zeta allies, who have used extortion and kidnapped businessmen and muzzled local reporters through threats.

Now, Nuevo Laredo is on edge again, a feeling expressed in lowered voices, sentences that trail off and vague, fear-laced references to "they" and "them."

"It is very easy to scare people who have lived for years under threat from el narco," said Gustavo Rodriguez Vega, the Roman Catholic bishop in Nuevo Laredo. "If someone says, 'They're coming,' it scares everyone."

Residents say their plight is made worse by a lack of reliable information. Local news organizations, which for years have censored themselves for fear of angering drug bosses, are not reporting on the recent violence, including shootouts that were widely witnessed.

"We can't publish anything," said one newspaper executive.

In Reynosa, about 125 miles to the southeast, two Mexico City-based journalists were seized and beaten two weeks ago. At least five other border-area journalists are missing, their colleagues say, and a radio reporter died under suspicious circumstances. Authorities said he succumbed to a diabetic coma, but colleagues say he was kidnapped and tortured, according to Reporters Without Borders, a press advocacy group.

Tamaulipas residents have been barraged by terrifying rumors -- many of them unfounded -- delivered via e-mail, text message, Twitter and Facebook.

Parents across Nuevo Laredo raced to take their children out of school in late February after word went out of an impending gun battle, a rumor that proved untrue. A separate report, also false, said the city's mayor, Ramon Garza, had been assassinated.

Garza, a member of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, which dominates the state, blamed the cascade of untruths on an effort by organized crime or political opponents "to destabilize and generate mistrust in the public" during an election year. "This was manufactured," he said in an interview.

The Tamaulipas state government has added a breaking-news feature to its website, listing incidents that are officially confirmed. But many residents distrust what they see as spin control. They swap tips by e-mail and watch anonymously posted YouTube videos showing the aftermaths of recent shootouts: charred, bullet-riddled cars abandoned next to carpets of spent bullet casings.

"Rumor, that's how everyone is getting information," said a Nuevo Laredo restaurant owner, gazing over a room of empty tables at lunch hour. He said customers have stopped coming amid the recent violence.

Nearby, machine gun-toting soldiers stood guard on the roof of a funeral home where the bodies of four gunmen were said to be stored. The troops appeared to be guarding against a possible raid by hit men to seize comrades' bodies.

Some analysts say the latest clashes in northern Mexico may yet amount to a relatively brief jostling for position in the aftermath of the Cardenas sentencing.

Alberto Islas, a Mexico City-based security expert, compared the feuding to a corporate boardroom tussle. He predicted that the Gulf cartel and the Zetas would soon make amends and get back to the lucrative business of smuggling drugs to a hungry U.S. market.

"Like businessmen, they are negotiating," Islas said. "Here they kill people. That's the difference."
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From the Los Angeles Times
Illegal immigrants again in the budget spotlight
The economic downturn has activists pushing for a measure that would limit the services Californians provide.
By Anna Gorman and Teresa Watanabe

July 10, 2009

As California lawmakers struggle with a budget gap that has now grown to $26.3 billion, one of the hottest topics for many taxpayers is the cost to the state of illegal immigrants.

The question of whether taxpayers should provide services to illegal residents became a major political issue in California's last deep recession, culminating in the ballot fight over Proposition 187 in 1994. That history could repeat itself in the current downturn, as activists opposed to illegal immigration have launched a campaign for an initiative that would, among other things, cut off welfare payments to the U.S.-born children of illegal immigrants. Those children are eligible for welfare benefits because they are U.S. citizens.

State welfare officials estimate that cutting off payments to illegal immigrants for their U.S.-born children could save about $640 million annually if it survives legal challenges.

California has roughly 2.7 million illegal residents, according to an April 2009 report from the authoritative Pew Hispanic Center, accounting for about 7% of the state's population. State officials estimate that they add between $4 billion and $6 billion in costs, primarily for prisons and jails, schools and emergency rooms. Beyond those services, the illegal population adds to the overall cost of other parts of local government, from police and fire protection to highway maintenance and libraries.

On the other side of the ledger, illegal residents pay taxes -- sales taxes on what they buy, gasoline taxes when they fuel their cars, property taxes if they own homes. The total is hotly debated, although most researchers agree that the short-term costs to state and local government are bigger than the revenues.

Many companies that hire illegal workers also withhold Social Security and income taxes from their paychecks, based on workers' invalid Social Security numbers. That money goes mostly to the federal government, not to localities. The Social Security Administration estimates that in 2007, illegal residents nationwide contributed a net of $12 billion to the system.

The largest costs to California's budget from its illegal residents are in three areas:

* Education: The state has no official count of how many students are in the country illegally because school districts do not ask. But the state legislative analyst estimated, based on data from the Pew Hispanic Center, that the state's 6.3 million public school students include about 300,000 illegal residents. At an annual cost of about $7,626 each, the total comes to nearly $2.3 billion.

* Prisons: In fiscal year 2009-10, California expects to spend about $834 million to incarcerate 19,000 illegal immigrants in the state's prisons. In Los Angeles County, illegal immigrants add between $370 million and $550 million annually to criminal justice costs, including prosecution, defense, probation and jails, according to Supervisor Mike Antonovich.

* Healthcare: The expected state tab for healthcare in fiscal 2009-10 is $703 million for as many as 780,000 illegal immigrants. Of that, $486 million goes to emergency services. But low-income illegal residents are also eligible for some nonemergency health services, including prenatal and postpartum care, abortions, breast and cervical cancer treatment and certain types of long-term care, such as stays in nursing homes. Most of the nonemergency care for illegal immigrants was authorized by the Legislature in the 1980s.

Much of those costs are beyond the control of state officials. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1982 that the Constitution forbids school districts to turn away children who are illegal immigrants. And federal law requires emergency rooms to treat everyone, regardless of citizenship.

How serious a problem those costs are is a subject of constant debate. "It is a catastrophic hit . . . on every level of government," Antonovich said.

State Sen. Denise Moreno Ducheny (D-San Diego) who heads the Senate budget committee, counters that illegal immigrants are net contributors through their taxes and labor in farming and other industries. Cutting services to illegal residents is "penny wise and pound foolish," Ducheny said.

The Center for Continuing Study of the California Economy, based in Palo Alto, has analyzed research on the costs of illegal immigration. Most studies show that at least in the short term, illegal immigrants, who tend to be poorer and have more children than average, use more in public services than they contribute in taxes, the center found.

But the center's director, Stephen Levy, said some of the long-term effects were positive. Educating illegal immigrant children, for instance, helps them eventually land better jobs and higher salaries, benefiting Californians with increased tax payments and more sophisticated work skills.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has said it is wrong to blame illegal immigrants for the state's fiscal problems. He has, however, proposed to limit welfare and nonemergency healthcare for illegal immigrants and their families. So far, the Legislature has rejected his plans.

One of the governor's proposals would place a five-year limit on state welfare payments to the U.S.-citizen children of illegal immigrants. That would affect approximately 100,000 U.S.-born children in about 48,000 California households headed by illegal immigrants, who receive a monthly average of $472. The measure could save $77 million annually, according to the governor's office.

Under another proposal, the governor could commute the sentences of some illegal immigrant felons in state prisons and shift them to federal detention centers. It costs the state $48,000 to incarcerate a prisoner, and the federal government reimburses about 12 cents on the dollar, according to state finance officials. The administration estimates that commuting sentences of 8,500 felons, along with other sentencing changes, could save $182 million, although other state analysts question that.

State cuts in health services could shift costs to counties, some of which have begun denying treatment to illegal immigrants to close their own budget gaps. "It really is a punt," said Farra Bracht of the Legislative Analyst's Office. "We just keep shoving more and more to the counties. . . . They are the providers of truly last resort."

Many state officials have called on the federal government to increase the payments it makes to the state for costs associated with illegal immigrants, because controlling the borders is a federal responsibility. So far, however, Washington lawmakers, faced with large deficits of their own, have not been willing.

And others say the nation's humanitarian traditions and long-term interests compel extending a helping hand to people such as Delia Godinez.

Godinez, a 43-year-old undocumented Mexican immigrant, left an abusive family and lives in transitional housing. Four of her five children are citizens and receive a total of about $650 each month from the state's CalWorks program. She also receives about $500 in federal food stamps and other vouchers.

Without the aid, the unemployed Godinez said, she wouldn't be able to provide for her family. She is studying English and hopes one day to open a business and get off welfare.

"I don't want to be my whole life with that help," she said.

Many advocates say the ultimate solution is to reduce illegal immigration, not to cut off critical services that could jeopardize public health and safety.

"When people come into the U.S., even illegally, they cross more than a physical barrier; they cross a moral barrier," said Steven Camarota of the Washington-based Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates immigration restrictions. "We don't like it if someone can't go to the emergency room. That's just our way."
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