Wednesday, June 19, 2013

Drug war cash cow now a budget drain for Hudspeth County

Hudspeth County relies on the drug war as its main income source - not combating drugs smuggled from Mexico but mostly Americans caught with weed on I-10 at a Border Patrol checkpoint in Sierra Blanca. But now that the feds won't cover county jail costs, the drug war is busting their budget. Check out this excellent story from the Center for Investigative Reporting. Here are a few notable excerpts.
In recent years, the busy immigration inspection station has put a severe financial strain on the county and, in the process, revealed the tough monetary consequences of America’s massive expansion of border security and the government’s strategy for curbing the nation’s supply of drugs and illegal immigration.

Despite its remoteness, the Border Patrol’s Big Bend sector, where Sierra Blanca sits, has seen small-time drug busts skyrocket in recent years. An influx of agents tripled the local sector’s manpower, making the agency by far the biggest law enforcement presence around.

The Border Patrol checkpoint rarely catches drug mules making their way from Mexico or border crossers hidden in trunks. Illegal immigration apprehensions in the Big Bend sector historically have been among the lowest along the border.

The Sierra Blanca station essentially has become an immigration checkpoint in name only, as the bulked-up Border Patrol has ensnared mostly Americans there – thousands of them.

Even as the U.S. Border Patrol makes more small-time drug busts, the U.S. Justice Department is generally declining to prosecute these low-level cases. The federal government has largely walked away from paying local authorities to pick up the slack.

Roughly 8 out of 10 people busted in the sector between 2005 and 2011 were Americans caught at a checkpoint, according to data obtained by The Center for Investigative Reporting. A small fraction of those busts are referred to federal agencies for further investigation and possible prosecution. At the Sierra Blanca station, 88 percent of the seizures – mostly marijuana – were traffic stops for amounts below drug trafficking thresholds.
Remarkable story. Read the whole thing. Meanwhile, downstream, the New York Times reports that the Rio Grande Valley is the new "hotspot" for illegal immigration, though the number of apprehensions are less than a quarter of what they were at their height. See their story, framed in terms of the federal immigration bill debate.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

The McAllen Monitor is reporting that Brooks County isn't prosecuting checkpoint drug cases declined by the feds. This has been going on since 2010 since they too are upset that the federal dollars to offset the prosecution costs have dried up.

The Brooks County people are pretty candid; they contend that it just isn't profitable to prosecute the current crop of drug pushers. You simply can't squeeze blood from a turnip nor money from a poor illegal who is moonlighting as a drug courier.

Anonymous said...

legalize the weed, and focus war on drugs, but they don't want that because to many pockets are being filled with the hard drugs not to mention the money the state makes from the little guys, they say the big drug dealers are using the weed money to fund ther hard drugs, i'ts just commen sence to take the $$$'s away legalize the weed!...the world would be a lot better off. then they could make a lot of tax money sell in stores like any tobacco product...BUT THAT IS JUST TO SIMPLE I GUESS!!

Anonymous said...

Cash cows in Harris county

1) In the terms of numbers, Harris County reached the status
of the most productive conviction pipeline in the history of
human race. In no other jurisdiction in Texas incarceration
numbers match those in Harris County, Texas leaves behind other
states, and the US, with its 25% of world incarcerated
population, leaves behind the rest of the world, where
incarceration rates are typically at least 10 times lower.
One should multiply Harris County figures with factor 5-7x
to get a number of those under supervision (incarcerated,
probation, parole, deferred adjudication etc). Further, one should
multiply last numbers with a factor 4 or higher to get an estimate
of those family members affected by the legal cabal. Much more were
affected previously.

2) With 100,000 misdemeanor and felony cases handled by Harris
County (not counting much more class C misdemeanor criminal
cases such as driving violations handled by municipal courts)
each year in a county with 4,000,000 population, more and more
are affected. 30-40% of those railroaded into the
system have no prior convictions. The numbers indicate that
during a time span of 20 years 20% of population will go through
the corrupt system, created by lawyers, and for the major part
for exclusive benefits of the lawyers (employment, perks,
benefits, power, position in society), and affiliates.

3) In Houston, it's not infrequent to hear a single-word
characterization of Harris County "justice" facilities as
"Gestapo". In law enforcement the system is sometimes referred
as "Houston rodeo", and current DA Anderson called it "show"
in a recent video interview.

4) Faced with utter ugliness of the process, one of the major
impressions of an innocent railroaded into the Harris County
criminal "criminal justice" system is that he is sort of
sacrificial victim that system needs for its survival and
reproduction.

5) When looking at the "all smiles" pictures of Harris County
judges and prosecutors one should have in mind that appearances
are not infrequently wrong. As history shows, the most brutal,
inhuman acts such as human sacrifices (Mexico, sixteenth century)
were routinely performed by creatures with "charming, quick"
characters, who were able to "dance with feeling", with no
visible "moral defects" with "good understanding, good mannered".
The criminal rule of Moctezuma II:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_sacrifice_in_Aztec_culture

Professions of their beliefs must not disarm and blind one too.
In more recent history, the same Nazi criminals who orchestrated
or participated in systematic slaughter of innocents in
Auschwitz most typically attended Christian church services on
Sundays, generally looked happy and even exuberantly happy,
filled with joy on "all smiles" pictures.

6) KKK connections. Former judge Poe "served" on the bench
of Harris County during steep growth in output of the conviction
pipeline in the 80s. The growth itself (aka "beginning of terror")
is connected with massive creation of artificial "crimes" in
books such as possession. Poe named his 3 daughters
in a way that the first letters from their names form "KKK".
In 2007, he confirmed his association with KKK by citing a quote
from KKK grand wizard Nathanael Bedford:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-5K1vHB27g
Poe, a bad person, a bad parent, was also called the worst
living creature in the US by the national media anchors. Poe,
a living example of how wrong to have aspiring lifelong
taxeaters, must be voted out, and deported.

One with little knowledge of Mexican history would rightly
conjecture that KKK name derives from KuKulKan, the a Maya/Aztec
snake (also Lucifer) to whom Aztec/Maya criminals in power
(period of Moctezuma II) offered human sacrificies on scheduled
basis and on massive scale.

End of the part II of indictments.

Anonymous said...

When looking at the "all smiles" pictures of Harris County
judges and prosecutors one should have in mind that appearances
are not infrequently wrong. Many innocent lives would have
been saved from knowing and correct undestanding of the facts.


1) It is a general notion in Houston that everything is crime,
most frequently articulated by lawyers. Lawyers in Houston are
not infrequently cheating, most common type of cheating is to
do absolutely nothing, and not return calls after accepting
money.

2) Artificial laws are entered into the criminal codes by
members of legal cabal almost each year. No one explicitly
agreed to abide by these laws in writing. Every new criminal
law generates at least $10,000,000 in profits for various
agencies, and increases input into the conviction pipeline,
providing healthy, non-violent, mostly male and young able
convicts for a variety of private and public prison enterprises
treating them as slaves (slavery is legal due to the loophole
by design in Amendment XIII).

3) When witnessing slave trading in New Orleans in 1828,
Lincoln said "If I ever get a chance to hit this thing I'll
hit it hard". In 1862 Lincoln executed slave trader Nathaniel
Gordon:
http://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-by-era/american-civil-war/
resources/lincoln-execution-slave-trader-1862

4) After close examination of the essence of judges work in
Harris County, I don't think they are decent people. If they
worked at least 6 months on the bench in the period when
John Holmes was DA, did not quit and did not write about
atrocities, it applies to all 37 of them. It was Holmes who
aggressively kept a blind spot on atrocities, at the time
when terror--massive incarceration in connection with
artificial crimes such as possession--started and soared with
no precedent in history. One must never forget to add words
about dozens and dozens of thousands of innocents, whose
lives were effectively wiped out, sacrificed for the benefits,
employment, and perks of the lifelong taxeating legal cabal.

5) It might be a huge, unrecoverable mistake for an innocent
railroaded into the system to trust the system as marketed
by presstitutes for there is an inherent conflict of interest
between just, truth-seeking consideration and hidden agenda
of Harris County judges to keep docket as empty as possible,
minimizing time allocated for a case, which is possible withing
the system where more than 95% of cases never reach trial.
The only possible outcome of such criminal "criminal" system is
superficial consideration that leads to routine conviction
of scores of innocents daily. No chance that "judges" of
Harris County don't understand this. In particular, cases
where sheriffs bluntly lie, even though there is no evidence,
have virtually zero chance of proper consideration, they
are railroaded in general manner.

6) There is also a conflict of interest for a judge who
wants to keep employment and dispose cases daily keeping his
docket clear. If he keeps docket balanced and nurtures his
attention anomaly (lack of attention) to superficial
consideration, he keeps his job (bad way, criminal negligence).
If he tries to find out the ultimate truth (he must) in
every case, which requires much more time and thought, there
is no way he can handle caseload, and if he is persistent he
would likely lose his job (decent way). While in a system not
overburdened with cases the matter is much more transparent,
and everyone realistically can get trial, in the Harris County
system with 60,000 cases for 15 misdemeanor judges, and
40,000 cases for 22 felony judges it is not possible without
dirty tradeins in the mind of a judge.

7) In Harris County it is common to hear "guilty until
proven innocent", or "guilty until proven wealthy" as a
reversal of the strict legal norm "innocent until proven
guilty" known as presumption of innocence.

End of the part III of indictments.