New GAO report on border corruption among federal customs agents

From a GAO report published earlier this month related to corruption in border security operations:

U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) data indicate that arrests of CBP employees for corruption-related activities since fiscal years 2005 account for less than 1 percent of CBP’s entire workforce per fiscal year. The majority of arrests of CBP employees were related to misconduct. There were 2,170 reported incidents of arrests for acts of misconduct such as domestic violence or driving under the influence from fiscal year 2005 through fiscal year 2012, and a total of 144 current or former CBP employees were arrested or indicted for corruption-related activities, such as the smuggling of aliens and drugs, of whom 125 have been convicted as of October 2012. Further, the majority of allegations against CBP employees since fiscal year 2006 occurred at locations along the southwest border. CBP officials have stated that they are concerned about the negative impact that these cases have on agencywide integrity.

See related MSM coverage from Fox News, "Study finds corruption on rise among border agents, rep says security at risk," which included this tidbit from Texas Congressman Mike McCaul: "In fiscal year 2011 alone, the DHS Inspector General received almost 900 allegations of corruption from within CBP and ICE." 

Though unrelated to the Customs service, the corruption angle provides an opportunity to link to a remarkable story from the Houston Chronicle about a Houston PD cop caught laundering cartel drug money: "Ex-HPD officer faces 25 years for running drug money."

See also prior, related Grits posts:

Is Texas border crime "overwhelming" or at historic lows?

In an item titled "Texas police face continuing border crime problems," we learn from KPRC-TV that Brooks County has ceased receiving "Border Star" grant funds:

While it still receives some federal funding through partnerships with surrounding counties, the Brooks County Sheriff's Office recently lost its state Border Star funding for the quarter. 

[Sheriff Urbino] Martinez explained that with only a staff of three administrators, who also handle calls for help and take missing persons reports, the office couldn't keep up with all the paperwork required to secure the grant.

The story portrays Brooks County, population 7,200, as "facing an overwhelming amount of crime."

Brooks County averages two high-speed chases every day involving either drugs or human smuggling. 

This year, the county is also contending with 60 missing person cases and 116 bodies of illegal immigrants found murdered or dead from exposure.

Sheriff's office records show the number of bodies found in Brooks County in 2012 has more than doubled from 2011.

Grits' understanding was that most of the bodies found in Brooks County were illegal immigrants who died from exposure trying to walk through the Texas heat past border patrol checkpoints. The Austin Statesman reported last year that "Most of the bodies were those of illegal immigrants crossing the brush trying to avoid the U.S. Border Patrol checkpoint in Falfurrias and not victims of direct assaults, according to the Brooks County sheriff's department." Similarly, at the Texas Observer, Melissa del Bosque reported last year that "One of the deadliest corridors along the U.S.-Mexico border is a remote stretch of ranchland in tiny Brooks County." But I suppose it's possible there are murders interspersed with those more pedestrian, if no less tragic, deaths from heat and dehydration. If so, Grits has never heard additional details.

Remarkably, asset forfeiture made up 37.5% of the Brooks County Sheriff's budget last year. While "the sheriff's office's actual budget for 2011-2012 was $620,186.90," reported the TV station, that was supplemented with "an additional $387,834 from asset seizure funds."

With all this action reported by the Brooks County Sheriff, it's ironic and puzzling that larger cities along the border continue to see crime fall to historically low rates. USA Today had a story last week titled, "Violent crime falls in US cities along the Mexico border," where we learn that, remarkably, "Ten of the 13 largest cities in Texas, Arizona and California closest to the Mexico border recorded reductions in overall violent crime, according to the latest FBI’s Uniform Crime Report. Eleven of the 13 also saw reductions in property crime, including burglary and car theft." Here's a notable excerpt from that data-driven article:

While the largest of the border cities -- San Diego and El Paso -- also reported declines, murders in each city jumped in 2011. Yet city officials cautioned that the rise in homicides could not be attributed to a spillover in violence from Mexico.

El Paso recorded 16 murders in 2011, up from just five in 2010, the fewest since 1964. This year, the number is up to 23 killings. But police Sgt. Chris Mears says the larger numbers are within range of the average for the past 20 years.

"None of these homicides are in any way spillover violence from Mexico," Mears says, adding that a number of the homicides have involved child abuse resulting in death.

San Diego County Sheriff Cmdr. David Myers says the rise in murder there â(euro) " from 29 in 2010 to 38 in 2011 â(euro) " was largely attributed to a "flurry" of domestic-related disputes. None of the deaths were linked to Mexican violence, though Myers says the cartels remain active in the region.

El Paso’s proximity to one of the most violent cities in Mexico and world, Ciudad Juarez, prompted widespread fear last year that Mexican violence -- which claimed 3,400 lives in Juarez alone in 2010 -- was washing into U.S. border cities.

But a 2011 USA TODAY analysis of crime data reported by 1,600 law enforcement agencies in four border states found that violent crime rates on the U.S. side of the southwestern border have been falling for years.

The analysis concluded that U.S. cities near the border are statistically safer, on average, than others in their states. The new FBI numbers follow that same pattern.

It's hard to square these sorts of stories. The Brooks County Sheriff reports very few offenses in annual Uniform Crime Reports, which form the basis for USA Today's calculations. The FY 2011 jurisdiction-level report isn't up on the DPS website yet, but they reported one murder in 2009 - the first since the turn of the century - and none in 2010, when the Sheriff's office reported 14 total index-crime offenses. That hardly seems like an overwhelming caseload. One also wonders, if the agency engages in two high-speed chases per day, why those offenders haven't shown up over the last decade ( FY '11 and '12 data aren't available yet from DPS) in the Sheriff's UCR reports? One senses a whiff of exaggeration in the Sheriff's breathless account.

Is border crime "overwhelming" or low as ever? As is often the case one can find news sources, like those quoted in this post, that take both sides of the question. But when one source relies on data analysis and the other on anecdote and hype, my gut generally tells me to go with the folks crunching the data.

The sharpshooter who wasn't

A DPS sharpshooter in a helicopter aiming to take out the tires of a fleeing pickup truck missed and killed two undocumented immigrants in Hidalgo County, causing the local DA to request that DPS quit shooting at fleeing cars from helicopters. The term "sharpshooter" seems misplaced in describing such an episode; mere "shooter" would be more accurate. Notably, the Houston Chronicle reported, "a nationally known use-of-force expert has said he had never heard of a U.S. law enforcement agency with a similar policy." Compare this episode to an Austin case where an officer was recently fired for shooting at a fleeing vehicle. After the US Supreme Court issued Tennessee v. Garner back in the '80s, most local law enforcement agencies changed their policies on shooting at fleeing vehicles and DPS' approach seems like an odd, outdated throwback.

MORE (11/03): DPS now says the agency employed this tactic for fear that the speeding truck would soon enter an area with schools where children might be endangered. The audio from the chase was released to the media, and it cuts both ways. To DPS' credit, it contradicted earlier reports that DPS troopers were able to tell that people were in the back of the truck. The troopers involved in the chase declared, mistakenly, that "bundles" (i.e., drugss) were under the tarp. OTOH, I just listened to the audio clip up to point of the shooting and nobody ever mentioned schools or children. If that was part of the decision making process, as DPS now asserts, it wasn't discussed by any of the DPS personnel actively involved in the chase.

DPS has asked the FBI to investigate the incident, so stay tuned. This ain't over. 

AND MORE: One more notable aspect to the audio file keeps nagging at me. Dispatchers asked repeatedly right after the shooting whether there were any injuries, whether they should send an ambulance, etc., to which personnel at the scene responded with six minutes of radio silence on the subject. After someone on the ground finally answered, yes there were injuries, the dispatcher sarcastically asked if in the future "can we call him on the phone if he's not going to answer the radio?" Can you imagine those intense six minutes? What goes through a trooper, game warden or police officer's mind as the dispatcher's question rings out, unanswered over the radio - "Are there any injuries?" "Do you need an ambulance?"- all the while with the bodies of two sniper victims laying in the back of the truck? The living vehicle occupants had bailed at the 9:30 mark on the audio, and at least one had already been caught before the eleven minute mark; on-the-scene personnel confirmed the injuries at the 17:12 mark. Were there officers at the scene - troopers or perhaps from the game warden or other agencies - who could or should have seen these injured folks but delayed responding, perhaps panicked at their mistake over the cargo? There were 10 to 12 units at the scene, one officer estimated. Wouldn't somebody have looked in the truck bed that minutes earlier they thought was carrying a dope load? Those are the sorts of questions, one supposes, the FBI will be burrowing into soon.

GEO Group employees implicated in straw purchases of guns for cartel

Good heavens! Reported AP:

Six of the seven Laredo residents who pleaded guilty to illegally buying guns Monday worked at a federal detention center.

Federal prosecutors say the six worked at the Rio Grande Detention Center in Laredo. The center is privately managed by The Geo Group and holds federal detainees awaiting trial for the U.S. Marshals Service. The seventh was a close friend of one of them.

Prosecutors alleged that in 2011, the group acquired 16 guns, mostly semi-automatic rifles of the sort preferred by organized criminal groups in Mexico. In the purchases, they indicated they were buying the guns for their own use. However, they were being paid to buy them for someone else, a tactic known as straw purchases.

Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/2012/09/10/4806787/6-detention-center-employees-guilty.html#storylink=cpy

Fast and Furious, Rick Perry's chutzpah, and the politics of executive privilege

Governor Rick Perry today compared Barack Obama to Richard Nixon for using executive privilege to conceal documents in Congress' "Fast and Furious" investigation, which takes a lot of chutzpah considering Perry's record on transparency.

Said Perry to CBS' Bob Scheiffer, "If this President over the past three and a half years had made any effort to secure the border instead of running operations like Fast and Furious ..." then he trailed off into his Nixon comparison without finishing the thought. It's a bizarre framing of the issue since the Obama Administration has beefed up border security (a buildup, incidentally, that this blog has criticized) more than any time since Woodrow Wilson sent the Army there in 1916.

Grits must admit, I'm befuddled at how ineptly the Obama Administration has handled the "Fast and Furious" investigation by Congress. In politics, it's often not the act itself that gets you in trouble but the coverup. The politically smart thing to do would have been to release everything, continuously point out the bungled undercover operation was planned and launched during the Bush Administration, fire an ATF administrator or three, and put the issue as quickly as possible in the rearview mirror. The most logical reason for NOT doing that is in fact the one cited by Attorney General Eric Holder and dismissed out of hand by his partisan critics - the possibility of revealing undercover agents and sources. (Ironically, President Bush used executive privilege in order to cover up the outing of an undercover agent, while Obama is now being criticized for using it to keep operatives from being outed.)

To be clear, there's no doubt that Fast and Furious was one of the most screwed up undercover operations ever, with the ATF targeting cartel operatives who were also paid FBI informants. And it was a bipartisan screwup, spanning administrations. Once hundreds of deaths, including a US Border Patrol agent, were linked to guns lost in the operation, the boondoggle reached epic proportions.

But there's more than a little irony when folks like Rick Perry who pound on "border security" themes make such attacks. Mules caught smuggling drugs north or guns south are the lowest folks on the cartel totem pole, and arresting them barely makes a dent in the problem: For every mule arrested at a border checkpoint two more crop up to take their place. So if you want to go after the big fish - actual cartel leaders - the only way to do it is through long-term, large-scale undercover operations like Fast and Furious. And such operations must offer the cartels something to justify the risk: Guns, shipment protection, money laundering services, or what have you. Otherwise, why would they let an undercover operative near them?

A small portion of the public favors full-on drug legalization (for marijuana, now a majority). But if one believes the drug war should be prosecuted - if you believe the US government should be targeting drug cartels through law enforcement - I don't see any other way but long-term undercover ops like Fast and Furious. Inevitably, some of those will fail, just like the military has often failed to stop violence in Afghanistan despite their best efforts. But should they not try? Would it have been better if they'd remained paralyzed by fear of failure? And importantly, does anyone believe that without Fast and Furious, Mexican drug cartels would have been unable to buy guns and kill people with them? I certainly don't.

Ironically, Governor Perry and other Fast and Furious critics are adopting arguments normally bracketed to supporters of gun control. A common refrain from the NRA and gun-rights advocates - in the past including Governor Perry - is that guns don't kill people, people kill people. The same is true in the case of the Border Patrol agent and others killed using guns from Fast and Furious: The cartels are responsible for the people they kill, not the Obama Administration. Or, if Perry et. al. believe suppliers of guns are to blame, it's hard to understand why the same logic doesn't undermine their domestic stance on gun rights. Perhaps discomfort with that strange repositioning is behind the almost bizarre accusations by some conservatives that Fast and Furious was intended (by the administration and a shadowy cabal of gun control advocates) to fail, blow back, and thereby give Americans cause to enact stronger gun-control laws. That nutty idea is spreading in large part because there's been no real information released to counter it.

I for one hope for a quick about-face from the Obama Administration. Release as much information as possible to the general public without putting undercover operatives at risk, and release everything else under the usual confidentiality requirements for Congressional oversight of national security. Then, like gawkers slowing down on the highway to look at a car crash, we can all see the mess for ourselves and move on to our day jobs.

Spillover corruption: Texas companies laundered bribes to Mexican politicos

Grits continues to maintain that the most significant "spillover" of violence and corruption along the Texas-Mexico border, at least so far, happens north to south. Most recently, reported the Wall Street Journal ("Mexican businessman charged in Texas with money laundering," May 24), a federal indictment alleged that "an array of corporate entities in Texas" laundered money used to bribe "elected officials and political candidates in Tamaulipas," the Mexican state across the river from Brownsville whose northern and eastern borders are defined by the Rio Grande and the Gulf of Mexico. Said the Journal:

Blogging border violence

After the body count from the Mexican cartel wars has ramped up over the last five years, there's finally beginning to be more consistent reporting on the subject available in the US, including in the blogosphere. Here are a few sources I've begun following recently to stay abreast of the topic:

• Borderland Beat
• Narco Confidential
• Beyond the Border

And for the Spanish speakers among you (or those who don't mind fumbling around with Google's "translate" function), here are a few notable Spanish-language sources:

• El Blog del Narco
• Guerra del Narco
• Plata o Plomo

Combing through the blogs this morning, I ran across a story from March I'd missed at the time: An active-duty US soldier who'd signed on as an assassin for Los Zetas was shot by an undercover agent in Laredo. His cousin, who served in Afghanistan and was discharged from the Army on March 13, was among those arrested with him. This is yet another example of the real "spillover" violence on the Texas-Mexico border: US criminals crossing the river southward to commit murders and other crimes working as soldiers for competing drug cartels (warning: graphic images). By contrast, Texas border regions are among the safest in the state, particularly compared to the state's larger cities, and despite politicized misrepresentations, have not yet seen substantial violence "spillover" northward.

Grits can't follow these topics as closely as I would like, so I'm glad the bloggers above are covering the beat. With the Calderon military strategy an abject failure and the Mexican presidential elections looming this summer (a race made more or less interesting, depending on one's perspective, by a new ban on campaign attack ads), we're possibly at a pivotal moment in this epic tragedy.

Police informant use contributes to tolerating crimes, solving them, and testing community loyalties

Via Alexandra Natapoff's Snitching blog, I ran across several items on the subject of confidential informants (aka, "snitches") that may interest Grits readers.

First, out of Boston, a TV news reporter raises a question that could be asked anywhere in the country: Whether confidential informants are gaming the system, "continuing to commit crimes while exerting too much control over government investigations." "'There is almost no crime that a criminal informant cannot work their way out of,' Natapoff told FOX Undercover. 'Terrorism. Drug dealing. Murder. Child pornography. Nothing is off-limits. And because of that we send a terrible message in our criminal justice system that every crime is negotiable.'"

On the flip side of that critique, Natapoff points to a story from the San Antonio Express News that I'd missed back in January detailing court testimony from a long-time DEA informant who worked infiltrating the Zetas organized crime gang on both sides of the river, including in Laredo and Nuevo Laredo. Natapoff notes the account is "unusual in part because of the generally secretive nature of informant use, but also more concretely because trials are infrequent and therefore informants rarely testify. On the extent to which informant/cartel members have become central to U.S. law enforcement in Mexico, see this previous post: NYT: Numerous Mexican drug informants benefit U.S. law enforcement."

Finally, Natapoff points to a law review article which aims to articulate "a different understanding" of the Stop Snitching phenomenon, "arguing that poor, black community members' refusal to cooperate with police investigations should be viewed as neither ethically condemnable nor inexplicable, but rather as a natural extension of the innate human aspiration to be loyal. It does so by situating Stop Snitching within the existing literature on loyalty and asserting that the refusal to cooperate with police represents a privileging of community loyalty over loyalty to the state. Throughout the various strata of contemporary society, such privileging of the familiar over the remote is common, and Stop Snitching is neither puzzling nor reprehensible when viewed as a manifestation of this manner of prioritization." (Grits has explored some of these same themes in the past.)

Fascinating stuff. Grits hasn't focused as much in recent years on the subject of informants, but I continue to believe, with Natapoff, that it's a lynchpin issue around which a lot of problematic police practices revolve. Informants are critical for law enforcement - particularly when investigating targets like insular Mexican drug cartels - yet at the same time they represent one of law enforcement's greatest points of vulnerability for corruption and abuse of power. If you haven't read Natapoff's book on snitching and have any interest in the subject, professional or otherwise, I couldn't recommend it and her work more highly.

Mexican presidential elections and border security

What makes the escalation of the drug war in northern  Mexico so disoncerting - and also explains the impotence of the military and the federales to confront major drug cartels in that country - is that the fundamental causes of their sad situation are economic and political, not necessarily related to the success or (more often) failure of the justice system.

On the political side, high-level corruption defines this conflict in the eyes of many Mexicans I know. Under stewardship of the "PRI," which was the ruling party from the time of the revolution until 12 years ago, political favor doled out smuggling opportunities to various criminal organizations who, the theory goes, were allowed to operate in exchange for (relatively) low levels of violence. Once the PRI lost power, though, the infrastructure controlling the beast fell apart - first in Juarez and then Nuevo Laredo and beyond - corruption factionalized by region, and criminal gangs began openly competing for turf. By the time President Calderon sent the military in to take over security in northern Mexico, the government had become merely one of several competitors for political power. Think of it from a citizen's standpoint: If you want to remain safe, should you pay your taxes to the government or the criminal gang running a protection racket in your community? It's a non-trivial question.

On the economic front, NAFTA helped spawn a legitimate middle class in Mexico that didn't exist before, but it also depopulated rural areas, driving thousands of families, including  many with relatively little education or skills, out of agriculture and into an urban proletariat where the country's legitimate economic base was ill-prepared to absorb them. Such desperate poverty and lack of opportunity, combined with rational personal security decisions, underlie the cost-benefit analysis of many Mexicans who side with the drug smugglers against the government (or else waffle tentatively in the middle, waiting to identify the likely victor). This story about the massive drought in northern Mexico - for which I almost feel guilty after the bout of rain we've had -  makes me think the economic end of the equation may only get worse in the short term.

With military and police enforcement seemingly unable to stem the violence (it's declined in Juarez but expanded elsewhere in Mexico), and the Mexican public understandably opposed to direct US intervention, that pretty much leaves a poltiical solution as the only viable path forward for the troubled state. And that makes this summer's presidential elections in Mexico (replacing Calderon's successor for the next six years) more important for Texas' "border security," arguably, even than the US presidential race. In any event, the three-candidate field is now complete and it's a virtual guarantee any debates on "border security" will be more substantive and interesting than any we're seeing in the (endless?) GOP contest for US president, which should be refreshing in and of itself.

Poor Mexico: Reports from the cartel wars

A number of stories related to Mexican drug cartels and their relationship with US-side prison gangs, as well as other articles about US-side cartel infrastructure and organized crime in Mexico and Latin America, caught my attention over the holidays and may interest Grits readers:

• Houston Chronicle: Cartels cooperate with prison gangs
• Austin Statesman: Authorities work long hours to stamp out Mexican mafia
• Brownsville Herald: Prison gangs enforce brutal reign
• SA Express News: Prosecutors like RICO
• Huffington Post: Mexican drug cartels recruit young latinos in Southern California
• Catholic Online: Mexican drug cartels recruiting American teens
• Gant News Service: DEA: Mexican drug cartel extortion moving more into US
• McAllen Monitor: Gulf cartel lieutenant linked to various incidents on US side
• AP: Mexican cartels build own national radio system
  
• Wired: Radio Zeta: How Mexican drug cartels stay connected
• Global Post: Mexico police tortured suspects in Ciudad Juarez, human rights body says
• El Paso Times: Juarez forensic team a work in progress
• Honduras Weekly: Holding the United States accountable

Reading these stories reminds me of Porfirio Diaz's famous lament: "Poor Mexico, so far from God, so close to the United States!"

Roundup: Lightning strikes, news flashes, and principle ducks for cover

A few odds and ends for your holiday reading pleasure:

When lightning strikes
Williamson County District Attorney John Bradley told the Dallas News that the Michael Morton DNA test results hit him like a "lightning bolt." Though they didn't invoke the road to Damascus, they did say the Williamson County DA now "testifies to a conversion." Declaring, “We need to leave the window open a little bit more,” Bradley says he hopes speaking up will influence how other prosecutors approach post-conviction DNA cases: “I finally decided that it was more important that I overcome my concerns about people’s opinions about my shifting of my personal opinions, because I saw that it has public value in helping other prosecutors, I hope, adjust their point of view.” Abel Reyna, are you listening?

Police, distracted driving and civil liability
Austin PD accounts for the largest proportion of payouts in civil suits of any city-owned department in the capital, including the electric utility and the airport. Chief Art Acevedo blamed distracted driving on a significant number of settlements related to automobile accidents involving police officers: “They're in the patrol car environment where there is a lot of things going on. You've got the computer going on, you've got the radio going on. They're looking where they're at. They're looking for violations, they're looking for risks.”

Spillover violence documented in Valley
Law enforcement reports the first, documented example of "spillover" cartel violence in the Rio Grande Valley, if you don't count gang members from the Texas side spilling over to commit violence in Mexico. This event is an important marker, but still a far cry from the absurdist, politicized claims made recently on behalf of Texas DPS and the Ag Department.

Drug violence in Puerto Rico
Lots of interesting detail in this story about which I wasn't aware; you never hear PR violence discussed in any of the "spillover" discussions.

News flash: Prison-industrial complex exists
Conservative columnist Jonah Goldberg offers a "small apology" to his ideological foes, admitting to the existence of "a prison-industrial complex" he'd "long thought" didn't exist. He sees it as dominated by public-employees unions rather than private-prison companies and other such corporate-welfare recipients. For my part, I consider both special interests to be partially culpable for the situation, and many other elements besides. These are not mutually exclusive factors.

MSM scorns principle in criminal-justice debates
A frequent theme on this blog is that, despite how they're framed in the mainstream media, criminal-justice issues seldom fall along partisan nor strictly ideological lines. Nowhere can that be seen more clearly than in the LA Times headline, "Criminal defendants find an unlikely friend in Justice Scalia." The story by David Savage is fairly typical of modern MSM criminal-justice coverage, demonstrating many of its shortcomings all in one place. Notice how, for example, a judgment in favor of the defense (e.g., on Confrontation Clause issues) makes US Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia a "friend" to criminals. All nuance is lost: You're either for criminals or against them, though bizarrely the headline complains of Scalia, "For him, there are no shades of gray." That's the pot calling the kettle black, indeed. The newspaper quotes a law professor explaining, "This is not a left-right split. This is principle versus pragmatism" (though Grits would argue that some of Scalia's most controversial assertions on criminal justice have been profoundly pragmatic). But the issue is presented as though judges basing decisions on principle - as opposed to the convenience of government bureaucrats or the structural biases of the press - is somehow a bad thing. Perhaps, in light of the string of modern DNA exonerations and the lessons learned by John Bradley mentioned above in the top item, 21st-century journalists shouldn't be so quick to dismiss every effort to instill fairness or adhere to principle in the justice system as somehow coddling criminals? Just a thought.

Anatomy of a sweet smelling cartel money laundering front

Earlier this year, Grits argued in a post both lauded and criticized that money laundering of drug profits artificially boosted Texas' economy by propping up seemingly legitimate front businesses, contributing to the so-called Texas economic "miracle." The Texas Tribune's Julian Aguilar has an excellent feature describing one such company - a Laredo-based perfumeria, of all things - exemplifying that dynamic.

Photo by the Texas Tribune's Jennifer Whitney

Lies, damn lies and border security rhetoric: New study aims to fabricate fear

In order to justify massive amounts of border security pork and to bolster the Governor's anti-immigration bona fides, since 2006 the Governor and his former homeland security director Steve McCraw, who now leads the Department of Public Safety, have consistently overstated the amount of crime in border counties, raising the spurious specter of "spillover" violence from the cartel wars in Mexico onto the US side of the river.

In reality, any close observer of border realities knows that the real "spillover" of violence along the border is in the other direction, with Texas-based prison gangs like Barrio Azteca serving as soldiers and assassins for feuding drug cartels. In rare moments of candor, DPS officials have told the Legislature that in many cases "command and control" of cartel activity has shifted to the US side, with cartel leaders themselves seeking safety from the chaotic and violent environments south of the Rio Grande.

So I wasn't surprised to see that DPS and (for some reason) the Texas Ag Department teamed up to hire two big-name ex-generals, including former Clinton-era "Drug Czar" Barry McCaffrey, to perform an anecdote-driven security study (pdf) released last week which contradicts all available data about crime on the US side of the border to falsely claim that violence on the American side poses as great a threat as in Mexican border towns. Reported the Austin Statesman ("Report cites anecdotes to claim spillover violence," Sept. 27), despite claims by the generals that South Texas has become a war zone:

Federal crime statistics from cities and counties along the Southwest border have not shown spikes in violence, and last year the Congressional Research Service found that FBI statistics do not indicate whether there has been spillover from the violence raging in Mexico. Officials along the border have presented differing accounts of drug cartel-related violence.

Indeed, the sourcing for the most serious allegations in the report turns out to be unbelievably sketchy:

During a news conference after the report was released, McCaffrey raised eyebrows when he spoke of "hundreds of people murdered on our side of the frontier," a statistic that far exceeded the 22 killings between January 2010 and May 2011 identified by the Department of Public Safety as being related to drug cartels. When asked about the number, McCaffrey pointed to statements from a Brooks County rancher, who told reporters that hundreds of bodies had been found in the county in recent years.

Most of the bodies were those of illegal immigrants crossing the brush trying to avoid the U.S. Border Patrol checkpoint in Falfurrias and not victims of direct assaults, according to the Brooks County sheriff's department.

So the bulk of US side deaths McCaffrey attributes to drug cartels a) stem from failed attempts at illegal immigration, not the drug war, and b) weren't actually murders according to law enforcement. Such obfuscations are regrettable if not surprising, as border security issues have become highly politicized. The Statesman reported:

The issue of spillover violence has increasingly pitted Republican lawmakers and leaders, including Gov. Rick Perry, against President Barack Obama's administration.

"Our pleas for help are being met with denial and lame jokes," Texas Agriculture Secretary Todd Staples said Monday. "The threat grows more violent every day, and more resources are needed."

In May, Obama traveled to El Paso and declared the border more secure than ever, accusing Republicans of using the issue of border security to delay discussion of immigration reform.

"Maybe they'll say we need a moat," Obama said at the time. "Or alligators in the moat. They'll never be satisfied."

Earlier this month, Perry blasted Obama during a presidential debate as either having poor "intel" or being an "abject liar."

But since law enforcement sources support President Obama's interpretation of what's happening on the border instead of Rick Perry's, McCaffrey and Co. relied on anonymous sources that blatantly contradict the law-enforcement interests who've received tens of millions in border-security grants from the governor. Apparently those folks are credible when it comes to doling out pork, but are all fibbing when they report the number of murders in their jurisdictions. How much sense does that make?

Anyone familiar with McCaffrey's record as Drug Czar won't be surprised by such fabrications. Indeed, as Drug Czar he was literally statutorily obligated to mislead the public about the drug war. Apparently old habits die hard.

Surprise to no one: Drug smuggling increased after border wall built

Drug smuggling in the Rio Grande Valley increased after the much-touted border wall went up in the area, a Sheriff's lieutenant told a community meeting yesterday. Reported the McAllen Monitor ("Impact of border wall discussed at meeting," Sept. 18):

Drug trafficking from Mexico into Cameron County has increased, not decreased, since the border fence was built, a sheriff’s lieutenant said Saturday at a public meeting.

It was one of many points discussed at the “Border Wall Impact” meeting hosted by State Senator Eddie Lucio Jr. at the Fort Brown Memorial Golf Course. The event brought together legislators, city representatives, state and county law enforcement and private citizens to air concerns about the fence.

“Is the fence keeping drugs from coming in? No,” Lieutenant Rick Perez said responding to a question. “We have more drugs now than before.”

Perez is part of the special investigations unit of the Cameron County Sheriff’s Department.

This outcome was as predictable as the sunrise. Law enforcement has known for years that most drug trafficking happens at the legal checkpoints, not in between them. Even in between the checkpoints, the wall can be easily defeated with tactics ranging from flying ultralight aircraft to drop drugs on the other side to flinging drugs with large catapults to waiting accomplices on the US side. Anyway, show me a 20 foot wall and I'll show you a 21 foot ladder.

This was never more than symbolism, and even Governor Rick Perry can see a border wall adds little to border security. But state Rep. Rene Oliveira told the audience, “The wall is here whether we like it or not ... I don’t think anybody is going to tear it down. The political will is clearly nonexistent for that.” For my part, I wouldn't be so pessimistic. There were many years when one could easily say there was "no political will" to bring down the Berlin Wall, but eventually the wall fell. Who knows, maybe if Rick Perry is elected president, he'll go to Congress and demand, echoing Ronald Reagan, that they "tear down this wall."

State oversight of homeland security grants criticized in federal audit

The Fort Worth Star-Telegram broke some new ground on Sunday with a story by Darren Barbee voicing federal criticisms of the state's management of homeland security grants. The story opened:

In the years after the 9-11 terrorist attacks, Texas has grabbed at least $1.7 billion in federal Homeland Security grants, with large chunks of the money spent to beef up law enforcement communication and border security.

But a Star-Telegram examination of thousands of purchases also found a hodgepodge of spending, some of which might have taxpayers scratching their heads: a $21 fish tank in Seguin, a $24,000 latrine on wheels in Fort Worth, and a real pork project -- a hog catcher in Liberty County.

Homeland Security paid for body bags, garbage bags and Ziploc bags.

If taxpayers had a say-so, they might have gone along with some purchases, such as $24,012 in body armor for the Houston Metropolitan Transit Authority. But what about the two 2011 Camaros, each $30,884, used in Kleberg County border enforcement?

A report this year by the inspector general of the U.S. Homeland Security Department criticized the state's management of Homeland Security grants from 2006 to 2008. While the audit showed that the state was generally efficient in administering the grant programs, it said the state passed along Homeland Security money to local governments without adequately defined goals and objectives to strengthen preparedness and response to attacks or disasters.


The state also failed to adequately monitor how cities and counties or others getting money were performing their responsibilities, the report says. Instead, the state asked local officials to rate their own performance. The audit recommended that the state develop goals, milestones and work tasks to assess and improve that performance.

For the life of me I can't find the audit online, and the Startlegram failed to link to it. (If one of you finds it, dear readers, please pass it along.) Grits has criticized these grants as wasteful, so I'm scarcely surprised to read that assessment. One strongly suspects that state border security grants are overseen with even less rigor.

I want to see Rick Perry debate Gary Johnson on border security

One thing I'm looking forward to as Gov. Rick Perry prepares for his presidential run is seeing him debate former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson on border security topics. The two couldn't have more different views and Johnson's main messages on the subject are are virtually antithetical to Perry's more simplistic, voter rousing memes. A recent op ed by Johnson in the Washington Times opened:

Imagine you are a drug lord in Mexico, making unfathomable profits sending your illegal product to the United States. What is the headline you fear the most? “U.S. to build bigger fence”? “U.S. to send troops to the border”? “U.S. to deploy tanks in El Paso”? No. None of those would give you much pause. They would simply raise the level of difficulty and perhaps cause you to escalate the violence that already has turned the border region into a war zone. But would they stop you or ultimately hurt your bottom line? Probably not.

But what if that drug lord opened his newspaper and read this: “U.S. to legalize and regulate marijuana”? That would ruin his day, and ruin it in a way that could not be fixed with more and bigger guns, higher prices or more murder.

As a Republican presidential candidate, especially one who served as governor of a border state, I hear a lot from people - all across the country - about the crisis along our border with Mexico. People are often surprised when they hear me say that the “border problem” is generally misconstrued and widely blamed on the wrong things.

Governor Rick Perry, of course, is one of those who has most vociferously misconstrued the border problem in the fashion Johnson critiques, conflating immigration issues and and drug violence in a sort of hazy, mostly fact-free fear mongering. Continued Johnson:

having lived most of my life in New Mexico, done business there for decades and served two terms as governor, I will say with great confidence that just about everything we are doing to deal with “border issues” is wrong.

First, inflamed by politicians who have chosen to use illegal immigration as the ultimate wedge issue, far too many people see a connection between a lack of so-called border security and border violence. Let us be clear:

The border war is not an immigration problem - illegal or otherwise - and even if it were, fences and troops would not solve it. If anything, the crackdown measures of recent years, while doing little or nothing to address illegal immigration, have had the unintended consequence of upping the ante for the cartels trying to move drugs across that same border, resulting in greater crime and violence.

Immigration is a different issue - and one that must be addressed not with fences, but with a system for legal entry and temporary work visas that works. Real border security is knowing who is coming here and why.

Border violence, on the other hand, is a prohibition problem. Just as we did for Al Capone and his murderous colleagues 90 years ago, our drug laws have created the battlefield on which tens of thousands are dying. By doggedly hanging onto marijuana laws that make criminals out of our children while our leaders proudly consume wine at state dinners, we have created an illegal marketplace with such mind-boggling profits that no enforcement measures will ever overcome the motivation, resources and determination of the cartels.

Perry and Johnson will clash directly over these topics when the GOP primary debates ramp up in earnest. It's incredibly rare these days that I could honestly say I'm "looking forward" to a presidential debate, but I must say I'll want to watch that. Relatedly, via Drug War Rant, check out this remarkable Gary Johnson campaign ad, which hews closely to a traditional conservative value set but reaches a rather astonishing polcy conclusion:




RELATED: From the Texas Tribune, "Selling the high price of border security."

Mexican drug war roundup

A pair of recent stories about Congressional testimony last week, including from Texas DPS chief Steve McCraw related to Mexican drug cartels provided new information and deserve Grits readers' attention:

• El Paso Times: Report: Mexican Drug cartels adopting military tactics
• New York Times: US widens its role in battle against Mexican drug cartels

Relatedly several other stories about the battle against Mexican drug smuggling merit mention:

• Reuters: Top Mexico trafficker claims he was DEA informant
• Reuters: Under fire in drug war, Mexican media falls silent
• Wall Street Journal: Mexico elbows into US meth trade
• InSight: Mexico should cut hype over drug gang arrests
• Avionics Intelligence: Ultralight aircraft pilots may face stiffer penalties
• Las Cruces Sun-News: Azteca power grab in Midland stymied by RICO crackdown
• NPR: Business booms on Mexican border despite violence
• Narco News: The war on drugs and the Mexican movement to end it

MORE: Here's a copy of McCraw's testimony (pdf) to Congress, about which Grits may have more to say in the near future.

Gangs evolve, eschew 'turf' wars, thanks to Mexican drug trade

The Austin Statesman yesterday reported on a presentation to the city's Public Safety Commission on gang activity in the state capitol. The story opened:

The number of documented gang members in Austin has increased about 36 percent since 2010, and law enforcement officials say they are concerned about the connection to Mexican drug cartels.

At a meeting Monday of the Austin Public Safety Commission, police Cmdr. Donald Baker said that by the Police Department's most current count, 2,657 people belong to 113 gangs in Austin.

The double-digit increase is reflected in a year-to-year comparison: There were 2,501 documented gang members in March of this year and 1,834 in March 2010. August 2010 figures were not immediately available, Baker said.

However, Baker, who oversees the department's organized crime units, cautioned that there may not be more gang members than in the past.

The documented gang members may be on the rise, he said, because law enforcement officials may be better identifying them.

The local DEA agent in charge told the commission that "four [Mexican drug] cartels are active in Austin: the Gulf Cartel, La Familia Michoacana, the Beltrán-Leyva Cartel and the Los Zetas Cartel."

It's hard to know what to make of these data without more context. If there are really 113 active criminal street gangs operating in Austin I'd be amazed. Likely a handful of bigger groups make up the bulk of the numbers. And in any event, both the form and function of gangs are evolving, an APD gang specialist told commissioners:

gangs today, including those in Austin, are less about turf wars and "red versus blue," and more about the sales of narcotics they get from Mexican cartels.

"This is a different game," Baker said. "The cartels are bringing the dope in, and this is the distribution center. They're bringing in gangs for a narco-enterprise."

To watch the presentation, see the "Channel 6 video" from the Austin Public Safety Commission's August 1 meeting, linked here, and go to agenda item four, parts one and two. MORE: From KVUE-TV.

The real secret behind Texas' economic boom: Drug trafficking

Brilliant observation, and true: What's the secret ingredient to Texas' much-ballyhooed job creation boom that you'll never hear from Rick Perry on the presidential campaign stump? Drug Trafficking, says Joe Tone at the Dallas Observer's Unfair Park blog, offering this quote first reported by Tina Rosenberg in New York magazine:

Jack Schumacher, a recently retired Texas-based DEA agent, says that at least half the drug shipments coming from Mexico stop and offload in Texas. The product is repackaged in small units and resold at a considerable markup, with a share of the gross staying in the state. Even some of the money that gets expatriated to Mexico winds up back in Texas, laundered through Mexican currency exchanges. The state's relative security is the draw. "If you have a few million," says Schumacher, "would you invest in a war zone or a bank in San Antonio?" The DEA warns that traffickers are cleaning up their proceeds by buying businesses in South Texas. They also spend on guns, warehouses, security guards--and on luxury cars and houses. "In San Antonio, a high-dollar trafficker can buy a $2 million or $3 million place and exist for a long time," he adds.

Further, adds Rosenberg:

Mexicans in Texas are hardly new, but in recent years it’s middle- and ­upper-class families in Mexico’s north who have also made the exodus, bringing their savings and businesses with them. While most seem to be fleeing the kidnapping and extortion back home, one observer has a different take: “Some people, including me, suspect that some of these people come with funds from the drug trade,” says Michael Lauderdale, a professor of criminal justice at the ­University of Texas.

After all, picking up your money on the Texas side means avoiding the border checkpoints and customs officials altogether. The US-side infrastructure of drug cartels is a subject that seems almost willfully ignored by policymakers and the media. The Texas Department of Public Safety has maintained for years that "command and control" of much so-called Mexican cartel activity is actually on the US side of the border, and so is much of their money. Not just cartels but also mid-level distributors set up front companies that lose money as a practical matter but serve as vehicles through which they can launder drug cash, making it a lot easier to distribute either back to Mexico or to other stakeholders in the US. This is happening today on a fairly widespread basis and it means a lot more marginal businesses stay afloat - how many, no one can tell - to perform what amount to retail-level money laundering functions.

Then there's just the fact that rich people spend more money, including Mexican cartel thugs and others getting rich from drug money. Tone adds that "Last week's drug bust demonstrated some of that on a smaller scale. Dealers in Fort Worth ran a body shop with the proceeds, owned several homes and dumped truckloads of cash into their local bank (in just-low-enough amounts not to attract suspicion). Dallas's kingpins kept multiple residences, rented a storage space and, presumably, shoveled down copious tacos after doing hand-to-hands in the Lupita's parking lot."

It requires almost nothing to create a legal business structure in Texas - pay $15 for a DBA at the county courthouse and you can open a bank account and start to make cash deposits. Apply for a federal tax ID number and you can put employees on the payroll. Setting up a corporation requires only slightly more paperwork. Multiply that process by hundreds or even thousands of businesses backed by billions in liquid cartel capital, and it's no wonder the state's economy looks so much better than the rest of the country's.

There's an ironic sense in which it's a good thing for Texas' economy that "winning" the drug war is a senselessly impossible task - at least banking solely on a prohibitionist law-enforcement strategy. If it were ever actually possible to eliminate the flow of illegal drugs, our state economy would be like the dog who caught the car - lucky if not dead, much-disfigured, and walking forward into the future with a permanent limp.

'Borderline Paranoia': Did visions of 'spillover' cause pointless border shooting?

Grits has argued repeatedly that, despite the raging cartel wars south of the Rio Grande, the concept of "spillover" violence into the United States fundamentally misunderstands what's happening at the border. Yes, there have been examples of drug loads dumped into the river following high-speed chases, and even one or two shootouts across the river as US law enforcement pursues escaping smugglers. But as a practical matter, the real "spillover" violence almost all happens in the other direction, with US gangs crossing the river into Mexcio to work as hit men in the cartel wars, murdering hundreds if not thousands in Juarez and elsewhere.

By contrast, towns on the US side of the border - particularly El Paso, sister city to the site of Mexico's worst cartel-related blood bath - ironically boast among the lowest crime rates in the state and are far safer places to live as a practical matter than, say, Houston or Dallas. That could just be because cartel leaders are smart enough not to s%*t where they sleep: According to Steve McCraw, head of DPS and formerly the Governor's top homeland security adviser, "command and control" of feuding Mexican gangs for the most part operates on the American side of the border.

At the Texas Observer, though, Melissa del Bosque describes another type of "spillover" that crime stats don't account for ("Borderline Paranoia," July 13): The spillover of irrational paranoia that's come to surround right-wing nativist thinking about immigration and border security. Her recent blog post opened:

It was an early morning in mid-May. Norberto Velez, 55, and his son Norangel, 32, were driving through ranchland in far West Texas. They were looking for a piece of property to buy near the U.S.-Mexico border in remote Hudspeth County.

The Velezes made a wrong turn onto a road  that apparently led to private land, and were met by an armed, 52-year old rancher named Joseph Denton who yelled, “Get down. Get down! I’m going to kill you!” Denton then quickly fired a rifle several times, Norangel Velez told El Paso’s KTSM-TV after the incident. “He never said freeze, he never gave us a warning, he never came out in front of us and say what we’re doing here, just boom, boom, boom,” Norangel said. Norangel was shot once. His father, Norberto, jumped on top of his son to absorb the brunt of the gunfire. The older man suffered three gunshot wounds.

The shooter has yet to publicly explain his actions, but the victim thinks they were mistaken for illegal immigrants, though "I’ve lived here all my life,” he told a local TV station. Del Bosque concludes:

The shooting comes amid growing panic in the area about “spillover violence.” Nearby El Paso was recently named the safest city of its size in the nation. Hudspeth County has seen only one murder in recent years. Yet Sheriff West has advised ranchers in the area to arm themselves in case of spillover from the drug war raging just across the border. “You farmers, I’m telling you right now: Arm yourselves,” he said during a crowded town hall meeting last year. “It’s better to be tried by 12 than carried by six, and I don’t want to see six people carrying you.” Denton may have just tested that frontier wisdom.

It's terribly sad and ironic that the main "spillover" violence seen in Texas so far results from Americans shooting Americans. And nobody seems to care about the real spillover violence from US citizens committing violence in Mexico. Stopping that should be the Number One US law enforcement priority from the local to federal levels, but giving preference to that strategy would run counter to the politically convenient if tactically simplistic "spillover" myth, which holds that we only need worry when the killing crosses the Rio Grande and that Mexican violence has nothing to do with Americans. As yet, nobody in officialdom seems willing to buck that false, counterproductive narrative. (Grits believes that providing more on-the-ground detail on the drug war would protect journalists, who are among the main American "spillover" targets to date, but that idea has yet to catch on.) Eventually politicians and their MSM enablers must move beyond culture war rhetoric and confront the grim, messy realities of border corruption and violence, at least if they want to do something about the problem instead of just grandstand and demagogue about it. Despite the massive deployment of security personnel along the border, it's not entirely clear to me that's the case.