West Coast Connection Forum
Lifestyle => Train of Thought => Topic started by: Elano on August 19, 2007, 05:11:14 AM
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Drug cartels extend their reach into Texas and Arizona. Citizens and immigrants alike are victimized.
Violent crime along the U.S.-Mexico border, which has long plagued the scrubby, often desolate stretch, is increasingly spilling northward into the cities of the American Southwest.
In Phoenix, deputies are working the unsolved case of 13 border crossers who were kidnapped and executed in the desert. In Dallas, nearly two dozen high school students have died in the last two years from overdoses of a $2-a-hit Mexican fad drug called "cheese heroin."
The crime surge, most acute in Texas and Arizona, is fueled by a gritty drug war in Mexico that includes hostages being held in stash houses, daylight gun battles claiming innocent lives, and teenage hit men for the Mexican cartels. Shipments of narcotics and vans carrying illegal workers on U.S. highways are being hijacked by rival cartels fighting over the lucrative smuggling routes. Fires are being set in national forests to divert police.
In Laredo, Texas, a teenager who had been driving around the United States in a $70,000 luxury sedan confessed to becoming a Mexican cartel hitman when he was just 13. In Nogales, Ariz., an 82-year-old man was caught with 79 kilograms of cocaine in his Chevrolet Impala. The youth was sentenced to 40 years in prison in one slaying case and is awaiting trial in another; the old man received 10 years.
In Southern California, Border Patrol agents routinely encounter smugglers driving immigrant-laden cars who try to escape by driving the wrong way on busy freeways. And stash houses packed with dozens of illegal immigrants have been discovered in Los Angeles.
But a huge U.S. law enforcement buildup along the border that started a decade ago has helped stabilize border-related crime rates on the California side; a recent wave of kidnappings in Tijuana has been largely contained south of the border.
The sprawling border has been crisscrossed for years by the poor seeking work and by drug dealers in the hunt for U.S. dollars. For decades neither the United States nor Mexico has managed to halt the immigrants and narcotics pushing north. But with the Mexican government's newly pledged war on the cartels, and an explosion of violence among rival networks, a new crime dynamic is emerging: The violence that has hit Mexican border towns is spreading deeper into the United States.
U.S. officials are promising more Border Patrol and federal firearms officers, more fences and more surveillance towers along the desert stretches where the two nations meet.
But law enforcement officials are wary of how this new burst in violence will play out, especially because the enemy is better armed and more sophisticated than ever. Among their concerns are budget cutbacks in some agencies -- including a hiring freeze in the Drug Enforcement Administration -- and community opposition to the surveillance towers.
Johnny Sutton, U.S. attorney for the Western District of Texas, said he would need at least 20,000 new Border Patrol agents in El Paso alone to hold back the tide. But that is the total number of agents that Washington hopes to have along the whole border by the end of 2009.
In six years, Sutton's office has tried 33,000 defendants, about 90% of them on drug and immigration violations. "We're body-slamming them the best we can," he said.
In Phoenix, Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio said there were 10,000 inmates in his jail and overflow tents; 2,000 of them are "criminal aliens" from the border, he said. His deputies are investigating the deaths of 13 people executed in the desert.
Jennifer Allen, director of Border Action Network, a Tucson nonprofit that supports immigrants' rights, said Washington and Mexico City need fresh approaches. "The smugglers are no longer mom-and-pop organizations. Now it's an industry," she said. "So the violence increases. That's incredibly predictable."
Raul Benitez, an international relations professor in Mexico City who also taught at American University in Washington, blames both countries for the crime wave. As long as Americans crave drugs and the cartels want money, Benitez said, "security in both directions is jeopardized."
Nestor Rodriguez, a University of Houston sociologist, said people on both sides of the Rio Grande viewed themselves as one community.
"People say, 'The river doesn't divide us,; it unites us,' " he said. "When you're at ground zero at the border, you see yourselves as one community -- for good or bad."
Rodriguez knows. His first cousin, Juan Garza, born in the United States but trained by criminals in Mexico, ran his own murder-and-drug enterprise out of Brownsville, Texas. He was executed in 2001 by the United States.
"Of course there is a spillover of violence into this country," Rodriguez said.
"It's pouring across our border, and anybody can get caught up in it."
The small town of Sierra Vista, Ariz., learned firsthand of the rising violence in 2004, when police chased a pickup carrying 24 illegal immigrants on the border town's main drag, Buffalo Soldier Trail. Speeds reached up to 100 mph. The truck went airborne, hit half a dozen cars and killed a recently married elderly couple waiting at a stoplight.
"It was just the worst kind of tragedy," said Cochise County Atty. Ed Rheinheimer. "The coyotes [smugglers] are just more willing to either shoot at the police, fight with the police, or to try to flee."
Even more brazen have been several kidnappings of 50 to 100 immigrants by rival cartels, which hide them in stash houses in and around Phoenix until families pay a ransom. One captive's face was burned with a cigarette, another person nearly suffocated in a plastic bag. A woman was raped. Fingers have been sliced off and sent back to families with demands for money.
The border-crime issue became so urgent in Arizona that top officials met in Tucson in June with their counterparts from Sonora, Mexico. Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano agreed to help train Sonoran police to track wire payments to smugglers. Sonoran Gov. Eduardo Bours agreed to improve police communications with U.S. authorities.
In the first nine months of the fiscal year, Tucson officials have surpassed last year's record of 4,559 arrests over migrant smuggling.
And so far this year, in tiny Douglas, Ariz., the Mexican consulate has identified the bodies of five Mexican nationals who died under suspicious circumstances while crossing into the United States, and he is awaiting the identification of another five he presumes were Mexicans as well. There were only seven such deaths last year.
Statewide the picture is equally bleak. Homicides of illegal crossers is up 21% over last year.
Another visible effect of the cross-border crime wave is the flood of drugs into the country.
Anthony J. Coulson, assistant special agent in charge of the DEA in Arizona, said records indicated that cocaine and heroin seizures may end up twice as high as last year. Marijuana seizures are increasing 25%. Nine months into the current fiscal year, he said, his team had already seized more pot than all of last year. "And 2006 was a record year," he said.
In the Tucson sector alone there has been a 71% increase in marijuana seizures over the last fiscal year, with the Border Patrol reporting 648,000 pounds confiscated since October.
In the Phoenix suburb of Scottsdale, Arpaio said, a cartel operative was openly selling heroin to high school students. "He was getting 150 calls a day on his cellphone," the sheriff said.
The DEA believes 80% of the methamphetamine in the United States is coming from labs in Mexico, which were set up after police raids shut down many of the labs in the U.S.
In Dallas, police are dealing with the deaths of 21 high school students from "cheese heroin," a mixture of Mexican heroin and over-the-counter cold medicine. A hit sells for $2 to $5. Several arrests of dealers have been made; now officials are bracing for the coming school season.
"It's a small packet," said Lt. Tom Moorman of the Dallas Police Department. "They can carry it in a pack of gum. Very, very small."
Antonio Oscar "Tony" Garza Jr., the U.S. ambassador to Mexico, has issued repeated notes to the Mexican government. Last year he sent an advisory to American tourists that "drug cartels, aided by corrupt officials [in Mexico], reign unchecked in many towns along our common border."
A House subcommittee on domestic security has investigated the "triple threat" of drug smuggling, illegal border crossings and rising violence, and it found that "very little" passes the border without the cartels' knowledge.
The panel found that cartels send smugglers into the United States fully armored with equipment -- much of it imported to Mexico from the United States -- including high-powered binoculars and encrypted radios, bazookas, military-style grenades, assault rifles and silencers, sniper scopes and bulletproof vests. Some wear fake police uniforms to confuse authorities as well as Mexican bandits who might ambush them.
The panel's report cited numerous recent crimes. In McAllen, Texas, "two smuggled women from Central America were found on the side of a road badly beaten and without clothing. Their captors intimidated the victims by shooting weapons into the walls and ceiling as they were raped." In Laredo, Texas, Webb County sheriff's deputies came upon 56 illegal immigrants locked in a refrigerator trailer; 11 were women, two children. After six hours, "many were near death by the time they were rescued."
It was in Laredo last summer where police encountered Rosalio Reta, then 17, a Houston native who fell under the spell of the Gulf Cartel across the river. Known as Bart, the youth was 13 when he started visiting Mexico.
"They walk across the bridge," said Laredo Det. Robert Garcia, who investigated a murder that involved Reta. "They see all the nightclubs with no age limit. They see the guys their age spending money, throwing money around, paying for everything. They like the lure, the women, the fancy cars. They start moving weapons and guns and pretty soon they start asking for money for hits."
Garcia said Reta told him how he helped break a cartel leader out of a Mexican prison. From there he moved up to become a hit man and returned to Texas behind the wheel of a $70,000 Mercedes Benz, Garcia said.
Then last year a Laredo man, Noe Flores, was killed in front of his home, shot by mistake because the cartel thought Flores was his half-brother.
In a written statement to police, Reta admitted to driving the car with two accomplices. One of them, identified by Reta as Gabriel Cardona, jumped out and "shot two rounds at first," he wrote.
"That was when he fell to the floor and then shot em 13 more rounds and that was when Jesus Gonzales [the other alleged accomplice] started shooting from the rear windows.
"Then we left the sene of the crime and we left the car like 3 blocks away. The work was done for the Gulf Cartel of Mexico."
At trial last month, a witness said Reta and the accomplices were paid a total of $15,000 for the hit. But the case ended abruptly when Reta pleaded guilty in return for a 40-year sentence; he had faced 99 years.
Webb County Judge Joe Lopez told the youth: "It's a young life. Come to terms with your God and your faith, or whatever it may be."
Cardona also pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 80 years. Gonzales was arrested but made bail, and he disappeared back into Mexico.
Reta awaits trial in a second case, involving the ambush slaying in December 2005 of Moises Garcia, shot in his car in a Laredo restaurant parking lot as his pregnant wife and family watched helplessly.
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Hey watch Traffic that to me although it is a fictional film gives a very good insight into the reality of the war on drugs and I could add and meanwhile the border between Mexico and America stays wide open despite this and what does the media do? they simply ignore this ongoing violence. It is not in the interests of big business to show anything like the reality of this wide open border with Mexico because they support a totally open policy of immigrants in order to drive down the wages.
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All they need to do is legalize all drugs fully and these drug lords will be in line at the soup kitchen with in a few years. I don't understand why the government wants to ignore a market that will be filled whether it's legal or not and as long as it's not it destroys so many more lives than it would if it was legal.
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Shallow the reason why they don't legalise drugs, is because we all know how the CIA are the major drug dealers, the so called drug barons are just the public face of drug dealing but the fact is that this war drives up the price of drugs and any perceived crack downs lead to a further increase in prices, therefore more profits for the bosses.
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I'm just saying that's how you solve it. You'd think it would be obvious to people that it's not morality that keeps it illegal but the money and of course, like welfare, it creates a viable lifestyle for the poor to throw away their lives with in stead of making something of htemselves and becoming intelligent voters (a politicians worst nightmare).
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government should just legalize drugs crime would drop alot
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The war on drugs is one thats lost. However I don't agree about legalizing all drugs. Ah, and Traffic is a very good movie, if not one of my favourites of all time.
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However I don't agree about legalizing all drugs.
You don't believe in personal freedom?
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legalising all drugs would be political suicide, even legalising weed would be dangerous polically. however i don't think legalisation is the answer, the dutch approach is best when its still illegal but its not an arrestable offense.
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However I don't agree about legalizing all drugs.
You don't believe in personal freedom?
People who want to use drugs as it is still do them and nothings stopping them.
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However I don't agree about legalizing all drugs.
You don't believe in personal freedom?
People who want to use drugs as it is still do them and nothings stopping them.
Exactly, so what's the point of prohibition in your mind? Do you enjoy the fact that all these lowlife criminals destroy towns and communities all over the world to ensure they get the money they get from drugs when they would all be put out of business in a matter of weeks if it became legal?
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However I don't agree about legalizing all drugs.
You don't believe in personal freedom?
People who want to use drugs as it is still do them and nothings stopping them.
Exactly, so what's the point of prohibition in your mind? Do you enjoy the fact that all these lowlife criminals destroy towns and communities all over the world to ensure they get the money they get from drugs when they would all be put out of business in a matter of weeks if it became legal?
Legalizing it is going to make it easier for all these lowlife criminals to get drugs and do even more stupid shit while high as a kite. Say its legal, then its either going to be cheaper to buy, resulting in more use of it and more shit to deal with, or its going to be higher than on the street and sold by whatever companies or government, resulting in even more mass production by dealers and cultivators. Legalizing drugs is only going to make the world even more full of them, which is not a good idea. You know in Vancouver every 2 weeks they have ambulances or other medical vehicles to go around certain areas of town because of junkies getting their wellfare cheques and blowing them on heroin and other drugs resulting in them overdosing. Its only going to increase that number.
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However I don't agree about legalizing all drugs.
You don't believe in personal freedom?
People who want to use drugs as it is still do them and nothings stopping them.
Exactly, so what's the point of prohibition in your mind? Do you enjoy the fact that all these lowlife criminals destroy towns and communities all over the world to ensure they get the money they get from drugs when they would all be put out of business in a matter of weeks if it became legal?
Legalizing it is going to make it easier for all these lowlife criminals to get drugs and do even more stupid shit while high as a kite. Say its legal, then its either going to be cheaper to buy, resulting in more use of it and more shit to deal with, or its going to be higher than on the street and sold by whatever companies or government, resulting in even more mass production by dealers and cultivators. Legalizing drugs is only going to make the world even more full of them, which is not a good idea. You know in Vancouver every 2 weeks they have ambulances or other medical vehicles to go around certain areas of town because of junkies getting their wellfare cheques and blowing them on heroin and other drugs resulting in them overdosing. Its only going to increase that number.
So be it. It's not my right to make sure other people take care of themselves. But here is what I think will happen if it is done this way. No way will the government legalize it with out guidelines, and most companies won't want to touch it right off the bat. The cigarette, liquor, and porn companies will. Most places that sell it will either be required or just want to have rooms where you can use it because using drugs on the street will be illegal. The drugs will be very clean as opposed to the street drugs and lower end drugs like crack may end up being passed on by more extreme now cheaper drugs. Prices will drop you can be sure of it. The current dealers and cultivators will disappear because the big businesses will take over. The street gangs will go broke and guns will now no longer be needed as much and will no longer be easily bought because the street income will go down. The appeal of the easy money street life will be gone. It will be illegal to serve someone that is already high and there will be an abundance of anti-drug and drug awareness programs paid for by the sin tax that will go along with this new industry. Ultimately, and it may take a couple generations, drugs will lose their taboo and be shown as the destructive forces they are and may people will stay away or atleast be reasonable with it. It won't go away ever but it will be as controlled as alcohol and the crime will all but cease to exist.
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Ok some good points but I still disagree with somethings, Alcohol is legal, but people still drive drunk as hell and manage to kill people. Legalizing all drugs is going to add on to that but with people driving high as a kite on heroin instead. I just don't agree, legalizing drugs will end up bringing more drugs everywhere. The only positive on legalizing drugs is for the big companies who sell them. To each his own I guess.
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Ok some good points but I still disagree with somethings, Alcohol is legal, but people still drive drunk as hell and manage to kill people. Legalizing all drugs is going to add on to that but with people driving high as a kite on heroin instead. I just don't agree, legalizing drugs will end up bringing more drugs everywhere. The only positive on legalizing drugs is for the big companies who sell them. To each his own I guess.
The other major positive is for black and latino communities all over the country that are destroyed because of the street drug trade. I agree it will lead to more drugs and I agree that people will drive high. Now I don't know what the effects are for a person under the influence of coke or heroin so I'll stop there and will not say it will add to vehicular homicides or not. The bottom line is that drugs would be legal but driving while high would not be, Maybe drug doing rooms where you leave your keys with a supervisor would be appropriate.
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Only the drug users want it legalized so yeah the only thing that happens is that the price is cheaper and the effects are better. Wanting the government in control of your drugs, that is a stupid thing. And for the people who don't do them are paying the others' health and hospital bills.
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But if drugs are illegal, how am I gonna get my paper to finance the revolution?
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But if drugs are illegal, how am I gonna get my paper to finance the revolution?
what about those diamond mines? just chop off some more limbs and get production up. You need to hook me up...i need to sharpen my floss game
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what about those diamond mines? just chop off some more limbs and get production up. You need to hook me up...i need to sharpen my floss game
Diamonds financed the revolution here in Sierra Leone, but are insufficient to finance a worldwide revolution.
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Only the drug users want it legalized so yeah the only thing that happens is that the price is cheaper and the effects are better. Wanting the government in control of your drugs, that is a stupid thing. And for the people who don't do them are paying the others' health and hospital bills.
You're talking as a Canadian right, like that the health care will cover them? But doesn't the system cover drug users anyway? Anyway I think it would be absurd to think Canada would legalize with out the government controlling it. They don't even allow alcohol to be sold outside thie control here. I'm not for that myself but better the government run it legally than the streets run illegally. And like I said the sin tax associated with the drugs would easily pay for the programs used to clean up addicts. Think of how much weed will be bought legally by 19 year olds across the country for parties and shit. None of those kids will end up in rehab programs but they will pay for rehab programs across the country for heavy drug users, and then some. And large legal grow ops will add so much to the economy creating job after job.
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You're talking as a pothead right? lol.
Well if you're for drugs being legal good for you but theres no way you can convince me legalizing every drug is going to have a positive impact on the world.
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HIDTA border task force mired in drug-war scandal
Over the past 17 years since its creation, probably no other initiative has done more in seeking to coordinate the resources of federal, state and local law enforcement in the so-called War on Drugs than the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area (HIDTA) program.
HIDTA, which operates offices across the United States, is a federally funded program with an annual budget of some $225 million that is administered by the White House’s Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP). Its mission is to enlist the power of law enforcement “teamwork” to fight drug trafficking in key areas of the United States.
But this idyllic model of law enforcement camaraderie focused on disrupting the bad boys of the narco-trafficking world appears to have more than a few bad apples of its own — stemming from the same vice that fuels the illegal drug trade: the quest for the easy buck.
In fact, a federal whistleblower is alleging that some $300,000 in federal funds under the control of a HIDTA task force in Deming, N.M., has mysteriously disappeared.
Government documents obtained by Narco News reveal that this Deming-based task force is supposed to be overseen by federal agents but instead has been taken over by a group of state and local law enforcers who seem to play by their own rules. Those same documents reveal that this Deming-based HIDTA task force is linked to a disturbing trail of bookkeeping irregularities, multiple mysterious bank accounts and even claims of law enforcement corruption.
In March of this year, the problems with the HIDTA program in New Mexico appear to have come to a head as evidenced by the following press statement issued by the office of U.S. Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M.:
The ONDCP has suspended funding for the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area program in New Mexico for repeatedly failing to comply with multiple federal guidelines over the past three years. These reportedly non-criminal infractions are related to not using HIDTA funding for core HIDTA purposes.
If we take the senator at his word, it would seem the New Mexico HIDTA funding was suspended due to some minor bureaucratic technical glitches. But what the senator seems to gloss over in his political speak is that some of the allegations involving the New Mexico HIDTA program are, in fact, extremely serious and do involve potential “criminal” violations related to waste, fraud, abuse and corruption.
Those allegations center on one particular initiative of the New Mexico HIDTA program that operates along the Mexican border in the southwestern corner of New Mexico: the Border Operations Task Force (BOTF) based in Deming. The BOTF-Deming is composed of some 25 individuals — including federal agents with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which is part of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), as well as state and local law enforcement officers from three participating New Mexico counties: Luna, Grant and Hidalgo.
Narco News recently obtained several hundred pages of documents through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request that diagnose in some detail the symptoms of the BOTF-Deming dysfunction. The documents were obtained from the U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB), which is a quasi-judicial agency charged with adjudicating cases involving alleged retaliation against federal employee whistleblowers.
Among the documents released through the FOIA request is a February 2007 final report based on a review by the ONDCP of the entire New Mexico HIDTA program. In addition, the FOIA documents include a March 2007 report by ICE’s internal affairs unit, the Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR), which last year conducted an investigation of the allegations of waste, fraud and abuse leveled at the BOTF-Deming.
(The ONDCP report can be found at this link; the ICE OPR report can be found at this link.)
Funding Freeze
On Feb. 8 of this year, less than two weeks before Sen. Domenici issued his press release about the HIDTA funds being frozen in New Mexico, the ONDCP sent a letter to the chairman of the Executive Committee of the New Mexico HIDTA program — a copy of which also was sent to the FBI.
The letter outlines the reason for the funding freeze:
From the letter:
Attached is the final report of the on-site program review of the Southwest Border High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area (SWB HIDTA)-New Mexico Region. It was conducted during the period January 22-26, 2007. … These findings detail a troubling pattern of mismanagement and are of concern because of the serious nature of the drug threat facing New Mexico.
… As a result of the serious nature of these findings, ONDCP has no choice but to withhold FY07 grant funding to the New Mexico Region until these issues have been addressed. …
The ONDCP final report was attached to that letter. It cites the problems with the Deming-based BOTF as one of the major issues of concern with New Mexico’s HIDTA program.
From the ONDCP report:
The following issues identified in the most recent OSR [on-site review] are factors supporting the OSR’s assertion of the NMREC’s [New Mexico Regional Executive Committee’s] loss of focus:
… The NMREC’s not ensuring that all initiatives adhere to HIDTA fiscal reporting requirements. Also the fact that the NMREC has not completely followed-up regarding the fiscal situation in the BOTF–Deming Initiative to ensure that it has been totally resolved.
The ICE OPR report, which includes a cover letter dated March 8, 2007, paints a picture of a dysfunctional BOTF-Deming HIDTA “team” in which the state and local law enforcers have ignored the fact that ICE is supposed to act as the lead agency for the task force. It appears, based on a reading of the ICE OPR report, that the state and local cops assigned to the HIDTA task force have essentially set up a rouge operation within ICE’s Deming office — where the BOTF is located.
From the ICE OPR report:
The first misperception is that ICE is the BOTF lead agency in name only and has resulted in the actual task force leadership being assumed by representatives from the Sixth Judicial District Attorney’s Office [covering Luna, Grant and Hidalgo counties in southwestern New Mexico], who have also assumed the position of “task force commander” while the RAC Deming is designated the Task Force Commander in name only.
… As of March 2006, ICE management’s actions to assert their leadership role and correct the task force jurisdictional misperception at the Deming BOTF have been inadequate. The task force still functioned as two separate enforcement units. When asked who was the Task Force Commander, TFO [task force officer Larry] Lutonsky [a local detective with the Sixth Judicial District Attorney’s Office] told the OPR review team that he was in charge of the state and local officers and that the acting [ICE] RAC [Resident Agent in Charge] was in charge of the federal officers [even though all of them work out of the same ICE building in Deming].
Whistleblower Retaliation
The dysfunction of the BOTF-Deming surfaced as result of an act of whistleblowing by the head of the ICE office in Deming — Caroline Richardson.
Richardson was appointed as RAC in New Mexico after the former RAC, Gayle Sawyer, retired in September 2004. While in charge of the ICE Deming office, Richardson began to discover a pattern of financial and management irregularities with the BOTF. Those problems had gone unaddressed for years under Sawyer’s watch, Richardson alleges in an October 2005 complaint she filed with the U.S. Office of Special Council (OSC), which is charged with investigating complaints of whistleblower retaliation.
In her OSC complaint, Richardson explains that she reported her concerns to the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General (DHS-OIG) in July 2005. However, after making an initial inquiry, DHS-OIG decided to turn the case over to ICE OPR. At that point, Richardson suspected the fix was in.
From her OSC complaint:
I expressed concern that it would be a conflict of interest for [ICE] OPR to investigate a case in which [ICE] management was involved. The legacy Customs Service and now ICE has historically used what used to be Internal Affairs, and is now called OPR, as a stepping stone to positions in upper management; therefore, most of management came directly from OPR. Likewise, those still in OPR are hoping to be picked up as ASACs [Assistant Special Agents in Charge] by the SACs [Special Agents in Charge] when they complete their tour in OPR.
… In El Paso, I know the two offices [ICE OPR and the investigative side of the agency] routinely socialize. This is why complaints of abuse of authority, harassment, gross mismanagement, and blatant disregard for agency policy and directives in order to reprise against employees who report wrongdoing just “disappear.”
In the wake of blowing the whistle on the BOTF-Deming, Richards was, in fact, demoted from RAC of the ICE Deming office to a lower-level group supervisor position and relocated to El Paso, Texas. (The El Paso ICE office oversees the ICE office in Deming, which is essentially a satellite office, as well as the BOTF-Deming.)
After demoting Richardson, her supervisors in El Paso attempted to paint her as an incompetent manager who had created friction between ICE and the state and local law enforcers assigned to the BOTF in Deming. Up until this point, Richardson had an unblemished record with ICE, according to her attorney, Ron Tonkin, who is a former federal prosecutor based in Houston.
The retaliation prompted Richardson to file a complaint with the OSC, which declined to take on her case. That is no surprise, since the OSC has been accused of being overtly hostile to whistleblowers under the leadership of Bush appointee Scott Bloch.
After the OSC slammed the door on her, Richardson filed a legal action with the U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board.
Her case is still pending before the MSPB, with a decision expected in the next several weeks.
The ICE OPR report uncovered by Narco News through its FOIA request describes Richardson’s allegations concerning the operations of the BOTF-Deming, in part, as follows:
[Richardson’s] allegations and [ICE OPR’s] findings concerned issues such as questionable spending, record keeping improprieties, imprudent management practices, noncompliance, insubordination, integrity [a police word for corruption] issues and internal control deficiencies.”
Richardson’s attorney, Tonkin, is much more direct in boiling down the ICE OPR report’s findings in a legal brief he filed on Richardson’s behalf with the MSPB:
This [the ICE OPR report’s description of Richardson’s allegations against the BOTF-Deming] is bureaucratese for fraud, financial abuse, and mismanagement. In fact, the [ICE OPR] Report of March 8, 2007 found what appeared to be outright fraud and criminal conduct.
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You're talking as a pothead right? lol.
Well if you're for drugs being legal good for you but theres no way you can convince me legalizing every drug is going to have a positive impact on the world.
I've never gotten high or drunk in my life, and never plan to. I also never plan on thinking it's okay to tell someone else how to live their life, so long as no one else is having their rights taken away.
How can you deny the positive effects it will have on the street gang culture and the surrounding communities?