NYT/AP: Bush Heads to Border Smuggling Hotspot, Yuma, Arizona

Bush Heads to Border Smuggling Hotspot
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: May 18, 2006

YUMA, Ariz. (AP) -- Over the past year, this stretch of desert in southwestern Arizona has become the nation's busiest immigrant-smuggling hotspot, a place of increasing banditry, violence, desperation and death.

Border Patrol agents are seeing spikes in arrests of illegal immigrants and cases every day of criminals preying on border crossers.

President Bush will get an up-close look on Thursday when he visits Yuma as part of his push to overhaul the nation's immigration laws and tighten the 2,000-mile U.S.-Mexican border by sending up to 6,000 National Guardsmen in a backup role.

An eastern Arizona stretch that includes Douglas and Nogales used to be the busiest spot along the border for immigrants trying to slip across. But authorities say a buildup there of border agents and surveillance technology caused a shift last year, pushing immigrants toward the Yuma Border Patrol station.

The shift is part of a common pattern seen in recent years: Crackdowns in one section of the border send immigrants and smugglers flooding to other areas, creating an ever-changing front....

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Immigration-Hotspot.html

right in front of him so he can personally capture them for a photo-op. Maybe he'll even have Saddam's gun in his hand. Now that's prezidentin'!

i drove along the border from san luis (i'm a map maker). it's a border jumpin' madhouse. everywhere along there, you see lots of little footprints going north. there's a prison a little way up from the border fence, and confused illegals actually climb into the prison thinking they're still heading north. i was told they find them in the exercise yard when the sun comes up... also, to the east is a marine corps bombing range and of course the pollo just come north through that also... if you can't close the border there, the whole thing's a joke. by the way, didn't this used to be part of mexico?

have his attention for some photo op, no doubt.

for Border Patrol operations under Bu*h

This latest display of phony concern about the border is nothing but a ploy to salvage republican control in the November elections.

Bush budget scraps 9,790 border patrol agents
President uses law's escape clause to drop funding for new homeland security force
Wednesday, February 9, 2005

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2005/02/09/MNGOKB837T1.DTL

"no matter what happens to America, she will always rebound -- with the most powerfully staged photo ops in the world."