Border Patrol

Raul Villarreal was long a public face of the Border Patrol, frequently appearing on television news as an agency spokesman and acting as a dangerous human smuggler in a public service announcement intended to warn Mexicans about the pitfalls of entering the United States illegally. Prosecutors contend now that he knew the smuggler's role well because he really was one. Raul and his older brother and fellow former agent, Fidel, are accused of smuggling hundreds of migrants in Border Patrol vehicles.

SAN DIEGO — A widely touted Border Patrol initiative to send migrants back to Mexico far from the points they are caught entering the U.S. illegally has one of the worst track records at discouraging people from trying again, according to a new study that offers a detailed assessment of how the agency's new enforcement strategies are working. The aim of the so-called lateral repatriations is to make it more difficult for migrants to reconnect with smugglers. The Congressional Research...

During a period when some in Congress and their related policy wonks think federal employees are overpaid, here comes Christian Sanchez, a Border Patrol agent who says he was punished for refusing overtime pay. His bosses suggested that he get psychological help. Instead, Sanchez has become a whistleblower, and on Friday he plans to tell gathering on Capitol Hill that he was retaliated against because he would not take overtime for doing no work. Sanchez is an example of what the Government...

SAN DIEGO — Federal prosecutors have released a surveillance video that was used in a case against a Border Patrol agent who was acquitted last month by a jury of a charge of choking a migrant. A judge on Thursday ordered the U.S. Attorney's office to release the footage in response to a petition by news organizations, including The Associated Press. In the video, Border Patrol agent Luis Fonseca is seen kneeing Adolfo Ceja in the thigh at a station in Imperial Beach in 2011, shortly after his...

SAN DIEGO — Federal prosecutors have released a surveillance video that was used in a case against a Border Patrol agent who was acquitted last month by a jury of a charge of choking a migrant. A judge on Thursday ordered the U.S. Attorney's office to release the footage in response to a petition by news organizations, including The Associated Press. In the video, Border Patrol agent Luis Fonseca is seen kneeing Adolfo Ceja in the thigh at a station in Imperial Beach in 2011, shortly after his...

SAN DIEGO — A widely touted Border Patrol initiative to send migrants back to Mexico far from the points they are caught entering the U.S. illegally has one of the worst track records at discouraging people from trying again, according to a new study that offers a detailed assessment of how the agency's new enforcement strategies are working. The aim of the so-called lateral repatriations is to make it more difficult for migrants to reconnect with smugglers. The...

Federal investigators said Friday that preliminary findings indicated that the fatal shooting of one U.S. Border Patrol agent and the wounding of another in southern Arizona this week was the result of friendly fire. "While it is important to emphasize that the FBI's investigation is actively continuing, there are strong preliminary indications that the death of United States Border Patrol Agent Nicholas J. Ivie and the injury to a second agent was the result of an...

MEXICALI, Mexico — Arrests of illegal migrants trying to cross the southern U.S. border have plummeted to levels not seen since the early 1970s, according to tallies released by the Department of Homeland Security last week, a historic shift that could reshape the debate over immigration reform. The Border Patrol apprehended 327,577 illegal crossers along the U.S.-Mexico border in fiscal year 2011, which ended Sept. 30, numbers not seen since Richard Nixon was president, and a precipitous drop from...

Regarding the Nov. 4 news article " Mexican drug cartels establish networks in U.S. cities ": Since March 2009, the Obama administration has placed an unprecedented amount of personnel, infrastructure and technology along the southwest border. The U.S. Border Patrol has doubled in size, we've bolstered operations at our ports of entry and we've expanded successful partnerships with the Mexican government that are cracking down on cross-border crime. These actions have improved our ability to disrupt...

CALEXICO, Calif. — A decade ago, when illegal immigration from Mexico was at an all-time high, this stretch of border was as good a place as any to sneak into the United States. Migrants and smugglers could slip through the alfalfa fields outside town or plow their pickup trucks through the desert, where the biggest worries were stuck tires and getting safely across the irrigation canals. But in the past five years, the international border here has become a harder, tougher, taller barrier — an American Great Wall.

PHOENIX — A man was sentenced to 14 years in prison Wednesday for his murder conviction in the beheading of a man in Arizona who police say had stolen drugs from a Mexican drug cartel. Crisantos Moroyoqui-Yocupicio, 39, had pleaded no contest to second-degree murder in the death of 38-year-old Martin Alejandro Cota-Monroy at an apartment in the Phoenix suburb of Chandler on Oct. 10, 2010. Moroyoqui-Yocupicio faced a punishment ranging from 10 to 16 years in prison when he was sentenced by Judge Joseph...

By any measure, the U.S. government has devoted massive resources toward tightening security along the Mexican border, including adding thousands more agents and hundreds of miles of fencing in the last few years. That, plus shifting economic conditions on both sides of the border, has reduced illegal crossings, as measured by Border Patrol apprehensions, to their lowest levels in more than 40 years . So is it really worth spending more than $6.5 billion to throw more agents, drones, fences and...

Border Patrol agents would be willing to give up time-and-a-half overtime pay if it meant they would not have to be furloughed as part of mandated federal spending cuts, their union president testified Friday. National Border Patrol Council President Brandon Judd told a House subcommittee that in exchange for giving up overtime pay, agents would want a two-step increase in base pay. But Judd said the government would still come out ahead. "The reform I have just proposed saves tax...

Federal authorities would be required to establish vast new border fences and surveillance as part of a bipartisan Senate plan aimed at allowing the nation's 11 million illegal immigrants to earn permanent residency and, potentially, citizenship, aides familiar with the proposal said Wednesday. The provisions would call on the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to increase surveillance to cover 100 percent of the Southwestern border and to apprehend 90 percent of the people who attempt to enter the United...

With the winter sun's glare bouncing off his old red pickup, John Ladd drives slowly along the 10-foot wall of iron stakes and steel mesh that crosses his 14,000-acre cattle ranch, dividing his great-grandfather's land from the Mexican desert but not always keeping intruders out. "Here's where the drug smugglers cut through the wall in January," Ladd says, pointing to a large jagged square in the metal that has since been rewelded. "They use blowtorches and hydraulic...

It does not matter much, when you are on this side of the fence, whether there will be a path to citizenship or something short of it. The path that matters is the one up and over the canyons and ridges of "La Rumorosa," the Whisper Trail, one of the last places left along the California border where someone with no money and a little desert smarts has a decent shot of getting back in. Which is why Lazaro Limon, 44 and recently deported for...

NOGALES, Ariz. -- They call themselves the Tunnel Rats. Trained in close-quarter combat, psychologically certified to work in confined spaces and armed to the teeth, these four-member teams of Border Patrol agents monitor an elaborate underground warren of dark and dangerous storm drains that crisscross these twin downtowns along the border. Lately, the Tunnel Rats have been busy. In the past nine months, they have discovered 16 new tunnels dug by smugglers in Nogales to move drugs, migrants, cash and weapons between Mexico and...

University of Maryland football fans still are waiting for Coach Randy Edsall to prove he's right for his job. You can't expect them to be happy after Edsall went 6-18 in his first two seasons combined in College Park. But perhaps Edsall's encouraging performance in recruiting should inspire at least a little confidence. Off the field, Edsall has won. In the Terrapins' 22-man recruiting class announced Wednesday, there are 14 players from Maryland and the District , including several of...