Let's Chase Real Criminals

A little more police work is in order down there on the border.

While we're down there on the Mexican border, searching out the folks coming in without documents, let's chase after the real criminals as well -- you know, the ones bringing drugs across.

Obviously, some drug-chasing works gets done. But it seems that to some extent, we are being distracted from that more urgent need by our desire to hunt out the man without paperwork.

As if they were one and the same.

How many kilos of illegal drugs flow across that border, I do not know, but I wonder but what more out-of-country drug trafficking is done on that one border than on any other entry point we have. Yet, to some extent, we are so busy chasing people without documents that we are not concentrating on what should be seen as the more obvious need, stopping the drug trafficker and stopping those involved in other high crimes.

How do I know we are not? I called the border patrol. I asked if they so much as run a background check on the people they stop. As a practice, they don't. If a person is from Mexico, they don't contact Mexican police authorities and get a Mexican background. Now, if someone already has a visa, the visa does require such a background check, I'm told, but the folks who show up at the border get no such police work done on them.

How's that? If a traffic stop were made anywhere else here in the states, and the person stopped was suspected of a crime, we would run a background check right on the spot. Normal police work. Yet, in a spot where we have one of our greatest crime concerns, we aren't even thinking to even perform one of the most elementary of police techniques?

Now, there's an oversight.

What a waste to have so many border agents, and not have them focusing on drug trafficking and other high crimes, instead having them just processing people in who do have paperwork and chasing folks home who don't.

I was told by the public relations spokesperson, common practice is simply to take them back to Mexico and dump them there. Free and easy, go on home.

We need to ask ourselves, what is the real problem? Is it people without paperwork, or people smuggling drugs? Let's not be so obsessed with chasing the small fry that we neglect the big fish.

Which will it be? War on immigration, or war on drugs? Where should we place our emphasis?