Nearly 23,000 people have died in drug-related violence since 2006, according to the government, with northern border states experiencing the worst of the violence.
The topic of today’s podcast at 11AM Eastern,
Today’s Wall Street Journal reports that
Four reporters, including two from Televisa, Mexico’s most powerful television network, have apparently been held since Monday by drug traffickers unhappy with coverage of last week’s arrest of a prison director who allegedly armed prisoners, provided them with cars and then allowed them to leave the penitentiary to commit mass murders.
The WSJ article also has a timetable of events:
Turmoil in Torreón
Spate of ‘Revenge Killings’ Rattles a City in Northern Mexico
- Feb. 1, 2010:Ten killed during an armed attack inside ‘Ferrie,’ a bar in the industrial city of Torreón, in northern Mexico.
- May 15:Eight killed in an attack at ‘Las Juanas,’ another bar in Torreón.
- July 18:At least 17 people massacred at 1:30 in the morning during a party in a tented patio atthe Italia Inn a hall in Torreón. A partial list of the dead put the victims’ ages between 20 and 38 years.
- July 25:Authorities say they believe prisoners incarcerated in a Torreón facility were responsible for carrying out all three assaults, with the assistance of prison guards. According to news reports, the prison director dispatched the inmates in official vehicles to carry out the ‘revenge killings.’
- July 26: Four reporters kidnapped while visiting the prison in nearby Gómez Palacio. Media organizations in Mexico observe a news blackout on the kidnappings during negotiations with captors.
- July 28:Mexican daily newspaper Milenio breaks the unofficial silence, publishing an article that describes the kidnappings. Negotiations continue.
I’ll also talk about the Mexican cartels expansion into the Northern Triangle of Central America — Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras.
Meanwhile, in Arizona, Judge Bolton issues a temporary injunction against SB 1070
Most notably, she blocked a requirement that police check the immigration status of people stopped for such routine infractions as traffic violations, if police suspect they are in the U.S. illegally. She also blocked a section that required law enforcement to detain individuals until their legal status was clarified.
…
She also blocked a section that required foreigners to carry documents proving they had permission to be in the U.S., and another provision that banned illegal immigrants from seeking work in Arizona.The judge said the sections of the law, known as SB1070, should not go into effect until the court addresses issues surrounding them. She didn’t set a court date for new arguments.
because enforcing immigration law
will constitute an unacceptable “intrusion of police presence into the lives of legally-present aliens,” she maintains, and runs counter to the 1941 Supreme Court decision in Hines v. Davidowitz, which held that Congress wanted to protect legal aliens from “inquisitorial practices and police surveillance.”
The next step on Bolton’s decision: a hearing. I expect the ensuing suits will go all the way to the Supreme Court.
Related:
Surviving the Obama Assault on the Rule of Law
The Obama administration’s case against Arizona sought to preemptively stop enforcement of Arizona’s new immigration law. The legal term for this is a “facial challenge,” and federal precedent is clear that facial challenges “must be careful not to go beyond the statute’s facial requirements and speculate about ‘hypothetical’ or imaginary cases.” But that is exactly what Judge Bolton did. First, she ignored Section 2(B) of the law as written and completely ignored the section’s first sentence that required an officer to have “reasonable suspicion” that a person was in the country illegally before their immigration status should be checked. Then, she invented a completely hypothetical case about a Chilean dog walker detained by a completely fictional Sheriff Smith. Finally, despite the fact that 8 U.S.C. §1373 clearly requires the federal government to “respond to an inquiry by a…State, or local government agency, seeking to verify or ascertain the citizenship or immigration status of any individual,” Judge Bolton concluded that the Obama administration’s decision not to enforce this provision was as good as rewriting the law itself.
