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This make any Sense.
grumpygy
Member Posts: 53,466 ✭
quote:PHOENIX (AP) - By the time the women arrived disheveled and hungry at the Greyhound station in Phoenix, they had already spent weeks traveling thousands of miles with young children in tow.
Ranging from months old to adolescents, some of the children were sick and lethargic. Others played gleefully at arcade games in the crowded waiting room of the bus station.
Migrants dropped off at bus stations: Floridalma Bineda Portillo, of Guatemala, and her sons wait at a bus terminal, May 29, 2014 in
The families were apprehended in Texas, flown to Arizona and dropped off by the busload at the station in Phoenix by federal immigration authorities overwhelmed by a surge of families caught crossing the Mexican border into the Rio Grande Valley in Texas.
It was signal of a shift in immigration that has seen the Rio Grande Valley surpass Tucson as the leader in border apprehensions, overwhelming border agents in Texas. The trend is being driven by a huge increase in the number of immigrants from Central America.
Yet while the number of apprehensions in the Rio Grande Valley vastly surpasses those in the Tucson sector in Arizona, the area has fewer agents. From October 2013 to May 17, agents in the Rio Grande Valley made more than 148,000 arrests, compared with 63,000 arrests in the Tucson sector. But the Rio Grande Valley has about 1,000 fewer agents than Tucson.
"This shows that our strategy is poorly thought-out. Illegal aliens are always going to go where agents aren't," said Shawn Moran, a spokesman for the National Border Patrol Council, the U.S. Border Patrol union.
Immigration officials by policy do not keep children in detention. When agents in Texas caught an unusually high number of families with young children crossing the border over Memorial Day weekend, they were stumped as to where to process them. So they turned to Arizona.
In a sign of the political ramifications of the move, politicians in Arizona lashed out at the federal government over the fact that immigrants are being sent to the state when it has its own problems associated with immigration.
"What an astonishing failure of leadership at every level inside the Beltway," Republican gubernatorial candidate Scott Smith said.
Migrants dropped off at bus stations: Volunteer Michelle Lewis of Phoenix helps Doris Suyapa, of Honduras, with her
Floridalma Bineda Portillo and her two young boys were part of a group of about 400 Central Americans who were flown from Texas to Tucson last weekend. Bineda Portillo and many others were then shuttled to Phoenix after the Tucson Greyhound station ran out of space.
When they arrived at the station in Phoenix, a volunteer nurse found Bineda Portillo's 5-year-old son, Hugo David, wheezing and struggling to breathe. His asthma inhaler had been lost when the family was processed by immigration. The boy's three-year-old brother developed a cold after sitting on the floor for hours in the detention center, his mother said.
"We all started crying because we didn't know what was going to happen to us. It was brutal," the Guatemala native said in Spanish.
Women and children look through a box of clothes that were donated by volunteers at the Greyhound bus terminal, Thursday, May 29, 2014 in Phoenix.
Bineda Portillo said she fled Guatemala because of growing violence and to escape domestic abuse. Her mother, who lives in Nashville, Tennessee, sent her money for a bus ride there.
In the meantime, volunteers from the Phoenix Restoration Project, a humanitarian group, have been at the Greyhound station since Tuesday handing out food, clothing, diapers and other supplies.
"It's always heart-wrenching, especially when we're working with women, because they're less likely to be able to read and sometimes are coming from very rural areas of Central America, and Spanish isn't their first language," volunteer Cyndi Whitmore said. "We see a lot of women who are very sacred, very vulnerable."
Like the other Central American migrants sent from Texas to Arizona this week, Bineda Portillo has 15 days from the time she was apprehended to report to the Immigrations and Customs Enforcement office in Nashville, where officials will begin proceedings against them there. ICE requires that migrants provide a valid address to their destination in the U.S. before they are released. The migrants' cases are then forwarded to the ICE office closest to that address.
Immigration officials say they don't know how many migrants will actually report to ICE, but that many who are fleeing violence are likely to do so to seek asylum.
Maria Eva Casco, of El Salvador, says she and her 8-year-old son fell ill while in immigration detention. On their way to meet the boy's father in Orlando, Florida, Casco was now regretting the trek.
"It's been terrifying. A lot of tears and regret," she said in Spanish.
The rise in Central American migrants in Texas and the Rio Grande Valley has exposed how few resources agents have in protecting the border, Moran said. Agents in Laredo, Texas, on Friday sent another flight of migrants to Tucson, and at least one other flight out of there was scheduled in the upcoming days.
"It really highlights that we're behind the eight ball and it's a difficult job to do, especially when we're overwhelmed," Moran said.
Ranging from months old to adolescents, some of the children were sick and lethargic. Others played gleefully at arcade games in the crowded waiting room of the bus station.
Migrants dropped off at bus stations: Floridalma Bineda Portillo, of Guatemala, and her sons wait at a bus terminal, May 29, 2014 in
The families were apprehended in Texas, flown to Arizona and dropped off by the busload at the station in Phoenix by federal immigration authorities overwhelmed by a surge of families caught crossing the Mexican border into the Rio Grande Valley in Texas.
It was signal of a shift in immigration that has seen the Rio Grande Valley surpass Tucson as the leader in border apprehensions, overwhelming border agents in Texas. The trend is being driven by a huge increase in the number of immigrants from Central America.
Yet while the number of apprehensions in the Rio Grande Valley vastly surpasses those in the Tucson sector in Arizona, the area has fewer agents. From October 2013 to May 17, agents in the Rio Grande Valley made more than 148,000 arrests, compared with 63,000 arrests in the Tucson sector. But the Rio Grande Valley has about 1,000 fewer agents than Tucson.
"This shows that our strategy is poorly thought-out. Illegal aliens are always going to go where agents aren't," said Shawn Moran, a spokesman for the National Border Patrol Council, the U.S. Border Patrol union.
Immigration officials by policy do not keep children in detention. When agents in Texas caught an unusually high number of families with young children crossing the border over Memorial Day weekend, they were stumped as to where to process them. So they turned to Arizona.
In a sign of the political ramifications of the move, politicians in Arizona lashed out at the federal government over the fact that immigrants are being sent to the state when it has its own problems associated with immigration.
"What an astonishing failure of leadership at every level inside the Beltway," Republican gubernatorial candidate Scott Smith said.
Migrants dropped off at bus stations: Volunteer Michelle Lewis of Phoenix helps Doris Suyapa, of Honduras, with her
Floridalma Bineda Portillo and her two young boys were part of a group of about 400 Central Americans who were flown from Texas to Tucson last weekend. Bineda Portillo and many others were then shuttled to Phoenix after the Tucson Greyhound station ran out of space.
When they arrived at the station in Phoenix, a volunteer nurse found Bineda Portillo's 5-year-old son, Hugo David, wheezing and struggling to breathe. His asthma inhaler had been lost when the family was processed by immigration. The boy's three-year-old brother developed a cold after sitting on the floor for hours in the detention center, his mother said.
"We all started crying because we didn't know what was going to happen to us. It was brutal," the Guatemala native said in Spanish.
Women and children look through a box of clothes that were donated by volunteers at the Greyhound bus terminal, Thursday, May 29, 2014 in Phoenix.
Bineda Portillo said she fled Guatemala because of growing violence and to escape domestic abuse. Her mother, who lives in Nashville, Tennessee, sent her money for a bus ride there.
In the meantime, volunteers from the Phoenix Restoration Project, a humanitarian group, have been at the Greyhound station since Tuesday handing out food, clothing, diapers and other supplies.
"It's always heart-wrenching, especially when we're working with women, because they're less likely to be able to read and sometimes are coming from very rural areas of Central America, and Spanish isn't their first language," volunteer Cyndi Whitmore said. "We see a lot of women who are very sacred, very vulnerable."
Like the other Central American migrants sent from Texas to Arizona this week, Bineda Portillo has 15 days from the time she was apprehended to report to the Immigrations and Customs Enforcement office in Nashville, where officials will begin proceedings against them there. ICE requires that migrants provide a valid address to their destination in the U.S. before they are released. The migrants' cases are then forwarded to the ICE office closest to that address.
Immigration officials say they don't know how many migrants will actually report to ICE, but that many who are fleeing violence are likely to do so to seek asylum.
Maria Eva Casco, of El Salvador, says she and her 8-year-old son fell ill while in immigration detention. On their way to meet the boy's father in Orlando, Florida, Casco was now regretting the trek.
"It's been terrifying. A lot of tears and regret," she said in Spanish.
The rise in Central American migrants in Texas and the Rio Grande Valley has exposed how few resources agents have in protecting the border, Moran said. Agents in Laredo, Texas, on Friday sent another flight of migrants to Tucson, and at least one other flight out of there was scheduled in the upcoming days.
"It really highlights that we're behind the eight ball and it's a difficult job to do, especially when we're overwhelmed," Moran said.
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quote:WASHINGTON (AP) - The Navy has fired the commander of the 10 American sailors who wandered into Iranian territorial waters in the Persian Gulf and were captured and held by Iran for about 15 hours.
In a statement Thursday, the Navy said it had lost confidence in Cmdr. Eric Rasch, who was the executive officer of the squadron that included the 10 sailors at the time of the January incident. He was responsible for the training and readiness of the more than 400 sailors in the unit.
A Navy official said that Rasch failed to provide effective leadership, leading to a lack of oversight, complacency and failure to maintain standards in the unit. The official was not authorized to discuss the details publicly so spoke on condition of anonymity.
Rasch has been relieved of his command duties and reassigned, the Navy said.
Although this is the first firing by the Navy regarding the incident, several other sailors received administrative reprimands. The investigation is expected to be finished by the end of the month, and others are likely to be disciplined.
Rasch was promoted to commander of the unit in April - after the Iran incident occurred, but before the preliminary investigation was done.
The sailors, nine men and one woman, were detained after their boat drifted into Iranian waters off Farsi Island, an outpost in the middle of the Persian Gulf that has been used as a base for Revolutionary Guard speedboats since the 1980s.
The sailors were on two small armed vessels, known as riverine command boats, on a 300-mile journey from Kuwait to Bahrain, where the Navy's 5th Fleet is located. The incident, while brief, raised tensions between the U.S. and Iran because of images Iran published of the soldiers kneeling with their hands on their heads. It caused political uproar at home, too, coming on the day of President Barack Obama's final State of the Union address and months after the signing of a deal with Iran to curb its nuclear program in exchange for relief from financial penalties.
Navy Capt. Gary Leigh, commander of Riverine Group 1, decided to fire Rasch after Leigh reviewed the initial investigation. A Navy official said no action has been taken, at least so far, against Cmdr. Greg Meyer, who was serving as commander of the squadron when the incident happened. He is no longer in a command job.
Defense Secretary Ash Carter said the sailors made a navigational error and went off course.
An initial account said the "planned transit path for the mission was down the middle of the Gulf and not through the territorial waters of any country other than Kuwait and Bahrain."
That account said the crew stopped when a diesel engine in one of the boats appeared to have a mechanical issue. The second boat also stopped.
At this point they were in Iranian territorial waters, "although it's not clear the crew was aware of their exact location," the report said.
While the boats were stopped and the crew was trying to assess the mechanical problem, two small Iranian craft carrying armed personnel approached. Soon after, they were joined by two more Iranian military vessels. A verbal exchange ensued between the Iranians and Americans, but there was no gunfire.
The sailors had been scheduled to meet up with a U.S. Coast Guard ship, the Monomoy, in international waters to refuel. But about 10 minutes before the refueling was supposed to take place, the Navy headquarters in Bahrain got a report that Iranians were questioning the crew members.
Soon afterward, the Navy lost communications with the boats.
The Navy launched a large-scale search-and-rescue mission, but it is not clear whether the Americans had already been taken ashore on Farsi Island. The Iranians eventually told the U.S. that the 10 sailors were safe and healthy.
Secretary of State John Kerry, in a series of phone calls, used the personal relationship he has formed with Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif to work out the crews' release. Kerry credited the quick resolution to the "critical role diplomacy plays in keeping our country secure and strong."
But then, you knew that.
Did it not cost more to transport them to Arizona than it would have to just ship them home.
We will review this incident in our next annual meeting.
In the meantime, have your people call my people and we'll do lunch.
Not in the country a day and already getting freebies, while some hard working, overtaxed AMERICANS child goes barefoot and hungry.