New Mexico border clampdown
LAS CRUCES: As thousands of National Guard troops deploy to the Mexico border, US Attorney-General Jeff Sessions plans to bring his firm stance on immigration enforcement to New Mexico, where a group of south-west border sheriffs was due to meet yesterday.
Sessions was set to speak in Las Cruces at the Texas Border Sheriff ’s Coalition Annual Spring Meeting with the Southwestern Border Sheriff ’s Coalition, which is made up of 31 sheriff ’s departments from Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California.
Their counties are located within 40km of the US-Mexico border.
Immigrant rights activists promised to protest against Sessions’s visit as they rejected his past characterisation of the border region during a visit last year to El Paso, Texas, as “ground zero” in the Trump administration’s fight against cartels, and human traffickers.
“He treated our home like a war zone, referring to it as ‘ground zero’,” said Fernando Garcia, the executive director of the Border Network for Human Rights in El Paso. “He was wrong then, and he is wrong now.” El Paso is 80km south of Las Cruces. Sessions’s trip to Las Cruces, a city about an hour north of the border, comes as construction begins nearby on 32km of steel fencing that officials say is a part of President Donald Trump’s promised wall.
US Customs and Border Protection officials have described the new, heightened barrier as a structure that will be harder to get over, under and through than the old post and rail barriers that have lined the stretch of the border’s El Paso sector.
Sessions has issued an order directing federal prosecutors to put more emphasis on charging people with illegal entry, citing a “crisis” on the border.
A 37% increase in illegal border crossings in March brought more than 50 000 immigrants into the US, which was triple the number of reported illegal border crossings in the same period last year.
It was still far lower, however, than the surges during the last years of the Obama administration and prior decades.