Latest United States Border Patrol Stories

By Bernd DebusmannLAREDO, Texas (Reuters) - The United States is closing a legal loophole which has allowed tens of thousands of illegal immigrants to slip into the country and join the estimated 11 million undocumented foreigners already here.Under long-standing procedure along the U.S. border with Mexico, illegal crossers of nationalities other than Mexican -- dubbed OTMs by the Border Patrol -- have been entitled to a hearing before an immigration judge before they could be...

By Bernd Debusmann LAREDO, Texas (Reuters) - Heat-sensing cameras. Motion detectors. X-ray systems. Drones. Night-vision goggles. Helicopters. More than 11,000 border patrol officers, and more to be recruited. The United States is fielding an array of high-tech equipment and a small army of highly trained agents along its border with Mexico to stop people from entering the United States illegally and to throttle the flow of drugs into the world's richest market. Yet they keep coming,...

LAREDO, Texas -- Heat-sensing cameras. Motion detectors. X-ray systems. Drones. Night-vision goggles. Helicopters. More than 11,000 border patrol officers, and more to be recruited. The United States is fielding an array of high-tech equipment and a small army of highly trained agents along its border with Mexico to stop people from entering the United States illegally and to throttle the flow of drugs into the world's richest market.Yet they keep coming, and Laredo, divided from its Mexican...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The immigration and customs operations of the recently created Department of Homeland Security are inefficient and should be merged, the department's inspector general said on Thursday. The inspector general said in a report that Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) -- created in early 2003 when 22 agencies were combined into the mammoth Homeland Security Department -- were incapable of coordinating their efforts in...

By Tim Gaynor SASABE, Mexico (Reuters) - For decades, residents of this Mexican desert village on the border with the United States baked bricks and ranched cattle to make a meager living. Sasabe was barren and isolated then. Now it is a boomtown studded with bars, flophouses and taco stands as that isolation has made it a popular and thriving hub for smugglers hauling undocumented migrants north into America, authorities say. The U.S. Border Patrol said more than 165,000 illegal...

By Tim Gaynor BROWNSVILLE, Texas (Reuters) - A U.S. militia group will launch a month-long sweep for illegal immigrants along the border with Mexico this weekend, stepping up a campaign that has raised fears of violence. Volunteers plan to gather at seven sites between San Diego, California, and Brownsville, Texas, throughout October to scour the deserts for illegal immigrants and report them to the U.S. Border Patrol so they can be arrested. The Minuteman Civil Defense Corps began...

SAN FRANCISCO, Sept 8 - California voters are concerned about illegal immigration but are divided over whether the state should declare an emergency along its border with Mexico, according to a Field Poll released on Thursday. And most of those who responded to the survey said they opposed citizen patrols of the border. New Mexico and Arizona declared states of emergency along their borders last month, citing increased crime and illegal immigration. The declarations gave local...

MONTERREY, Mexico (Reuters) - A brutal heat wave in Arizona has resulted in a record number of deaths among illegal immigrants trekking across the scorching deserts from Mexico, authorities said on Thursday. The U.S. Border Patrol said at least 229 immigrants have died in the desert state since the reporting period began October 1 last year, a 57 percent increase over a year earlier, as summer temperatures peaked at 120 degrees F (44 C). "The heat has been brutal," Jose Garza, the...

By Dan Whitcomb LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - A U.S. Border Patrol helicopter was forced to make an emergency landing after illegal immigrants pelted it with baseball-sized rocks, damaging a rotor, a spokesman for the agency said on Thursday. There were no injuries as the helicopter's pilot was able to set the aircraft down just north of the All American Canal on the border between the U.S. and Mexico, Border Patrol spokesman Michael Gramley said. Authorities say smugglers are becoming...

SANTA FE, New Mexico (Reuters) - New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson will seek the bulldozing of a Mexican village to improve border security at a meeting with the governor of the Mexican state of Chihuahua this week, a Richardson spokesman said on Tuesday. Las Chepas is said to be a staging area for immigrants to enter the United States illegally and for other criminal activities, spokesman Gilbert Gallegos said. An agreement by Mexican officials to raze the hamlet would be "an important...