Defining the border

"The border between Queens, NYC & Nassau County, Long Island isn't so clear in places. There really isn't a defining body of land or water which determines the border, so maps are required to be referenced. Features such as street sign and fire hydrant styles give some clues on which side of the border you're on."

Rambling in Rosedale

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Dutch Broadway? Hmmm....

All along the border

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King has tougher stance on illegal aliens

From the NY Post:

Rep. Peter King, who next week becomes chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, says he will push legislation to tighten border security and arrest more illegal aliens -- challenging what he considers to be President Obama's lax immigration policies.

"The Obama administration continues to display an obvious lack of urgency when it comes to gaining operational control of the border, which is absolutely critical," King (R-LI) said.

He said Obama has "done little" in the past two years to keep out illegal immigrants and the country needs a new strategy "that incorporates the necessary staffing, fencing and technology to do the job."

King's immigration proposals will include an aggressive crackdown on private companies that hire illegal aliens and increased federal support for local police to help arrest illegal immigrants.

These measures are near the top of a packed Homeland Security agenda that includes efforts to better combat domestic radicalization, stopping Obama's plans to transfer Guantanamo Bay detainees to the US for civilian trials and bolstering national cybersecurity.

The border security initiatives would be a sharp departure from the current Obama administration policy that is focused on deporting illegal aliens who commit serious crimes.

Too bad Paterson decided to go the other way.

Borderline crazy!

From the NY Times:

For many New Yorkers, a borough is like a tribe, a singular identity, a way of being in the world. There is Brooklyn, land of the $5 slice (Di Fara Pizza) and the $12 million brownstone (Brooklyn Heights), the kind of place that has become as much a brand as a borough, where people wear Brooklyn sweatshirts as they drink Brooklyn Brewery beer. And then there is Queens, land of Archie Bunker (Corona or Glendale, depending on whom you ask) and former actual home of Run-D.M.C. (Hollis), the kind of middle-class mecca that more people seem to be from than aspire to, where half of the residents own homes and two-thirds drive cars.

Then there is the border. It is a curious, somewhat unsettling experience to stand between the two boroughs. You keep looking for some sign of Brooklyn, some sign of Queens, but there is nothing — the same parked cars, the same trees, the same power lines, the same houses. Boroughs exist in the mind as much as they exist on maps.

There is no painted line running down the middle of Menahan Street between Cypress and St. Nicholas Avenues, but there might as well be. Stand in the middle of Menahan facing St. Nicholas — your right foot is in Brooklyn, your left is in Queens. The three-story brick row houses on either side face one another as if the two counties were locked in a staring contest: Kings versus Queens. For those who live on this block, the border remains a kind of psychological and bureaucratic barrier.

On Election Day, residents on the west side of Menahan voted at an apartment complex on Bleecker Street in Brooklyn, and residents on the east side of Menahan voted at Public School 81 on Cypress Avenue in Queens. If Francisco Miranda needs assistance from the police, he has to take it up with the 83rd Precinct in Brooklyn. If Jaime Arroyo, Mr. Miranda’s neighbor and friend who lives a few houses down, has a problem, he has to call the 104th Precinct in Queens. Mr. Miranda’s ZIP code is 11237; Mr. Arroyo’s is 11385.

Immigration checks routine near northern border

From the NY Times:

The Lake Shore Limited runs between Chicago and New York City without crossing the Canadian border. But when it stops at Amtrak stations in western New York State, armed Border Patrol agents routinely board the train, question passengers about their citizenship and take away noncitizens who cannot produce satisfactory immigration papers.

“Are you a U.S. citizen?” agents asked one recent morning, moving through a Rochester-bound train full of dozing passengers at a station outside Buffalo. “What country were you born in?”

When the answer came back, “the U.S.,” they moved on. But Ruth Fernandez, 60, a naturalized citizen born in Ecuador, was asked for identification. And though she was only traveling home to New York City from her sister’s in Ohio, she had made sure to carry her American passport. On earlier trips, she said, agents had photographed her, and taken away a nervous Hispanic man.

He was one of hundreds of passengers taken to detention each year from domestic trains and buses along the nation’s northern border. The little-publicized transportation checks are the result of the Border Patrol’s growth since 9/11, fueled by Congressional antiterrorism spending and an expanding definition of border jurisdiction. In the Rochester area, where the border is miles away in the middle of Lake Ontario, the patrol arrested 2,788 passengers from October 2005 through last September.

The checks are “a vital component to our overall border security efforts” to prevent terrorism and illegal entry, said Rafael Lemaitre, a spokesman for United States Customs and Border Protection. He said that the patrol had jurisdiction to enforce immigration laws within 100 miles of the border, and that one mission was preventing smugglers and human traffickers from exploiting inland transit hubs.

Result of a porous border

From the Village Voice:

On April 27, Janet Napolitano pronounced that the border separating the United States from the Republic of Mexico is more secure than ever.

Napolitano sounded convinced, even though she also has spoken of Mexico's 6,000 drug-related murders in 2009 alone, more than twice the total in 2008.

But Napolitano's words rang hollow to those who live at or near the border in Cochise County, a beautiful, sparsely populated expanse in southeast Arizona.

They live at ground zero in the United States for the smuggling from Mexico of marijuana, cocaine, methamphetamine, heroin — and human beings.

(The U.S. Border Patrol's Tucson sector was responsible for almost half of all illegal aliens arrested and marijuana seized along the nation's borders during fiscal 2009, which ended September 30. Try to imagine 1.2 million pounds of pot, an all-time record for any sector. The zone includes Cochise County and covers 262 miles of border).

Most people in this fabled county — home to Tombstone (the shootout at the OK Corral), Fort Huachuaca (a major U.S. Army base), funky border towns (Douglas and Naco), and almost unimaginably open spaces — agree on this:

The executive and legislative branches of the federal government have set up Cochise County for disaster by not coming up with a border policy to effectively handle what's known as "illegal immigration."

In the early 1990s, the feds tightened the leaky border around San Diego and El Paso with mega-operations called Operation Gatekeeper and Operation Hold the Line, respectively.

The result was a monumental funneling of hundreds of thousands of undocumented aliens from the steep mountains and unforgiving deserts of northern Mexico into southern Arizona.

Before then, Cochise County was not a prime point of entry for illegal aliens (the Tucson sector accounted for only 9 percent of the U.S. Border Patrol's arrests in 1993).

Then, as now, drug smugglers pretty much had free rein, with law enforcement seemingly always a step behind most of the criminals.

With the redirection of the migrants came dire ramifications, including death for untold hapless migrants ill-equipped to negotiate the desert and mountain trails in brutal summers and cold winters.

The influx also has upended the lives of many on this side of the border, especially American citizens who live anywhere in the southern portion of Cochise County.

Some of them simply are hungry and desperate. But others are of a more malevolent bent, committing robberies, burglaries, and other crimes against Americans in remote spots like Portal, Apache, and Palominas.

Why we need troops on the border

From Fox News:

The Department of Homeland Security is alerting Texas authorities to be on the lookout for a suspected member of the Somalia-based Al Shabaab terrorist group who might be attempting to travel to the U.S. through Mexico, a security expert who has seen the memo tells FOXNews.com.

The warning follows an indictment unsealed this month in Texas federal court that accuses a Somali man in Texas of running a “large-scale smuggling enterprise” responsible for bringing hundreds of Somalis from Brazil through South America and eventually across the Mexican border. Many of the illegal immigrants, who court records say were given fake IDs, are alleged to have ties to other now-defunct Somalian terror organizations that have merged with active organizations like Al Shabaab, al-Barakat and Al-Ittihad Al-Islami.

In 2008, the U.S. government designated Al Shabaab a terrorist organization. Al Shabaab has said its priority is to impose Sharia, or Islamic law, on Somalia; the group has aligned itself with Al Qaeda and has made statements about its intent to harm the United States.

In recent years, American Somalis have been recruited by Al Shabaab to travel to Somalia, where they are often radicalized by more extremist or operational anti-American terror groups, which Al Shabaab supports. The recruiters coming through the Mexican border are the ones who could be the most dangerous, according to law enforcement officials.

Security experts tell FOXNews.com that the influx of hundreds of Somalis over the U.S. border who allegedly have ties to suspected terror cells is evidence of a porous and unsecured border being exploited by groups intent on wrecking deadly havoc on American soil.

Here's more from CNN.

National Guard being deployed to the border

From Fox News:

President Obama told Senate Republicans Tuesday that he's read the controversial Arizona immigration law and is concerned it would allow for discrimination -- but is planning to deploy up to 1,200 National Guard troops to the U.S.-Mexico border to allay security concerns.

An administration official confirmed to Fox News that Obama plans to request $500 million for "enhanced border protection and law enforcement" and deploy the National Guard troops as needed.

The official said the National Guard would be used to "provide intelligence; surveillance and reconnaissance support; intelligence analysis; immediate support to counternarcotics enforcement; and training capacity until Customs and Border Patrol can recruit and train additional officers and agents to serve on the border."

From Fox 5:

Bloomberg says countries that welcome immigrants prosper.

He says the U.S. has had some "disgraceful" and "stupid periods" in which it tried to close its borders.

Added Bloomberg: "Fortunately, sanity prevailed."

Wow, talk about twisting the truth! We aren't trying to stop immigration. We are trying to prevent a breach of security in a post-9/11 world. Remember 9/11? It was the event that made you mayor. We were thinking of making you president at one time, too, but fortunately, sanity prevailed.