New Mexico

The U.S. state of New Mexico is under attack by drug cartels and smugglers and little can be done to stop border violence without federal troops.

This state’s 180-mile border with Mexico is nearly devoid of human habitation. Isolated ranches and small farms dot the border area. Because the population is so small (less than two million in a state of 50,000 square miles), little federal funding is available to build adequate border infrastructure.

Because New Mexico occupies such a strategic east/west position it has been favored with an extensive Interstate Highway System. The combination of fast roads and no people bodes catastrophe for the residents of this state. The drug cartels have taken over. Don’t think that even the federal government will help. Even when smugglers and drug gangs are arrested, the embarrassingly underfunded federal prosecutors have to prioritize cases and that means some very bad people go free for lack of prosecutors to handle the cases. New Mexico has the fourth-highest federal caseload in the United States yet has but one city worth the name: Albuquerque.

This isolated town is home to one of the largest nuclear weapons facilities in the world. What it would take for the Al-Qaeda and Mexican criminals now operating in New Mexico’s border areas to repeat the attack of 1916 but against a nuclear weapons facility is unknown but a nightmare worth Hollywood’s attention.

The efforts of Texas to stem the flow of cross-border Mexican army troops and drug gang attacks plus new efforts to stem the flow of illegals in Arizona has put tremendous pressure on New Mexico. While Texas has gone high-tech by placing video cameras along the border accessible over the Internet. Showing border violence to the world has caused civil rights groups of all stripes to protest and New Mexico seems eager to keep its drugs and violence a secret to itself.

The 53-mile stretch of border near Columbus / Deming, the USBP has installed seven camera towers. This area also has some vehicle barrier systems.

Part of that vehicle barrier, 17 miles west of Columbus, N.M., was built in 2000 by Joint Task Force North out of Fort Bliss, Texas and it was discovered to encroach into Mexico territory between one and six feet along a 1.5-mile stretch.

The Mexican government threw a hissy fit and demanded that the vehicle barrier be removed pronto. What they refuse to acknowledge is that the entire border barrier along all 1,945 miles of our southern border is between one and six feet north of the border. This is done so that when the drug smugglers and illegal alien smugglers tear it apart our crews can repair it without entering the Republic of Mexico. By having our barrier north of the border we have handed Mexico a combined area of over 1,000 acres of U.S. territory.

In places such as Lordsburg, 52 agents are responsible for 81 miles of the border and the 3,000 square miles of the adjacent border areas.

Unlike Texas and Arizona which have urban centers south of the border that operate as staging areas for the drug smugglers, in this part of the border the smugglers needed to be creative. Here, the smugglers use the public school buses to move their people and drugs from Mexican towns of Palomas and Las Chepas to the border twenty miles away. The smugglers also use abandoned mining towns and abandoned ranch homes in Mexico as operating bases. If the ranch wasn’t abandoned when the smugglers arrived, it was when they started their smuggling operations.

Smuggler apprehensions have doubled over a single year — from 2,588 in the first half of one year to 4,797 in the first half of the next.