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This email from Paul Wright, Editor of Prison Legal News: "The fifth circuit upheld the conviction of three INS officers who showed a depraved indifference to an immigration detainees medical indifference. After a raid a 15 year old suffered a broken back, how isn’t said, but the defendants were convicted of a civil rights violation for wiping their feet on the now paralyzed child, pepper spraying him to see if he would move, driving him around Texas on the floor of a police bus, etc. He died 11 months later."

EXCERPT from opinion of the court: IN THE UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE FIFTH CIRCUIT; No. 04-20131; UNITED STATES OF AMERICA v. Richard Gonzales, Louis Gomez, Carlos Reyna:

The defendants, Gonzales, Gomez, and Reyna worked as
deportation officers for the San Antonio division of the INS.
They were members of the elite San Antonio Fugitive Unit, a group that specialized in tracking down and deporting illegal aliens with criminal records. Early in the morning of March 25, 2001, their unit, together with INS agents from Houston, prepared to raid a house in Bryan, Texas. They were advised to be alert. The night before, agents had encountered an armed 15-year old near the house.
At 8:00 AM, the raid began. The San Antonio unit rushed in
the front door while the Houston officers maintained a perimeter
around the house. Minutes later, one of the house’s occupants,
Serafin Carrera, lay paralyzed on the kitchen floor.

The testimony is unclear about which officers took down
Carrera, though Gonzales, Gomez, and Reyna were all involved.
The prosecution did not charge the defendants with excessive
force in taking Carrera down or with causing the broken neck
which he suffered in that process. Instead, the defendants were
convicted for their behavior thereafter.

All three defendants had close contact with Carrera while he
lay handcuffed on the floor. Carrera begged for help, screaming
"they broke me . . . Tell them to kill me . . . Tell them to take me to a hospital." In response, Gomez taunted, "From here you’re going to go to jail and you’re never going to get out, you son of a f*cking mother." Officer Gonzales called him "cabron" and invited his fellow officers to wipe their feet on him. The three defendants stood in the kitchen, with Carrera on the floor crying for help, trying to figure out how to get their paralyzed detainee into an INS van. Officer Gonzales, the San Antonio team leader, ordered a detention officer to pull the van closer to the house, saying "I don’t want anybody to see what’s going on." Next, Gonzales, Gomez, and two other officers dragged Carrera from the house, across the backyard, and into the van. Carrera complained of pain, asking to be shot and put out of his misery, while Officer Gomez pulled him through the van door and onto the front seat. Gomez struggled to position Carrera’s limp body on the seat, finally leaving him slumped on his side and handcuffed. As the van departed for the Brazos County Jail, Officer Reyna asked the driver to give Carrera a screen test—an unofficial maneuver in which the driver slams on the brake causing a handcuffed passenger to lurch forward and hit his face against the screen.

The nearby Brazos County Jail was not the final destination
for Carrera or any of the other detainees. The INS Officers
merely used its parking lot as a makeshift processing area for
the illegal aliens. After processing, the aliens were to be sent by bus to New Braunfels, and then removed to Mexico.

After all the aliens were loaded into two vans, the officers
returned to their cars and followed the vans to the Brazos County Jail for processing. At the jail, all three defendants dragged Carrera off the van, hitting his head against the door on the way out. They dragged him across the parking lot while taunting him and playing with his limp body. Gonzales ordered the bus driver to open the luggage compartment, and threatened, jokingly, to make Carrera ride below. INS officers testified that Gonzales said, "Let’s Mace the f*cker, see if he budges."

The three defendants dragged Carrera onto the bus. Because the bus had tinted windows, no one outside of it saw what happened next, but after a few minutes all three defendants ran off the bus choking and laughing. With a smirk, Gonzales claimed that he had an "accidental discharge" of pepper spray. A nurse was on duty at the Brazos County Jail, and a hospital just four miles away, but the defendants left Carrera by himself on the floor of the bus, handcuffed, eyes swollen shut, and foaming at the mouth. At around 11:30 AM, three hours after Carrera’s neck
was broken, the bus left for New Braunfels. Carrera rode on the
floor of the bus for three more hours until he reached the Comal
County Jail. Upon his arrival, the intake nurse refused to take
custody of Carrera without a medical evaluation. He was taken
by ambulance to a nearby hospital and then airlifted to a trauma
center in San Antonio. Eleven months later, Carrera died.

The next day, the cover-up began. Gonzales called everyone into his office and assured them, "we’re going to get through this." When Gonzales found out that a bus driver had already written a memo about the incident, he called the bus driver into his office and said, "who the f*ck told [you] to write a memo . .
. nobody told you to write any memos . . . I’m the one that’s
going to take care of the memos." Gonzales demanded that the bus driver change his account to say that Carrera had assaulted them. The driver refused.

Not often do we harvest articles whole from the mainstream press, but when I tripped over a copy of the Dallas Morning News this morning, the top-of-the-fold-headline said "hey buddy, this is exactly what you’ve been looking for." Indeed, it was a story about a Colorado congressman calling for militarization of the USA border with Mexico, based on a recent "provocation" involving three SUVs, almost a ton of pot, and narco warriors packing 50 caliber heat. We darn sure warned you about this…
Border incident sparks outrage

Lawmakers urge troops after police encounter well-armed smugglers

08:30 AM CST on Wednesday, January 25, 2006

By DAVID McLEMORE / The Dallas Morning News

A West Texas standoff along the Rio Grande between U.S. law enforcement officers and heavily armed Mexican drug smugglers in military-style clothing prompted congressional demands Tuesday for an international investigation and a call for deployment of U.S. troops to the border.

The incident, which occurred Monday on U.S. soil at an isolated river crossing about 50 miles east of El Paso, is the latest involving armed incursions along the U.S. border with Mexico.

And it comes less than a week after Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff called a California newspaper’s account of such border incursions "overblown."

The incident Monday involved an encounter between two Hudspeth County Sheriff’s Department deputies and three Department of Public Safety troopers and 10 heavily armed drug smugglers at an area about 50 miles down the river from El Paso.

A spokesman for Mexico’s Foreign Ministry said Mexican military personnel had nothing to do with the incident and suggested the trespassers may have been drug traffickers wearing military-style gear.

The incident began on Interstate 10 near the Sierra Blanca checkpoint when DPS troopers began chasing three westbound SUVs believed to be carrying marijuana.

When the SUV drivers saw that they were being followed, they made a U-turn and headed south toward the river to an area known as Neely’s Crossing, said Rick Glancey, executive director of the Texas Border Sheriffs Coalition.

Also Online

En español

At the crossing, one of the SUVs drove across the shallow river into Mexico. A second one got stuck in the muddy banks. And as the Texas deputies watched, a military-style Humvee attempted to pull it from the mud, while several armed men in green uniforms fanned out around it, Mr. Glancey said.

When the Humvee failed to extricate the truck, a group of men in civilian clothes walked into the ankle-deep river, removed what appeared to be bales of marijuana and hauled them to the Mexican side. They then set the truck, a Ford Expedition, ablaze.

The third vehicle, a Cadillac Escalade, was abandoned on the U.S. side with a flat tire as the driver escaped on foot. Deputies found 1,447 pounds of marijuana inside.

"What this latest incidence underscores is the necessity of increased support for local law enforcement to aid improving our border security," said Mr. Glancey. "If this doesn’t open D.C.’s eyes, I don’t know what will."
Inquiry launched

Monday’s incident was not the first face-to-face confrontation for Hudspeth County deputies. In November, deputies responded to assist Border Patrol agents at the border town of Fort Hancock where they encountered six men in military uniforms attempting to carry a load of marijuana over the river.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials said Tuesday they have launched an inquiry into the Monday incident and asked Mexican authorities for a thorough investigation and full answer on what happened.

Customs "is coordinating closely with the appropriate federal, state and local authorities," said Kristi Clemens, Customs’ assistant commissioner for public affairs. "The U.S. government is also discussing the matter with the government of Mexico and is asking for a thorough investigation and response. We take very seriously and investigate fully any alleged incident of criminal activity, threats against our agents or possible incursions."

Gov. Rick Perry also has ordered an investigation, spokeswoman Kathy Walt said.

U.S. Rep. Tom Tancredo, R-Colo., a frequent critic of the administration’s border security efforts, called Tuesday for the federal government and the governments of southern border states to immediately deploy troops to the U.S.-Mexico border in light of what he termed "recent armed assistance Mexico’s military has given to drug smugglers."

"Our border has literally turned into a war zone with foreign military personnel challenging our laws and our sovereignty," Mr. Tancredo said.

"The only way to deal with this dangerous situation is to tap the resources of our own military," Mr. Tancredo said. "I call on President Bush and the governors of border states to immediately deploy military personnel to defend our borders against the Mexican military."

U.S. Sen. Jon Kyl, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Terrorism and Homeland Security, called on Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice to initiate a formal investigation on the reported border crossings and to begin a dialogue with Mexican officials to prevent further occurrences.

"These illegal incursions are a violation of our sovereignty and pose a significant danger to U.S. law enforcement officials and citizens near the border – especially if all parties involved are armed. The potential for violence is significant.

Mr. Kyl noted that the Department of Homeland Security released figures that indicate that there have been 231 documented incursions along the 2,000-mile border with Mexico since 1996.

Of those, 63 in that nine-year period occurred in Arizona and 28 occurred along the Texas border, according to Homeland Security.

In each instance, U.S. agents at the local level asked Mexican federal police and army officials to clarify what happened.
Border forays

Many included accidental forays by legitimate Mexican authorities across a poorly defined border in rough and isolated country while in pursuit of drug dealers. The Texas-Mexico border, however, is delineated by the Rio Grande River.

Investigators have long documented that Mexican drug gangs often wear camouflage clothing and carry military-style automatic weapons.

But Tuesday’s request for a Mexican government response significantly ups the ante, federal officials said.

In Mexico, officials said the National Defense Ministry has begun an investigation of the incident and launched a search for the vehicles identified by photographs taken by Hudspeth County deputies.

Hudspeth County Chief Deputy Mike Doyal said that men dressed as Mexican soldiers manned what looked like .50-caliber machine guns mounted on vehicles about 200 yards inside the U.S. border during the incident.

In Mexico, a ministry spokesman said that the Army’s Ciudad Juarez garrison does not maintain Humvees with mounted .50-caliber machine guns.

"It cannot be ruled out that said actions are designed as much to harm the image of our armed forces as the bilateral cooperation between Mexico and the United States in the fight against organized crime and, in particular, narcotrafficking," a foreign ministry spokesman said.

Staff writer Lennox Samuels contributed to this report from Mexico City. David McLemore reported from San Antonio.

E-mail dmclemore@dallasnews.com

And they would be right about that. There is too much testing in education today. Clipped from the Dallas Morning News:

"On student testing, always one of the hottest topics in public
education, 56 percent of those polled said there is too much emphasis on testing. About 27 percent said the state has the right amount of testing, and 13 percent said there is not enough emphasis on exams."

Other highlights:

47 percent say public schools should be the top priority for state government ( 23 percent said health care, the second choice)

69 percent say the state should spend more on education

59 percent want to put more money into state education initiatives (33 percent would instead focus funding on schools and teachers based on standardized test scores)

58 percent want a pay raise for all teachers (34 percent want a merit-pay system for teachers)

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

URGENT PRESS ALERT (April 19, 2006)

PRESS CONFERENCE AND RALLY THURSDAY,
APRIL 20 AT 12AM AT 10 W. JACKSON
BLVRD. MIGRA BUIDING.

Religious leaders, workers and community leaders
decry immoral ICE raids
The community organizations calls upon the Bush
Administration and U.S. Immigration and Customs
Enforcement to immediately cease a series of
raids targeting immigrant workers.

On Wednesday, April 19, Immigration and Customs
Enforcement officials began a series of raids on
immigrant workers in what reports describe as a
nationwide crackdown on undocumented immigrants.
The Associated Press has reported raids in Cincinnati,
Phoenix, Houston, and Albany, and Immigration
and Customs Enforcement will likely lay out a new
enforcement strategy tomorrow.

“This is an unjust and immoral attack on immigrant
workers’ rights. Immigrant workers are being
punished for exercising their freedom of speech
and freedom of assembly.” Kim Bobo, Interfaith
WorkerJustice Executive Director.

In the past month, immigrants’ rights groups have
held a series of massive rallies, with turnout of tens
and even hundreds of thousands in over a hundred
cities. Immigrants rights groups are planning
another national day of action on May 1.

Conferencia de prensa y rally ante
el edificio de inmigración.
10 W. Jackson Blvrd. Chicago

El 19 de abril, en diferentes localidades
de los Estados Unidos el Departamento de
Home Land Security a estado haciendo
redadas de inmigrantes indocumetados, todas
enfocadas a dos empresas que tienen localidades
en diferentes estados del país, hoy 19 de abril
lo ha hecho en la ciudad de Chicago asi como
en Cincinnati, Phoenix, Houston y Albany, nos
parece muy peculiar dado que hemos estado
preparando la manifestación del primero de
mayo.

La posibilidad de que muchas de las personas
que han sido detenidas puedan calificar para
algún tipo de regularización el próximo mes,
cuando se reúna nuevamente el Senado de
los Estados Unidos nos parece sumamente injusto
y es un atentado por parte del Departamento
de Home Land Security contra estas gentes y
una manera de acallar nuestras voces, estan
tratando por medio de el temor a la deportación
de hacer que no nos manifestemos mas, que no
se desarrolle mas este movimiento por los derechos
civiles que en Chicago ha nacido.

Las organizaciones comunitarias unidas al Movimiento
10 de Marzo, estaremos dando una conferencia de
presa y rally enfrente de las oficinas de Inmigración
en la calle Jackson el 20 de abril a las 12:00PM

Received via email April 20 from Roberto Calderon’s list “beto – at – unt.edu”, sourced to Rosalio Munoz “rosalio_munoz – at – sbcglobal.net”