Three Border Patrol agents are assaulted on the average day at or near the U.S. border. Someone is kidnapped every 35 hours in Phoenix, Ariz., often by agents of alien smuggling organizations. And one-in-five American teenagers last year used some type of illegal drug, many of which were imported across the unsecured U.S.-Mexico border.
These facts are reported in the recently released National Drug Threat Assessment for 2010, published by the National Drug Intelligence Center, a division of the U.S. Justice Department. They ought to add some perspective to the national debate raging over Arizona’s new law that requires local law enforcement officers to make a “reasonable attempt” to determine the immigration status of persons they legally come into contact with and whom they reasonably suspect of being in the country illegally.
Assaults on Border Patrol agents have massively escalated in recent years, according to the Justice Department threat assessment, which was released on March 25. “Assaults against U.S. Border Patrol (USBP) agents increased 46 percent from 752 incidents in FY2006 to 1,097 incidents in FY 2008,” says the assessment. Given that there are 365 days in the year, 1,097 assaults equals 3 per day.
“Contributing most to this increase were rocking assaults, which rose 77 percent from 435 incidents in FY2006 to 769 incidents in FY2008,” said the assessment. A “rocking assault,” the assessment explains, “is defined as the throwing of rocks at Border Patrol agents by drug or alien smugglers with the intent of threatening or causing physical harm to the agent.”
The assessment also noted that Border Patrol agents are sometimes murdered in the line of duty. “However, some assaults against USBP agents in California have been deadly,” it said, “including the January 2008 murder of a USBP officer who was struck and killed by the automobile of a fleeing drug suspect in Imperial County and the fatal shooting of a USBP officer investigating suspicious activity in Campo in July 2009.”
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