Mexican Handoff

Someone remind me: which country is the Border Patrol charged with protecting?

DailyBulletin.com:

While Minuteman civilian patrols are keeping an eye out for illegal border crossers, the U.S. Border Patrol is keeping an eye out for Minutemen -- and telling the Mexican government where they are.

According to three documents on the Mexican Secretary of Foreign Relations Web site, the U.S. Border Patrol is to notify the Mexican government as to the location of Minutemen and other civilian border patrol groups when they participate in apprehending illegal immigrants -- and if and when violence is used against border crossers.

A U.S. Customs and Border Protection spokesman confirmed the notification process, describing it as a standard procedure meant to reassure the Mexican government that migrants' rights are being observed.
"It's not a secret where the Minuteman volunteers are going to be," Mario Martinez said Monday.

"This ... simply makes two basic statements -- that we will not allow any lawlessness of any type, and that if an alien is encountered by a Minuteman or arrested by the Minuteman, then we will allow that government to interview the person."

Minuteman members were not so sanguine about the arrangement, however, saying that reporting their location to Mexican officials nullifies their effectiveness along the border and could endanger their lives.

"Now we know why it seemed like Mexican officials knew where we were all the time," said Chris Simcox, founder of the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps. "It's unbelievable that our own government agency is sending intelligence to another country. They are sending intelligence to a nation where corruption runs rampant, and that could be getting into the hands of criminal cartels.

"They just basically endangered the lives of American people."

I'll never support impeachment proceedings brought against President for going to war with Iraq based on flawed intelligence, not will I fault him overmuch for an executive order that authorized the NSA to try to close intelligence gaps using targeted intercepts of suspected terrorist communications. In both instances, a plausible, if not strong case could be made that he was trying to act in this nation's best interests.

His resistance to protecting this nation's borders, however is another matter entirely. Bush refuses to protect the territorial integrity of the United States, leaving us exposed to an importation of poverty that strains our social welfare system and artificially depresses wages. At least as important is the fact that President Bush's border policies leave us naked to the threat of terrorist infiltration.

Surely an al Qaeda terrorist who grew up in the shifting sands of the Arabian Peninsula or the rugged mountains of Afghanistan could easily walk across an unattended border to cut America from her soft underbelly.

Bush's border policies? Those are what I consider impeachable offenses.

Update: Via Michelle Malkin, Minuteman Blog Central shows that the story just gets worse:

This article does not report information told to the MCDC media offices that the Border Patrol chiefs have also been passing along intelligence reports to the government of Mexico on the activities of Minutemen not only at the borders, but in locations such as Utah, Nevada, Illinois, Massachusetts and Tennessee. Perhaps a follow-up story is coming tomorrow or an over zealous editor took the info out?

Part of a report distributed last August to the Mexican government from Border Patrol bureaucrats read over the phone to the MCDC media offices contained not only numbers (estimated chapter membership) of Minutemen in Illinois, but a statement on their activities and that they didn't seem to know any politicians there, indicating that the Illinois Minutemen didn't yet have any political clout.

That is not a report on the location of Minutemen at the border, but political intelligence from our government to a foreign nation about the activities of American citizens petitioning our own government for redress of grievances.