Believe In America.com

butterbean · Joined: 21 Jun 2006 Posts: 2271

September 10, 2006 - Before Sept. 11, 2001, there was no “virtual” border of Internet cameras and Minuteman monitors.

There were no certified police officers standing guard at the Port of Brownsville.

Travelers from Brownsville/South Padre Island International Airport didn’t have to take off their shoes or throw away toothpaste or bottled water.

Few outside law enforcement circles had heard of Mara Salvatrucha, catch and release of “Other Than Mexican” undocumented immigrants, also known as OTMs.

Ports of entry didn’t have radiation scanners. Camouflage-clad National Guard troops didn’t watch over the Sarita Checkpoint.

The list of post-9/11 security upgrades and goes on and on.

Brownsville knows as well as anywhere how the terrorist attacks led to a heightened focus on border security and, with it, hun-dreds of millions of dollars in sophisticated equipment, new personnel and laws, and, sometimes, hassles for businesses and resi-dents.

Former U.S. Marshal Service Director Ben Reyna, now the special assistant to the vice president for academic affairs at the Uni-versity of Texas at Brownsville and Texas Southmost College, said Americans did not debate whether greater security was neces-sary but rather how to go about it.

“The most important thing that has happened in our country after 9/11 is that we all changed to accept the fact that we need to fo-cus on security,” he said.

Protecting the homeland and securing the border became — and continue to be — inseparable.

According to Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, which analyzes federal law enforcement data, the U.S. Attorney’s Office of the Southern District of Texas in fiscal year 2004 prosecuted slightly more than 21,000 people, 18,340 of whom were charged with immigration violations. The district logged two convictions in three international terrorism-related prose-cutions from October 2001 through May 2006, TRAC found. More...

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