MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - U.S. Border Patrol agents have come under fire twice along the Rio Grande in Texas in recent days amid rising tension on the frontier with Mexico, although no one was reported wounded, U.S. authorities said on Thursday. A Border Patrol spokesman said unknown gunmen fired on agents on patrol in Brownsville, Texas, late on Wednesday. It was not immediately clear if the shots came from Mexico or from within the United States. "Shots were fired, no one was injured and the FBI have taken the case over," Jose Rodriguez, a spokesman for the Border Patrol in McAllen, Texas, said by telephone. Rodriguez said the shooting was the second along the same stretch of the Rio Grande in the past week, after agents patrolling the area in a launch on Friday came under a volley of gunfire from Mexico. "On that occasion the shooters were hiding in brush on the Mexican side of the river ... The launch was struck by five bullets, although there were no injuries," he said. That incident came on the same day a Border Patrol agent fatally shot a teenage Mexican immigrant as he crossed the border near San Diego on December 30, triggering widespread anger in Mexico and calls for a full investigation. Speaking to Mexican diplomats late on Wednesday, President Vicente Fox reiterated calls by the Mexican government for clarification of the killing, and pledged to "ensure that total justice is done in the case." The 2,000-mile (3,200-km) U.S.-Mexico border has always been dangerous, although violent attacks on Border Patrol agents have risen in recent months, especially in Arizona, where around half the 1.2 million undocumented immigrants nabbed crossing from Mexico were detained last year. The Tucson sector Border Patrol said attacks on agents havroe almost doubled in recent months, and included cases in which officers have been shot at, rammed with cars and pelted with rocks by immigrants and smugglers.
Now that is what I call border security! We should be doing this no matter what to get the point across about legal versus illegal immigration.
Total justice would mean pinning a medal on the agent that shot him. Damn - pretty soon I'm going to think of Mexico like I do France. I went to Mexico once in 1995 and many of the locals were all but hostile, just doing what they had to to get your dollars while giving dirty looks. I wouldn't go back.
I say put the wall up and then electrify it. Actually, I think the INS agent in the movie Coneheads had a good idea. Put a collar on mexicans and then electrify the fence!
Hell they already know how to climb and/or cut fences so a better idea might be to create some jobs (and give them to Americans) on building a canal there for shipping so we could send things by water from the gulf straight to Comifornia. Make sure the sides are 15-20 feet straight up past the water and smooth. If its wide enouph and deep enouph for ships then it wont be any concerns of them jumping it, get economic benifit from it, and with the walls high above the water level straight up and smooth if they jump in and there arent enouph fish to take care of them then you just dredge it out from time to time and pretty soon all of the ones who wanted to come in illegal are no longer a concern. It would also have the benifit that any of them trying to tunnel under it would not be likely to be sucessful.
