"It's the border, stupid
By Salena Zito
TRIBUNE-REVIEW
Sunday, April 23, 2006


"LAREDO, Texas
There is no homeland security without border security.

Americans sitting in the heartland may not be sweating over border issues but Webb County, Texas, Sheriff Rick Flores thinks they should be.

"Any sheriff, whether they are in Dallas, Iowa or even Nebraska, would much prefer that we squash a threat at the border than force them to deal with it after it gets through us," the sheriff told me in his office here.

"Smugglers have a ready-made infrastructure in place ... and they are just waiting to substitute terrorists and their cargoes for drugs if the price is right."

Flores and 15 other Lone Star sheriffs along the Mexican border banded together in May 2005 to address drug cartels warring over the control of narcotics, human smuggling and a natural offshoot -- the likelihood of a terrorist migration into the United States.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who has taken the lead in funding border security, is impressed with the Texas Border Sheriffs Coalition, "first, by how they identified the scope and magnitude of the growing threat ... then by how they delivered a coordinated strategy to address those risks and threats."

It's intel-led policing at its best.

Talk of a terrorist pipeline is not paranoia. If criminals can smuggle drugs, gang members and illegals, what would stop them from importing members of al-Qaida or Hezbollah?

I recently got an on-the-ground look at what happens along the border. Armed with bulletproof vests, night-vision goggles and M-4s, Webb County deputies showed me the night life along the great divide.".......

........"Washington needs to take the racism card off the table so our leaders can have a reasonable debate about security. This is not about "economic refugees" crossing our borders. This is not an anti-Hispanic issue. It's not an anti-immigrant issue.

It's the border, stupid.  "