Violence on border at record high

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Violence on the U.S.-Mexico border is at an all-time high because illegal aliens are more willing to attack U.S. authorities, and an increasing number also are convicted criminals, border sheriffs said yesterday.

Whereas 10 years ago they would flee back to Mexico if anyone challenged them, now aliens make it clear they will fight, the sheriffs told a Senate Judiciary Committee panel.

"They make it known to the deputies: 'We're going through, you're not going to stop us,'" said Sheriff A. D'Wayne Jernigan of Val Verde County in Texas.

And Sheriff Larry A. Dever of Cochise County in Arizona said when smugglers are involved, law enforcement now expects the worst.

"We anticipate that we will be in a fight, a very violent confrontation, in every interdiction effort, with running gunbattles down public roadways," he said.

The sheriffs described a border in chaos and a federal government that hasn't put the resources into its own efforts, nor been as receptive as possible to local law-enforcement efforts to help out.

They said the trend toward violent confrontations has happened in the past decade as the trade in drugs and people has become a big business for smugglers and with the increase in OTMs, or "other than Mexican" aliens, attempting to cross.

"It sounds like, if nothing else, there's at least an attitude of entitlement," said Sen. John Cornyn, Texas Republican.

Border violence has become a hot topic in recent months, with drug cartels brazenly killing police chiefs on the Mexican side, the discovery of a tunnel under the border ending in a warehouse in San Diego, attacks on U.S. authorities increasing, and a videotaped encounter with what Texas sheriffs said was Mexican military on the U.S. side of the border.

Senators said one reason for the rise in violence on the U.S. side is that many illegal aliens are convicted criminals or persons wanted for crimes. More than 42,000 illegal aliens caught at the U.S. border in the past five months fell into that category, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection.