No wonder Arizona resorted to facilitating immigration enforcement by Arizona officials, since the federal government abandoned its responsibility by looking the other way.
These facts are reported in the recently released National Drug Threat Assessment for 2010, published by the National Drug Intelligence Center, a division of the U.S. Justice Department. They ought to add some perspective to the national debate raging over Arizona’s new law that requires local law enforcement officers to make a “reasonable attempt” to determine the immigration status of persons they legally come into contact with and whom they reasonably suspect of being in the country illegally.
rocking [rock throwing] assaults [at Border Patrol agents], which rose 77 percent from 435 incidents in FY2006 to 769 incidents in FY2008
Border Patrol agents are sometimes murdered in the line of duty.
kidnappings in Phoenix have numbered in the hundreds, with 260 in 2007, 299 in 2008, and 267 in 2009.”
The 267 kidnappings in Phoenix in 2009 equals one kidnapping every 1.37 days—or one every 35 hours.
“Mexican DTOs [drug trafficking organizations] increased the flow of several drugs (heroin, methamphetamine, and marijuana) into the United States, primarily because they increased production of those drugs in Mexico,” said the assessment.
“In 2009, midlevel and retail drug distribution in the United States was dominated by more than 900,000 criminally active gang members representing approximately 20,000 street gangs in more than 2,500 cities.”
“Mexican DTOs were the only DTOs operating in every region of the country,” said the threat assessment.
Arizona certainly has quite a bit to contend with in its state matters, particularly since the federal government seems to have had its priorities elsewhere for decades now.
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