Feds’ records detail Mexican incursions

LOS ANGELES – Armed Mexican government personnel made unauthorized incursions into the United States five times in the first quarter of the current fiscal year, including one incident last month in Southern California, according to confidential Department of Homeland Security records.

The crossings involved police officers or soldiers in military vehicles and were among 231 such incidents recorded by the Border Patrol over the past 10 years.

The records provide new details on more than a dozen incursions into the U.S., including the five most recent.

Details of the incidents emerged as authorities on both sides of the border scrambled to investigate a dangerous confrontation Monday in Texas.

Heavily armed personnel in a military-style Humvee from Mexico helped drug smugglers fleeing police to escape back across the border, according to authorities. An internal Border Patrol summary of the incident said the Humvee was equipped with a .50-cailber machine gun.

It was the second such incident in three months in the same rural county southeast of El Paso, Texas.

“It’s clear you’re dealing with a large number of incursions by bona fide Mexican military units, based on the tactics and the equipment being used,” said T.J. Bonner, a Border Patrol veteran and president of the agents’ union.

Reports of incursions into the U.S. by gun toting groups of men dressed in what appear to be military or police uniforms along the Mexican frontier have become a powerful rallying point for advocates of illegal immigration crackdowns and tighter border security.

The incursions have also intensified a long-running debate over the merits of fencing the 2,000-mile Mexican border, now a patchwork of metal barriers, rusted and broken barbed wire and large spans of rugged terrain where the divide is difficult to identify. In Texas, the Rio Grande separates the two nations.

U.S. Border Patrol Chief David V. Aguilar said incursions by Mexican government personnel are nothing new, and that U.S. agents on occasion cross accidentally into Mexico. He noted that incursion incidents have declined by more than 50 percent since 2002. Still, with assault rates against agents at record highs, any incursion is taken “very seriously.”