Undocumented immigrant student from Fontana engages in summer of activism
By Josh Dulaney, Staff Writer
Posted: 08/13/2010 0823 PM PDT

FONTANA - It's been a busy summer for Gladys Castro, a Kaiser High School graduate who was accepted into UC Berkeley.

But she hasn't been filling out school registration forms or preparing to leave home for the fall semester.

Castro, who cannot apply for government loans because she's an undocumented student, has spent her days either protesting or planning protests in favor of immigration reform and federal legislation that would create a path to citizenship for high-achieving students who are in the country illegally.

"I'm just not scared anymore," Castro said. "I feel so much (more) empowered now that I'm out of the shadows."

Castro fought off tears as she told her story earlier this year.

Her disappointment would give way to a mix of gratitude and outrage: gratitude for those Americans who reached out to help her, outrage at those who said in print, online and to her face that she had no right to be on a college campus, or American soil.

A counter-protester at one rally called her a "Mexican Nazi."

"It gets you really, really angry," she said. "All we're looking for is a chance, a chance at the American dream, and becoming Americans."

Not only is Castro - whose family fled the violence of Jalisco, Mexico, when she was 8 years old - unable to attend fall classes at Berkeley, she was shut out of impacted classes at Riverside Community College.

Instead of studying, she sharpened her focus on advocating for the federal Development, Relief and Education

for Alien Minors Act, also known as the Dream Act, a bill working its way through Congress that by some estimates would help roughly 65,000 illegal immigrants each year who graduate from high school and meet other requirements.

Under the bill, illegal immigrants under 35 may apply for conditional legal status if they entered the U.S. under 16 years of age and have lived here more than five years, graduated from high school and can demonstrate good moral character.

They would be allowed to stay in the country for six years under such status.

Students can convert their conditional status to permanent residency by graduating from a two-year college, studying at least two years toward a bachelor's degree or serving in the military at least two years.

Students receive green cards and could apply for citizenship, if the conditions of the probationary period are met.

Castro has networked with other Dream Act supporters through Internet forums.

Among them is Ivan Rosales, a 21-year-old biology major at Cal State San Bernardino.

Like many undocumented students who support the Dream Act, he challenges the notion that he shouldn't be allowed to study alongside American-born students on U.S. campuses.

"I've worked for the spot that I have," Rosales said. "It's not like it was handed to me."

He came to the country as an infant, and graduated from Rialto High School while qualifying for the President's Academic Excellence Scholarship at Cal State San Bernardino, which is earned by the top 1 percent of graduating students in the county's high schools.

The scholarship enabled Rosales, who wants to be a doctor, to pay for his first year of college. Since then, his parents have paid for his education.

"I've never taken a handout," he said. "America is fair. It doesn't put someone above anyone else. So I think if I'm there, it's because I deserve to be there."

But those who oppose the bill say it is nothing more than a form of amnesty.

"It takes away from opportunities our American children would have," said Raymond Herrera, founder of We The People, California's Crusader, an anti-illegal immigration group. "They are not entitled to benefit from a criminal act by their parents."

Castro hopes to have enough money from her family and through private scholarships and donations to pay for spring semester classes at Berkeley.

Beyond that, she doesn't have a plan.

"Cal State was an option, but it wasn't right for me," she said. "I wasn't going to settle for Cal State."

Castro said her family at first worried about her activism, fearing she and they would be deported. They support her now, she said, because they believe she is making a difference for her generation and the ones that follow. "Before, I was really scared about people finding out I was undocumented," she said. "I know I'm doing the right thing."
josh.dulaney@inlandnewspapers.com

Read more: http://www.sbsun.com/news/ci_15773595#ixzz0wdOwtI7r

Michelle Malkin
How Mexico Treats Illegal Aliens

Mexican President Felipe Calderon has accused Arizona of opening the door "to intolerance, hate, discrimination and abuse in law enforcement." But Arizona has nothing on Mexico when it comes to cracking down on illegal aliens. While open-borders activists decry new enforcement measures signed into law in "Nazi-zona" last week, they remain deaf, dumb or willfully blind to the unapologetically restrictionist policies of our neighbors to the south.

The Arizona law bans sanctuary cities that refuse to enforce immigration laws, stiffens penalties against illegal alien day laborers and their employers, makes it a misdemeanor for immigrants to fail to complete and carry an alien registration document, and allows the police to arrest immigrants unable to show documents proving they are in the U.S. legally. If those rules constitute the racist, fascist, xenophobic, inhumane regime that the National Council of La Raza, Al Sharpton, Catholic bishops and their grievance-mongering followers claim, then what about these regulations and restrictions imposed on foreigners?

-- The Mexican government will bar foreigners if they upset "the equilibrium of the national demographics." How's that for racial and ethnic profiling?

-- If outsiders do not enhance the country's "economic or national interests" or are "not found to be physically or mentally healthy," they are not welcome. Neither are those who show "contempt against national sovereignty or security." They must not be economic burdens on society and must have clean criminal histories. Those seeking to obtain Mexican citizenship must show a birth certificate, provide a bank statement proving economic independence, pass an exam and prove they can provide their own health care.

-- Illegal entry into the country is equivalent to a felony punishable by two years' imprisonment. Document fraud is subject to fine and imprisonment; so is alien marriage fraud. Evading deportation is a serious crime; illegal re-entry after deportation is punishable by ten years' imprisonment. Foreigners may be kicked out of the country without due process and the endless bites at the litigation apple that illegal aliens are afforded in our country (see, for example, President Obama's illegal alien aunt -- a fugitive from deportation for eight years who is awaiting a second decision on her previously rejected asylum claim).

-- Law enforcement officials at all levels -- by national mandate -- must cooperate to enforce immigration laws, including illegal alien arrests and deportations. The Mexican military is also required to assist in immigration enforcement operations. Native-born Mexicans are empowered to make citizens' arrests of illegal aliens and turn them in to authorities.

-- Ready to show your papers? Mexico's National Catalog of Foreigners tracks all outside tourists and foreign nationals. A National Population Registry tracks and verifies the identity of every member of the population, who must carry a citizens' identity card. Visitors who do not possess proper documents and identification are subject to arrest as illegal aliens.

All of these provisions are enshrined in Mexico's Ley General de Población (General Law of the Population) and were spotlighted in a 2006 research paper published by the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Security Policy. There's been no public clamor for "comprehensive immigration reform" in Mexico, however, because pro-illegal alien speech by outsiders is prohibited.

Consider: Open-borders protesters marched freely at the Capitol building in Arizona, comparing GOP Gov. Jan Brewer to Hitler, waving Mexican flags, advocating that demonstrators "Smash the State," and holding signs that proclaimed "No human is illegal" and "We have rights."

But under the Mexican constitution, such political speech by foreigners is banned. Noncitizens cannot "in any way participate in the political affairs of the country." In fact, a plethora of Mexican statutes enacted by its congress limit the participation of foreign nationals and companies in everything from investment, education, mining and civil aviation to electric energy and firearms. Foreigners have severely limited private property and employment rights (if any).

As for abuse, the Mexican government is notorious for its abuse of Central American illegal aliens who attempt to violate Mexico's southern border. The Red Cross has protested rampant Mexican police corruption, intimidation and bribery schemes targeting illegal aliens there for years. Mexico didn't respond by granting mass amnesty to illegal aliens, as it is demanding that we do. It clamped down on its borders even further. In late 2008, the Mexican government launched an aggressive deportation plan to curtain illegal Cuban immigration and human trafficking through Cancun.

Meanwhile, Mexican consular offices in the United States have coordinated with left-wing social justice groups and the Catholic Church leadership to demand a moratorium on all deportations and a freeze on all employment raids across America.

Mexico is doing the job Arizona is now doing -- a job the U.S. government has failed miserably to do: putting its people first. Here's the proper rejoinder to all the hysterical demagogues in Mexico (and their sympathizers here on American soil) now calling for boycotts and invoking Jim Crow laws, apartheid and the Holocaust because Arizona has taken its sovereignty into its own hands:

Hipócritas.

U.S. News
Arizona colleges sued for discrimination
Published: Aug. 31, 2010 at 11:43 AM

* Feds stick to deadline in Arizona probe
* Arizona appeals block of immigration law
* U.S. threatens to sue Arizona sheriff
* Poll: Arizona debate stirs racism

PHOENIX, Aug. 31 (UPI) -- The U.S. Justice Department says it has filed an immigration lawsuit against Arizona authorities alleging hiring discrimination by schools in the state.

The lawsuit alleges a group of community colleges acted illegally in requiring non-citizens to provide their green cards before they could be hired for jobs, The Washington Post reported Monday.

Justice Department officials said the Phoenix-area Maricopa Community Colleges discriminated against nearly 250 non-citizen job applicants by forcing them to fill out more documents than required by law to prove eligibility to work, a violation of the federal Immigration and Nationality Act.

The district, which did not require the extra documents from U.S. citizens, stopped the practice in January during a yearlong Justice Department investigation, The Arizona Republic reported.

The suit calls for the community college district to pay a penalty of $1,100 for each non-U.S. citizen who was authorized to work but was forced to supply additional documentation.

A spokesman for the community colleges said Monday the district would have no comment on the suit.

SC Agency: More Illegal Workers At School Sites
LLR Releases Update Because Of Newspaper Headline

POSTED: 4:43 pm EDT August 27, 2010
UPDATED: 8:48 pm EDT August 27, 2010

PICKENS COUNTY, S.C. -- The South Carolina Department of Labor, Licensing and Regulation said it found even more proof of illegal workers at construction sites in the Pickens County School District.

According to Jim Knight of LLR, the agency didn't plan to release more information on the ongoing investigation, but an inaccurate headline in The Greenville News newspaper led to an update.

Knight said an article in the newspaper on Friday morning had the following headline: "Minor' violations found at Pickens County school construction sites."

"We take great offense to the use of the word 'minor' in the article," said Knight, who pointed out that the word was in quotes in the headline because it was said by an employee of the Pickens County School District. "This article is an error in its description of our work there. By telling a South Carolinian who is legally in this country and authorized to work and can't find work because an employer has elected to hire unauthorized workers that the employer's action is minor, it's not minor to him if he can't find work, can't feed his family."

Knight said he had a conversation with the Pickens County Schools superintendent who promised to have a conversation with the employee whose quote was used in the article.

"At no time did we ever describe our work there or our finding as minor," said Knight.

After discussing the article with the media during a telephone news conference, Knight released an update in the agency's investigation.

According to LLR, Cherokee Masonry had five illegal workers at the site of the new Liberty High School, at the new Pickens Career and Technology Center Land Construction had five and B&B Plumbing had one and at Dacusville Elementary Rangel Masonry had five illegal workers.

"In none of these cases have we found evidence that would suggest that the employers knowingly and intentionally employed these unauthorized workers," said Knight who pointed out that the workers themselves confessed to having fake papers.

A Michigan-based company had already been cited for having undocumented workers at the new Pickens High School in May.

The Pickens County investigation is expected to wrap up in 10 to 14 days.

According to Knight, LLR will continue to hold surprise investigations at construction sites.

"We're not going away," he said.

The Pickens County School District released this statement to WYFF News4:

“These are serious violations,” said Dr. Henry Hunt, superintendent. “We have continually stressed to our general contractors that the district expects, and our contracts require, general contractors and all subcontractors to follow all laws and regulations in constructing our schools. We will be consulting with our attorneys to determine appropriate action.”

Feds sue Arizona sheriff in civil rights probe
Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio (AP Photo)Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio (AP Photo)

By Jacques Billeaud
Associated Press

Updated: 1:31 p.m. on Thursday, September 2, 2010

PHOENIX (AP) — The U.S. Justice Department sued Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio on Thursday, saying the Arizona lawman refused for more than a year to turn over records in an investigation into allegations his department discriminates against Hispanics.

The lawsuit calls Sheriff Arpaio and his office's defiance "unprecedented" and said the federal government has been trying since March 2009 to get officials to comply with its probe of alleged discrimination, unconstitutional searches and seizures, and jail policies that discriminate against people with limited English skills

Sheriff Arpaio was given until Aug. 17 to hand over documents the federal government first asked for 15 months ago.

At a news conference Thursday morning in downtown Phoenix, Sheriff Arpaio called the Justice Department's actions harrassment. His office has said it won't hand over additional documents because federal authorities haven't said exactly what they were investigating.

"They have hundreds of thousands of reports, hundreds of thousands," Sheriff Arpaio said. "They're so broad, we're trying to narrow it down. We're trying to work with them."

The lawsuit is the latest action against Arizona by the federal government, which earlier sued the state to stop its strict new immigration law, which requires police officers to question people about their immigration status if there is reason to suspect they are in the country illegally.

"The actions of the sheriff's office are unprecedented," said Thomas Perez, assistant attorney general for the department's civil rights division. "It is unfortunate that the department was forced to resort to litigation to gain access to public documents and facilities."

The lawsuit said the department is investigating police practices and jail policies but did not specify the documents sought in its dozens of requests. It was filed in U.S. District Court in Phoenix and names Sheriff Arpaio, the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office and the county.

Arizona's new law — most of which a federal judge has put on hold — mirrors many of the policies Sheriff Arpaio has put into place in Greater Phoenix. Sheriff Arpaio believes the inquiry is focused on his immigration sweeps, patrols where deputies flood an area of a city — in some cases heavily Latino areas — to seek out traffic violators and arrest other offenders.

Critics say his deputies pull people over for minor traffic infractions because of the color of their skin so they can ask them for their proof of citizenship.

Sheriff Arpaio denies allegations of racial profiling, saying that people are stopped if deputies have probable cause to believe they've committed crimes and that it's only afterward that deputies find many of them are illegal immigrants.

The sheriff's office has said half of the 1,032 people arrested in the sweeps have been illegal immigrants.

Last year, the federal government stripped Sheriff Arpaio of his special power to enforce federal immigration law. The sheriff continued his sweeps through the enforcement of state immigration laws.

The department's lawsuit said Sheriff Arpaio's office signed agreements promising to cooperate with civil-rights investigations and other reviews when it accepted federal law enforcement grants.

Last year, the nearly $113 million that the county government received from the federal government accounted for about 5 percent of the county's $2 billion budget. The lawsuit listed $16.5 million of funding provided Sheriff Arpaio's office through several programs.

In a separate investigation, a federal grand jury in Phoenix is examining allegations that Sheriff Arpaio has abused his powers with actions such as intimidating county workers by showing up at their homes at night and on weekends.

A Hispanic activist said a federal judge might have to threaten jail time to get Sheriff Arpaio to cooperate in the lawsuit filed Thursday.

Hispanics alleging racial profiling by sheriff's deputies in a lawsuit already pending in federal court have met with resistance in their own document demands, said Lydia Guzman of the Phoenix-based civil rights group Somos America.

"It's going to take the hard hand of the judge to order some sanctions against the sheriff's office," Ms. Guzman said.

Associated Press writers Paul Davenport and Amanda Lee Myers contributed to this report.

Border Sweeps in North Reach Miles Into U.S.

Border Patrol agents in the north routinely board Greyhound buses and Amtrak trains to check the immigration status of riders.
By NINA BERNSTEIN

Todd Heisler/The New York Times
Published: August 29, 2010

ROCHESTER — The Lake Shore Limited runs between Chicago and New York City without crossing the Canadian border. But when it stops at Amtrak stations in western New York State, armed Border Patrol agents routinely board the train, question passengers about their citizenship and take away noncitizens who cannot produce satisfactory immigration papers.

“Are you a U.S. citizen?” agents asked one recent morning, moving through a Rochester-bound train full of dozing passengers at a station outside Buffalo. “What country were you born in?”

When the answer came back, “the U.S.,” they moved on. But Ruth Fernandez, 60, a naturalized citizen born in Ecuador, was asked for identification. And though she was only traveling home to New York City from her sister’s in Ohio, she had made sure to carry her American passport. On earlier trips, she said, agents had photographed her, and taken away a nervous Hispanic man.

He was one of hundreds of passengers taken to detention each year from domestic trains and buses along the nation’s northern border. The little-publicized transportation checks are the result of the Border Patrol’s growth since 9/11, fueled by Congressional antiterrorism spending and an expanding definition of border jurisdiction. In the Rochester area, where the border is miles away in the middle of Lake Ontario, the patrol arrested 2,788 passengers from October 2005 through last September.

The checks are “a vital component to our overall border security efforts” to prevent terrorism and illegal entry, said Rafael Lemaitre, a spokesman for United States Customs and Border Protection. He said that the patrol had jurisdiction to enforce immigration laws within 100 miles of the border, and that one mission was preventing smugglers and human traffickers from exploiting inland transit hubs.

The patrol says that answering agents’ questions is voluntary, part of a “consensual and nonintrusive conversation” Some passengers agree, though they are not told that they can keep silent. But others, from immigration lawyers and university officials to American-born travelers startled by an agent’s flashlight in their eyes, say the practice is coercive, unconstitutional and tainted by racial profiling.

The Lake Shore Limited route is a journey across the spectrum of public attitudes toward illegal immigrants — from cities where they have been accepted and often treated as future citizens, to places where they are seen as lawbreakers the federal government is doing too little to expel.

The journey also highlights conflicting enforcement policies. Immigration authorities, vowing to concentrate resources on deporting immigrants with serious criminal convictions, have recently been halting the deportation of students who were brought to the country as children without papers — a group the Obama administration favors for legalization.

But some of the same kinds of students are being jailed by the patrol, like a Taiwan-born Ph.D. candidate who had excelled in New York City public schools since age 11. Two days after he gave a paper on Chaucer at a conference in Chicago last year, he was taken from his train seat and strip-searched at a detention center in Batavia, N.Y., facing deportation for an expired visa.

For some, the patrol’s practices evoke the same fears as a new immigration law in Arizona — that anyone, anytime, can be interrogated without cause.

The federal government is authorized to do just that at places where people enter and leave the country, and at a “reasonable distance” from the border. But as the patrol expands and tries to raise falling arrest numbers, critics say, the concept of the border is becoming more fluid, eroding Constitutional limits on search and seizure. And unlike Arizona’s law, the change is happening without public debate.

“It’s turned into a police state on the northern border,” said Cary M. Jensen, director of international services for the University of Rochester, whose foreign students, scholars and parents have been questioned and jailed, often because the patrol did not recognize their legal status. “It’s essentially become an internal document check.”

Domestic transportation checks are not mentioned in a report on the northern border strategy that Customs and Border Protection delivered last year to Congress, which has more than doubled the patrol since 2006, to 2,212 agents, with plans to double it again soon. The data available suggests that such stops account for as many as half the reported 6,000 arrests a year.

In Rochester, the Border Patrol station opened in 2004, with four agents to screen passengers of a new ferry from Toronto. The ferry went bankrupt, but the unit has since grown tenfold; its agents have one of the highest arrest rates on the northern border — 1,040 people in the 2008 fiscal year, 95 percent of them from buses and trains — though officials say numbers have fallen as word of the patrols reached immigrant communities.

“Our mission is to defend the homeland, primarily against terrorists and terrorist weapons,” said Thomas Pocorobba Jr., the agent in charge of the Rochester station, one of 55 between Washington State and Maine. “We still do our traditional mission, which is to enforce the nation’s immigration laws.”

Legal scholars say the government’s border authority, which extends to fixed checkpoints intercepting cross-border traffic, cannot be broadly applied to roving patrols in a swath of territory. But such authority is not needed to ask questions if people can refuse to answer. The patrol does not track how many people decline, Mr. Pocorobba said.

Asked if agents could question people in Times Square, which like most of the nation’s population centers is within 100 miles of international waters, Mr. Pocorobba replied, “Technically, we can, but we don’t.” He added, “Our job is strictly cross-border.”

Lawyers challenging the stops in several deportation cases questioned the rationale that they were aimed at border traffic. Government data obtained in litigation shows that at least three-quarters of those arrested since 2006 had been in the country more than a year.

Though many Americans may welcome such arrests, the patrol’s costly expansion was based on a bipartisan consensus about border security, not interiorenforcement to sweep up farmworkers and students, said Nancy Morawetz, who directs the immigration rights clinic at New York University.

One case she is challenging involves a Nassau County high school graduate taken from the Lake Shore Limited in Rochester in 2007. The government says the graduate, then 21, voluntarily produced a Guatemalan passport and could not prove she was in the country legally. A database later showed she had an expired visitor’s visa.

Unlike a criminal arrest, such detentions come with few due process protections. The woman was held at a county jail, then transferred across the country while her mother, a house cleaner, and a high school teacher tried to reach her. The woman first saw an immigration judge more than three weeks after her arrest. He halved the $10,000 bail set by the patrol, and she was eventually released at night at a rural Texas gas station.

“I was shocked,” said the teacher, Susanne Marcus, who said her former student had been awarded a $2,000 college scholarship.

Another challenge is pending in the 2009 train arrest of the Taiwan-born doctoral student, who had to answer the agent after being singled out for intense questioning because of his “Asian appearance,” he said. His account was corroborated in an affidavit filed this month by another passenger.

Similar complaints have been made by others, including a Chicago couple who encountered the patrol on a train to Poughkeepsie, N.Y., for the woman’s graduation from Vassar College.

“At least in Arizona, you have to be doing something wrong to be stopped,” said the woman, a citizen of Chinese-American descent who said her Mexican boyfriend was sleeping when an agent started questioning him. “Here, you’re sitting on the train asleep and if you don’t look like a U.S. citizen, it’s ‘Wake up!’ ”

Mr. Pocorobba denied that agents used racial profiling; the proof, he said, was that those arrested had come from 96 countries. Agents say they often act on suspicion, prompted by a passenger’s demeanor. Of those detained, most were in the country illegally — including the Mexican, 24, who admitted that he had sneaked across the southern border at 16 to find his father. Others were supposed to be carrying their papers, like a Pakistani college student detained for two weeks before authorities confirmed that he was a legal resident.

Some American-born passengers welcome the patrol. “It makes me feel safe,” volunteered Katie Miller, 34, who was riding Amtrak to New York from Ohio. “I don’t mind being monitored.”

To others, it evokes travel through the old Communist bloc. “I was actually woken up with a flashlight in my face,” recalled Mike Santomauro, 27, a law student who encountered the patrol in April, at 2 a.m. on a train in Rochester.

Across the aisle, he said, six agents grilled a student with a computer who had only an electronic version of his immigration documents. Through the window, Mr. Santomauro said, he could see three black passengers, standing with arms raised beside a Border Patrol van.

“As a citizen I’m offended,” he said. But he added, “To say I didn’t want to answer didn’t seem a viable option.”

Drug cartel suspected in massacre of 72 migrants


By MARK STEVENSON and E. EDUARDO CASTILLO, Associated Press Writer Mark Stevenson And E. Eduardo Castillo, Associated Press Writer – Wed Aug 25, 7:37 pm ET

MEXICO CITY – A wounded migrant stumbled into a military checkpoint and led marines to a gruesome scene, what may be the biggest massacre so far in Mexico's bloody drug war: a room strewn with the bodies of 72 fellow travelers, some piled on top of each other, just 100 miles from their goal, the U.S. border.

The 58 men and 14 women were killed, the migrant told investigators Wednesday, by the Zetas cartel, a group of former Mexican army special forces known to extort migrants who pass through its territory.

If authorities corroborate his story, it would be the most horrifying example yet of the plight of migrants trying to cross a country where drug cartels are increasingly scouting shelters and highways, hoping to extort or even recruit vulnerable immigrants.

"It's absolutely terrible and it demands the condemnation of all of our society," said government security spokesman Alejandro Poire.

The Ecuadorean migrant stumbled to the checkpoint on Tuesday, telling the marines he had just escaped from gunmen at a ranch in San Fernando, a town in the northern state of Tamaulipas about 100 miles from Brownsville, Texas.

The Zetas so brutally control some parts of Tamaulipas that even many Mexicans do not dare to travel on the highways in the states.

Many residents in the state tell of loved ones or friends who have disappeared traveling from one town to the next. Many of these kidnappings are never reported for fear that police are in league with the criminals.

The marines scrambled helicopters to raid the ranch, drawing gunfire from cartel gunmen. One marine and three gunmen died in a gunbattle. Then the marines discovered the bodies, some slumped in the chairs where they had been shot, one federal official said.

The migrant told authorities his captors identified themselves as Zetas, and that the migrants were from Brazil, Ecuador, El Salvador and Honduras.

Poire said the government was in contact with those countries to corroborate the identities of the migrants. Consular officials from Brazil, Ecuador and El Salvador said they had no immediate information on whether any of their citizens were among the dead.

The marines seized 21 assault rifles, shotguns and rifles, and detained a minor, apparently part of the gang.

Authorities said they were trying to determine whether the victims had been killed at the same time — and why. Poire noted that migrants are frequently kidnapped by cartel gunmen demanding money, sometimes contacting relatives in the U.S. to demand ransoms.

Poire also said the government believes cartels are increasingly trying to recruit migrants as foot soldiers — a concern that has also been expressed by U.S. politicians demanding more security at the border.

The government has confirmed at least seven cases of cartels kidnapping groups of migrants so far this year, said Antonio Diaz, an official with the National Migration Institute, a think tank that studies immigration.

But other groups say migrant kidnappings are much more rampant. In its most recent study, the National Human Rights Commission said some 1,600 migrants are kidnapped in Mexico each month. It based its figures on the number of reports it received between September 2008 and February 2009.

Violence along the northeastern border with the U.S. has soared this year since the Zetas broke with their former employer, the Gulf cartel. Authorities say the Gulf cartel has joined forces with its once-bitter enemies, the Sinaloa and La Familia gangs, to destroy the Zetas, who have grown so powerful they now have reach into Central America.

Teresa Delagadillo, who works at the Casa San Juan Diego shelter in Matamoros just across from Brownsville, said she often hears stories about criminal gangs kidnapping and beating migrants to demand money — but never a horror story on the scale of this week's massacre.

"There hadn't been reports that they had killed them," she said.

It was the third time this year that Mexican authorities have discovered large masses of corpses. In the other two cases, investigators believe the bodies were dumped at the sites over a long time.

In May, authorities discovered 55 bodies in an abandoned mine near Taxco, a colonial-era city south of Mexico City that is popular with tourists.

In July, investigators found 51 corpses in two days of digging in a field near a trash dump outside the northern metropolis of Monterrey. Many of those found were believed to have been rival traffickers. But cartels often dispose of the bodies of kidnap victims in such dumping grounds.

The Rev. Alejandro Solalinde, who runs a shelter in the southern state of Oaxaca, where many migrants pass on their way to Tamaulipas, said the Zetas have put informants inside shelters to find out which migrants have relatives in the U.S. — the most lucrative targets for kidnap-extortion schemes.

He said he constantly hears horror stories, including people who "say their companions have been killed with baseball bats in front of the others."

Solalinde said he has been threatened by Zetas demanding access to his shelters.

He said the gangsters told him: "If we kill you, they'll close the shelter and we'll have to look all over for the migrants."

___

Associated Press writer Alicia A. Caldwell in El Paso, Texas contributed to this report