PINAL COUNTY, AZ - On a single day in April, in a special cell block deep inside the Pinal County Jail, nearly 400 inmates sat awaiting trial or extradition after being detained trying to cross the Arizona border from Mexico.
Only about half of them were actually from Mexico.
In 2009, according to Homeland Security documents obtained by ABC 15, ICE officials detained 45,279 undocumented immigrants classified as OTM [other-than-Mexican]. While the vast majority were from other Central American countries like El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala, officials also arrested 10 undocumented immigrants from Iran, 10 from Iraq, six from Lebanon and 19 from Pakistan.
| At least according to their passports, one assumes. But how many more had acquired false papers? |
Through May of this year, officials had detained more than 25,000 OTM border crossers.
| Which may or may not mean they are on the path to more detentions than the previous year. With out a year-to-date comparison, or better yet a graph of monthly totals, the through-May-for-2010 number is not quite meaningful. If only communications students were required to take some statistics courses. |
Officials interviewed for this story expressed frustration, because U.S. intelligence officials have known for the better part of a decade about terror groups' willingness to smuggle people across the southern border, yet little has been done to substantially increase border security. |