A US Border Patrol agent was shot dead and another wounded when they came under fire on Tuesday while responding to a tripped ground sensor in a drug smuggling corridor in Arizona near the border with Mexico, authorities said.
Authorities said three agents were on foot about 8km north of the border in rocky terrain when gunfire erupted well before daybreak, but provided few additional details on the circumstances of the violence.
“As they were walking up the trail, they reported taking gunfire,” Cochise County Sheriff’s Office spokeswoman Carol Capas said.
The shooting marked the fourth conflict-related death of a Border Patrol agent in Arizona in less than two years and reignited concerns about border security in a state that is already at the forefront of the national immigration debate.
“Flags will be lowered in honor of the slain agent. Elected officials will vow to find those responsible. Arizonans and Americans will grieve, and they should, but this ought not only be a day of tears,” Arizona Republican Governor Jan Brewer said in a statement.
“There should be anger, too. Righteous anger — at the kind of evil that causes sorrow this deep, and at the federal failure and political stalemate that has left our border unsecured and our Border Patrol in harm’s way,” added Brewer, a vocal foe of US President Barack Obama’s administration on immigration.
Brewer, citing what she described as a federal failure to secure Arizona’s southern border, signed a broad immigration crackdown into law in 2010 to try to crack down on the flow of illegal immigrants into the state where an estimated 360,000 undocumented people live.
Critics of the law, which includes a requirement that police check the immigration status of anyone they stop and suspect of being in the country illegally, have said it could lead to racial profiling.
The shooting took place near the border town of Naco, southeast of Tucson, which remains a corridor for smuggling marijuana and people, despite the construction of a tall, steel fence along the border.
Across the border from Naco in a Mexican town of the same name, Mexican police said a team of soldiers and federal and local police was searching for a suspect or suspects in the case.
The border patrol identified the slain agent as Nicholas Ivie, 30, who was originally from Utah and had worked for the agency since 2008.
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion