Mexican Drug Cartels Using American Guns To Rob Migrants

As enforcement has increased along the southern border, traditional points where undocumented immigrants have crossed into the United States have been pushed into drug smuggling routes.

This has lead to increased predatory actions by the Drug Cartels in areas where migrants cross. The cartels have begun robbing families of immigrants who cross in remote areas of the desert. In Arizona, a Border patrol agent was recently killed defending migrant crossers from bandits who were attempting to rob them.

Kim Murphy of the Los Angeles Times recently wrote a story connecting the guns used in the killing of the Border Patrol agent back to a gun store in Arizona:

In a sign of the cost of widespread U.S. weapons smuggling into Mexico, federal law enforcement sources have confirmed that two guns, part of a series of purchases that were being monitored by authorities, were found at the scene of the firefight that killed a U.S. Border Patrol agent in southern Arizona.  Sources said U.S. authorities did not have the ability to adequately monitor the movement of the guns toward the southern border, in part because current laws and low levels of staffing.  As a result, "the next time they became aware of those weapons was when they turned up at the crime scene," said one source, who, like others connected to the case, spoke on condition of anonymity because of the ongoing criminal investigation.

As it turns out the most person asking more questions about the flow of guns into Mexico is a Republican Senator, just not the ones from Arizona...

Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has asked the bureau for detailed answers about its gun smuggling investigation, known as Project Gunrunner. In a letter to the bureau, Grassley said there are "serious concerns that the ATF may have become careless, if not negligent, in implementing the Gunrunner strategy." Grassley has focused on allegations that two AK-47s purchased with cash from a dealer in Glendale, Ariz., on Jan. 16, 2010, were then used in the Dec. 14 firefight that left Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry dead. Federal sources said agents were notified about the sale of the guns several days after the purchase.

The article goes on to note that there has been some controversy regarding Operation Gun Runner, particularly critics note that the program does an excellent job of monitoring the flow of guns but much less in actually stopping the guns from heading south of the border. 

These accusations seem somewhat disingenuous given the size of Operation Gun Runner, whose yearly budget is only $10 Million Dollars. If law makers where serious about this perhaps Congress should provide more resources for stopping the flow of guns across our border.