Border Patrol station overrun by armed force from Mexico

I saw this last night at Instapundit and was reminded about it by this story at FoxNews.com. National Guard troops at an observation post near the border were forced to retreat when a group of armed people advanced on them.

The event occurred about 11 p.m. Wednesday at one of the National Guard entrance identification team posts near Sasabe, said National Guard Sgt. Edward Balaban.

He said the troops withdrew safely, no shots were fired and no one suffered injuries.

U.S. Border Patrol officials are investigating the incident and trying to determine who the armed people were, what they were doing and why they approached the post before retreating to Mexico.

The incident occurred in the west desert corridor between Nogales and Lukeville in the vicinity of Sasabe, Balaban said.

“We don’t know exactly how many because obviously it took place in the dark,” Balaban said. “Nobody was able to get an accurate count.”

I’m quite a bit dismayed about this and not just because this was yet another example of why we need a good fence up. (If the fence had been in place at this point of the border, the attacking force wouldn’t have been able to just walk over toward the Guards’ position.) It’s not just that there’s an armed force coming out of a foreign country challenging American authorities on our soil. Those are bad enough. It’s the reaction by the Border Patrol and the National Guard that has me worried.

Approached by an armed force coming across the border, the reaction was to retreat without a shot fired? To permit a force considered hostile to simply push back American border defenses by the mere act of walking toward them? All of the commentary in the story by Border Patrol and Guard officials seems to be considering this just another illegal entry story. While that’s bad enough, the addition of firearms being carried by those ‘illegals’ changes the situation dramatically. While many have called the illegal aliens sneaking across our borders an ‘invasion’ the fact is that’s a euphemism. When armed people come from 1 country into another, that is an invasion and it should have been met with a response as though that’s what it was. Am I saying the Guards should have fired on those armed individuals?

You’re. Damned. Right. I. Am.

If those people were observed clearly enough to be identified as carrying arms, then they should have been challenged and engaged. They should not have been permitted to force a retreat without a fight and I’m very, very concerned that our “National Guard” appears less than willing to engage such an armed force crossing into American territory in the dead of night.

The story makes a point of saying that the Guard aren’t allowed to apprehend illegal entrants. This wasn’t a law enforcement issue. The presence of firearms with the advancing force makes it a national security, military issue and – if the story is being reported correctly (this is the AP, after all) – the response should have been a military one. It wasn’t.

If the new Congress wants to mount a big investigation, here’s their chance. Why did the Guard retreat without engaging? Why is Mexico allowing such armed forces to operate on the border? What is Congress going to do to put sufficient defenses in place to see that our sovereign territory isn’t invaded like that again?

I hope to follow up with more news soon.

Update: Jerry Fuhrman over at From On High agrees: this was pathetic.

Now THAT is a lotta pork

This time, I’m actually not referring to a Congressional budget meeting when I say there’s a lot of pork in this story.

A wild hog weighing eleven-hundred pounds, bigger than the near-mythical “Hogzilla” caught in rural south Georgia a few years ago, has been been shot and killed in a suburban neighborhood.

William Coursey, an avid hunter who shot the hog in a neighbor’s yard in Fayette County in the suburbs south of Atlanta, had it hanging from a tree in his front yard.

Kee-ripes, folks, that is a big pig! At 1100 pounds that bloody hog weighed almost as much as that Hyundai Excel I was driving around 15 years ago. And someone shot this thing in a suburban neighborhood? Talk about city sprawl crowding out the wildlife…