If you live within 100 miles of the border, you and your vehicle can be searched without probable cause, in violation of the fourth amendment. Two-thirds of US citizens don't have their fourth amendment rights under this reasoning. Absolutely sickening.

Apparently the trick is twisting two Supreme Court rulings: that the Border Patrol is allowed to do random stops to check for illegal immigrants in their areas, and that if a drug dog just happens to alert handlers that there are drugs, that is probable cause. So, just stop everyone to check for illegal immigrants and happen to have a bunch of drug dogs there. Oh, and take advantage of the fact Dogs frequently issue erroneous alerts.

In the CNN article, "Arrests of illegal immigrants on U.S. borders down", there is some interesting political spin. "The number of illegal immigrants arrested along U.S. borders dropped 23 percent during the past nine months -- evidence, officials said, that stepped-up enforcement is working." What?

Arrests went down because of the deterrant of more enforcement. Unless, of course arrests went down because conditions in other countries are improving and fewer people are interested in leaving. Or perhaps people sneaking into the country have newer and better tactics for evading the Border Patrol so they're actually entering in record numbers. It's entirely possible that stepped-up enforcement is a catastrophic failure. That's the problem with stats on crime; you only get numbers about the criminals we catch, not the ones who get away with their crimes.

I'm sure if arrests had gone up, we'd be hearing that it was evidence that enforcement was working. After all, we'd tried to be better at catching people, and we caught more people!

We're also not given long term data. 695,841 people were captures in the first three quarters of fiscal year 2007, compared to 907,445 from the same period the previous year. Okay, but what about 2005 and 2004. Ideally, what is the last several decades worth of numbers? Was 907,445 unusually high? Is the trend up or down? The article doesn't provide the information, so a real analysis isn't possible.