Mexican military chopper flies into US, shoots at border guards

 

A Mexican law enforcement helicopter crossed into the United States early Thursday and fired on two US Border Patrol agents.

 

Andy Adame, a spokesperson for US Border Patrol, said in a statement issued soon afterward that the incident had indeed occurred and that the two government agents targeted were not injured.

The incident occurred early Thursday around 100 yards north of the US/Mexico border, Adame said, around eight miles southwest of the Village of San Miguel on the Tohono O’odham Indian Nation.

According to the spokesmen, the personnel on board the Mexican military chopper were in the midst of a drug interdiction operation at the time of the event. Art del Cueto, the president of the Tucson sector Border Patrol union, told local news network KVOA that Mexican officials contacted US authorities soon after and apologized for the incident. The event is now under investigation, Adame added.

Also this week, del Cuerto, the union president, told KVOA that law enforcement officials on the border are in the midst of dealing with “probably the most notorious, dangerous, drug organizations to ever walk this earth.”

“They’re dealing with the criminal element; they’re dealing with somebody who is accustomed to violence,” Adame toldKVOA. “Those are the people the parents are putting their children’s lives into the hands of.”

Previously, the US Department of Homeland Security has reported that Mexican police or troops have crossed over the border around 300 times during the last decade, and were armed in around half of those incidents, according to theWashington Times.

RT reported earlier this week that the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on DHS green-lighted more than $47 billion this week to go towards that agency as part of a request made for funding in fiscal year 2015 that largely calls for increasing homeland security’s border operations, including by way of the installation of new facial recognition technology.