Monday, November 4, 2019

Adios Mexico

One can walk into Mexico without showing ID outside ‘business hours’ at San Ysidro, CA and at any time at Otay Mesa, CA (until the Mexicans finish building the admin center there).
A new system requiring $25 tourist cards for visits over 72 hours was recently implemented:

https://www.tripsavvy.com/mexico-tourist-card-3150205

I don’t know for sure, but I think people driving across are not stopped by Mexican officials.
I think this ban only affects air travelers using major airports.

Adios Mexico
Mexico is now denying entry into that country by “known members” of the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club. Both the United States Department of Justice and Europol maintain databases of known members.
The Aging Rebel does not know if the ban includes known members of other motorcycle clubs. Last February, a member of the Grim Guardians Motorcycle Club named Patrick Jim Harris was suddenly expelled from Mexico while doing charitable work there. Harris had been arrested for Engaging in Organized Criminal Activity, after a brawl on May 17, 2015 at the Twin Peaks restaurant in Waco, Texas. He was held on $2 million bond. He has never been indicted but his name is obviously now on an internationally shared list.
The United States has tried to restrict the international travel of motorcycle club members since the Hells Angels held their World Run in Laconia, New Hampshire in July 2011.

Listen And Learn
At a training session for fledgling outlaw motorcycle gang experts held at the Pinehurst Resort and Convention Center in North Carolina in August 2015, Jeremy Sheetz, an Intelligence Operations Specialist with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Forearms and Explosives explained what happened.
“The Attorney General’s Office did this. The Hells Angels World Run which occurs every five years in the United States, was going on in Laconia, New Hampshire. So Customs and Border Patrol and the State Department said ‘We’re gonna come in and we’re gonna say you’re a foreign member, we’re gonna put you on a list. And when you come to the airport, you can’t enter the United States.’”
“… what they were saying is you have a propensity to come into the United States to commit a crime. But there was never a precedent set. But they did it anyway. So at the time, the Hells Angels said this is bullshit. So when we were working the World Run at Laconia, there wasn’t many members from Brazil or England. They would get to the airport and they’d say, ‘Oh! You gotta go back. Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol and the State Department won’t allow you to come in. Some guys even flew into Boston or New York. They turned them around. They turned around their families, wives, kids.”

Civil Suit
A year later, the Hells Angels Motorcycle Corporation sued Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano; Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton; and Alejandro Mayorkas, who at the time was Director of United States Citizenship and Immigration Services. The soul of the Angels complaint was that the club had been designated “as a ‘criminal organization’ without providing any avenue to challenge said designation, Defendants have deprived Plaintiff’s members of their liberty without due process.”
Sheetz told his listeners that day at Pinehurst that the due process technicality was why the Department of Justice, and particularly the ATF, encouraged states to designate motorcycle clubs as “criminal organizations.” He told his audience that the designation provided states with a legal “precedent.”
And, the due process argument seems to have never come up in state cases. In fact, to cite one example, a prosecutor in Waco, Texas was able to convince Texas Department of Public Safety officials to designate the Cossacks Motorcycle Club as a “criminal organization” after more than 70 members of that club were detained, Then he used the instant designation to charge them with the same charge he used against Patrick Jim Harris – Engaging in Organized Criminal Activity.

Not In America
The Hells Angels lawsuit argued that Napolitano, Clinton and Mayorkas had denied “visas to all aliens based solely on their membership in a Hells Angels charter without further analysis into whether or not that individual seeks to enter the United States to engage solely, principally, or incidentally in unlawful activity. It is not a crime under any State or Federal law of the United States to be a member of Plaintiff’s group.”
The complaint sought injunctive and declaratory relief and the government, which was clearly in the wrong backed down. The Angels moved to dismiss their suit without prejudice on December 17, 2012.
But by then the International War on Terror had already been corrupted into an international war on motorcycle clubs. The Department of Justice, particularly the ATF, took the war to countries without a Bill of Rights – most notably Australia and Germany. And, now Mexico.