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.