Grieving relatives of 13 police officers killed in an apparent cartel ambush gathered outside a funeral home Tuesday, many of them angry at the government and police commanders they believe sent their loved ones to a certain death. “The good ones are here,” said the brother of slain officer Marco Antonio González, gesturing at the
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$1.5 million dollars has been pledged for the Borderland by tech giant Microsoft. The Seattle-based company has a vetted interest in the Sun City and the region, due to its bicultural and bilingual make up. “This isn’t just one city on one side of the border, it’s really two cities as part of a binational
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At least 14 police officers were killed and several others wounded Monday in an ambush by gunmen in the Mexican state of Michoacan, a western region where violence attributed to drug cartels has spiked in recent months. The state police officers had gone to a home in the town of El Aguaje in Aguililla municipality
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Federal agents with Mexico’s National Guard discovered a ladder Sunday apparently used to cross over the U.S.-Mexico border fence separating Juarez from Santa Teresa, New Mexico. In a statement, Mexican authorities said they advised U.S. Customs and Border Patrol that they had confiscated and destroyed “a metal staircase approximately five meters in length, which is
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A van carrying a family on a trip crashed along the Camino Real bridge just southwest of Juarez and then plunged down an embankment into an empty ravine, killing two people and injuring five others. Video from Canal 44 (you can watch it in the video player at the top of this article) showed emergency
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Newly released data reveals a dramatic shift in the region along the Rio Grande over the past year — and offers a window into the human toll of turmoil at the border. Water-related deaths tripled in the Border Patrol’s Del Rio sector from fiscal year 2018 to fiscal year 2019, according to data obtained from
Continue Reading Federal officials began Friday to reimburse organizations that fed, sheltered and transported migrants released this year in communities near the U.S.-Mexico border, according to Democratic lawmakers and some organizations receiving the funds. The Federal Emergency Management Agency has authorized $7.8 million in an initial wave of funding, part of $30 million in aid set aside
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Kevin McAleenan, the acting secretary of homeland security since April and the fourth person to serve in that post since the Trump presidency began, has submitted his resignation to the White House. President Trump confirmed his departure in a tweet Friday evening and said he would be announcing a new acting secretary in the next
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About 160 bodies have been buried in a mass grave in Juarez. The Juarez Medical Examiner’s Office designated them as unclaimed. The bodies were of people who died in hospitals, murder victims, migrants from Central America or those whose families could not afford a funeral. Juarez officials said DNA samples were taken from the bodies
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A federal judge in Texas ruled Friday that President Donald Trump’s national emergency declaration to build a border wall is unlawful and appears poised to block the use of those funds. Judge David Briones of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas, asked challengers of the wall to propose the scope of
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A U.S. Border Patrol agent, whose wife heads the El Paso sector of the agency, is facing charges he kidnapped and sexually assaulted a junior agent in Arizona, according to police records obtained by ABC-7. (Editor’s note: You can read the records for yourself at the end of this article.) Gus Zamora, 51, was allowed
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The number of migrants encountered at the Mexican border during the 2019 budget year is likely to be nearly 1 million, one of the highest figures on record and the most since 2007, Trump administration officials said Tuesday. In 2019 about 977,500 people were apprehended or presented themselves at the ports of entry without proper
Continue Reading The Trump administration is moving forward with plans to implement collection of DNA from migrants who’ve been arrested, according the Department of Homeland Security. The move, being done in coordination with the Department of Justice, comes on the heels of months of historic high apprehension numbers on the southern border and is likely to receive
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President Donald Trump suggested shooting migrants in the legs in order to slow them down after they crossed the U.S.-Mexico border during a March meeting in which he called for a shut down of the entire border, The New York Times reported Tuesday evening. Citing interviews with more than a dozen White House and administration
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A key group of New Mexico lawmakers will tour both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border later this week and hear from the mayor of the largest Mexican city in the region about the migrant influx. Ciudad Juarez Mayor Armando Cabada will be among those who will meet with members of New Mexico’s Legislative Finance Committee
Continue Reading An unknown number of residents in a San Elizario neighborhood were evacuated Sunday morning after an apparent dangerous pipe failure that occurred just over the border in Mexico. Multiple residents told ABC-7 that El Paso County Sheriff’s deputies came to their homes telling them to evacuate because of the incident. The area evacuated was reportedly
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President Donald Trump is raising a large chunk of the money for his border wall with Mexico by deferring several military construction projects slated for Guam, a strategic hub for U.S. forces in the Pacific. This may disrupt plans to move Marines to Guam from Japan and to modernize munitions storage for the Air Force.
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José José, a Mexican music icon, has died, the Mexican Ministry of Culture said. He was 71. “From the Ministry of Culture we are sorry for the passing of singer José Rómulo Sosa, better known as José José of the prince of the song. Since the beginning of his career, the singer of El Triste
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A federal judge has blocked the Trump administration’s plan to expand a procedure to speed up deportations for some undocumented immigrants. The policy shift, announced in July, casts a wider net over undocumented immigrants subject to the fast-track deportation procedure known as “expedited removal,” which allows immigration authorities to remove an individual without a hearing
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Catholic leaders touring the Borderland are witnessing for themselves the changing face of the immigrants trying to gain entry into the U.S. They are here as part of the U.S. conference of Bishops Six Bishops and a representative from the Vatican toured Juarez and El Paso, focusing on immigrant shelters. The group was expecting to
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As part of its latest attempt to deter migrants from seeking refuge at the U.S. southern border, the Trump administration has initiated a series of agreements with Central American countries and says they’re moving toward a new process that allows asylum seekers to be more easily turned away. A new agreement Wednesday between acting U.S.
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Hundreds of Customs and Border Protection officers who were reassigned in March to assist U.S. Border Patrol agents have returned to their normal duties at the country’s ports of entry, officials confirmed to ABC-7 on Wednesday. In late March, more than 700 officers from ports of entry in El Paso; Laredo; Tucson and San Diego
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Juarez set a new homicide record over the weekend with more than 20 killings in a roughly 40-hour period, the state attorney general’s office told Mexican media outlets on Sunday. El Diario reported that among the victims were a child whose body was discovered hours after the murder of his father, and four men gunned
Continue Reading El Paso native and Horizon High School graduate Ashley Alvdrez was crowned the new Miss Mexico over the weekend, a Clint Independent School District official tweeted. The 20-year-old Alvdrez, who was Miss Chihuahua, was selected from 32 candidates from all over Mexico who were vying for the title. She is the second Chihuahuan to win
Continue Reading Dozens of Mexican families continue to wait to declare asylum as the backlog in immigration cases grows every day. “It’s really hard to be on the streets,” said Marisela Estrada in Spanish. “It’s in God’s hands.” Marisela Estrada sleeps with her four children on the streets of Juarez near the Paso Del Norte Bridge. She
Continue Reading A U.S. Border Patrol agent was seriously injured when he was struck by a semi-truck late Tuesday night near the Sierra Blanca border checkpoint and was rushed to University Medical Center in El Paso for treatment. The Hudspeth County Sheriff’s Office initially confirmed the injury to ABC-7, and Customs and Border Protection officials offered additional
Continue Reading A person was found dead in a canal along the Border Highway on Tuesday morning. The El Paso Fire Department said the body was discovered near Midway Drive and Border Highway. Officials have not released the identity of the person found. No further details were immediately available.
Continue Reading Even in a city where authorities are investigating the scattering of body parts all over town, Domingo Beltran Zamora feels safer here than in his native Mexican beach town Acapulco. And if there is safety in numbers, Beltran and his wife and daughter may have found it on the streets of this border city earlier
Continue Reading The fight over funding for a border wall in Texas and other states appears to be heating up again in Congress this month as lawmakers near a deadline to pass a military funding bill. The partisan divide over the wall was on display last week when the Senate Appropriations Committee approved its $694.9 billion annual
Continue Reading One person was shot and killed, while two others were shot and wounded by a group of armed thieves at a busy north Juarez shopping mall, Mexican media outlets reported Sunday. The deadly robbery took place Saturday night at the entrance to the Futurama Rio Grande Mall, according to El Mexicano. The newspaper said the
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