Drawing the Line

After dealing with hundreds of attacks by Mexican thugs across the US/Mexico border, US border control agents have finally had enough and begun to go after these thugs using tear gas.

The Border Patrol says its agents were attacked nearly 1,000 times during a one-year period along the Mexican border, typically by assailants hurling rocks, bottles and bricks. Now the agency is responding with tear gas and powerful, pepper-spray weapons, including firing into Mexico.

The counteroffensive has drawn complaints that innocent families are being caught in the crossfire.

"A neighbor shouted, 'Stop it! There are children living here," said Esther Arias Medina, 41, who on Wednesday fled her Tijuana, Mexico, shanty with her 3-week-old grandson after the infant began coughing from smoke that seeped through the walls.

That's gotten some Mexicans quite annoyed.

Sorry, but that's a tiny violin playing for them.

Some of these same Mexicans have no problem with the thugs using those people as cover for their illegal operations and illegal border crossings into the United States.

Jules Crittenden offers his take, and Michelle Malkin notes that Congress has again gutted the border fence funding. Nice. Combine that with the fact that Congress can't figure out how to provide enough personnel for issuing passports as per federal law, then you begin to scratch the surface of what a mess border control really is.