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A few weeks back, I spent a long night down at the Mexican border watching the party crowd stagger back into the homeland.
I was the guest of the San Diego Police Department’s southern division. It was quite the night, as you will see from my story.
Someone posted my story into Alipac.org, a website run by Americans for Legal Immigration, a group dedicated to reducing illegal immigration. There were a few comments on it that I found pretty interesting.
Here’s one, posted by “Hylander_1314,” and presumably aimed at the young drinkers who cross to Tijuana’s clubs and pubs for a night of partying:
So, let them cross, just don’t let them re-enter. Let’s see how they like that one.
“Dagmar” posts this:
What a crap job, playing babysitters to a bunch of drunks.
Most interesting to me, however, is this comment from “mapwife”:
Arizona also has a law that it is unlawful for an underage (under 21) person to have alcohol in their system. Sometimes they hold a major crackdown (for display) but they probably don’t enforce that most of the time either. If and when they crack down, they set up shop right outside the border and test the underage for alcohol.
That’s interesting. The SDPD certainly “advertises” its regular crackdowns. Almost everyone who crosses the border into Mexico earlier in the evening, when the police department are out in force and checking IDs, should be aware of the police presence. They’re very hard to miss.
That might act as some sort of deterrent to the underage drinkers, who get a warning as they cross the border into Mexico not to get too drunk because the cops will be waiting when they come back.
But, by the looks of a few of the people who crossed back into San Diego on the night I spent at the border, that warning goes largely unheeded.