When Arpaio's officers raided the home of Alfredo Navarette -- a deputy who'd been with Arpaio for more than a decade and had worked for his anti-human-smuggling task force -- they found two illegal immigrants hiding there, along with 10 pounds of heroin.
Since October, more than 100 illegal immigrants have been arrested, bringing the marine arrests of illegal immigrants in the past couple of years to unprecedented levels, said Michael Carney, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent in San Diego who oversees a task force on marine smuggling.
At the time, he was allegedly trying to pass the drugs to a courier who had a ticket for a Jet Blue flight, according to LAX police officer Michael Woodard, who is part of a task force investigating drug smuggling.
Agents from US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) intercepted the drug boat on Thursday after tracking it for nearly three weeks with help from Joint Interagency Task Force South, a US military and law enforcement task force that fights smuggling on the high seas.
According to several reports, Gov. Janet Napolitano has signed an executive order shifting $1.6 million out of the budget for a task force set up to unravel human smuggling networks in the state, and reassigning the money to a new effort to round up tens of thousands of fugitives.
According to the official story, a police task force set up to tackle red sandalwood smuggling confronted a gang of more than 100 men deep in remote forests of Andhra Pradesh in the south of India.
To that effect, the authorities announced on Monday that a multiagency task force in Arizona would work to combat the smuggling problem on the ground, in the courts and through bank accounts.
Last June, Mr. Nektalov and his father were indicted in a sweep of suspected gold smuggling out of the diamond district, brought by the El Dorado task force, a group of federal agents and local police working as part of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
In 1999, he led a task force that targeted and successfully prosecuted the "the largest alien smuggling organization ever dismantled in United States history," as former U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno described it.
Barbara Crossette (NYT) THE AMERICAS BRAZIL: MORE BORDER TROOPS Brazil announced deployment of a special task force for the Bolivian border in an effort to shut routes to drug trafficking and contraband smuggling.
