"We should seek common ground on pragmatic, responsible solutions to challenges and opportunities in our border region, including more medical resources improving health and safety in remote areas of the southern border, improving infrastructure at ports of entry to grow our economy and create new jobs, and investing in smart border security like new technologies." Please see Udall's statement on Trump's Wall Against Mexico

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From US Senator Heinrich of New Mexico:

As President Trump travels down to our border to spread more fear and division, I wanted to let you know about what I am doing to advance responsible policies. We need to make smart investments to keep our nation safe and secure and to ensure our border communities in New Mexico prosper from their unique bi-national culture and economy. I hope you can take a moment to read and share an article from the Albuquerque Journal about legislation I introduced last week alongside Senator Tom Udall.

While the president threatens yet another shutdown if his demands for a border wall aren't met, I believe we should seek common ground on pragmatic, responsible solutions to real challenges and opportunities in our border region. That includes providing more medical resources to improve health and safety in all remote areas of the southern border, improving infrastructure and increasing capacity at ports of entry like Santa Teresa to grow our economy and create new jobs, and investing in smart border security like new technologies in remote and isolated areas of our border.

Instead of building wasteful and ineffective walls, we should make smart investments that address our southern border communities' real needs.

Sincerely,

MARTIN HEINRICH
United States Senator

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NM senators offer border security plans

BY STEVE KNIGHT / JOURNAL STAFF WRITER / ALBUQUERQUE JOURNAL

Thursday, February 7th, 2019

In an effort to prevent another lapse in federal funding, U.S. Sens. Martin Heinrich and Tom Udall on Thursday introduced three proposals aimed at addressing needs in remote areas of the southern border region and bolstering economic development in border communities.

One bill would provide Border Patrol agents with increased medical training and EMT certification, as well as deliver enhanced language interpretation services and voice access to physicians or health care providers at all Customs and Border Protection remote stations and southern land-based ports of entry.

A second proposal would increase commercial hours of operation at some of the nation's busiest southern land ports of entry and direct CBP to conduct a study of designated port of entry locations to identify improvements to redesign, modernize and improve efficiency.

The third piece of proposed legislation would make investments in technology and equipment in rural and remote border areas, such as New Mexico's Bootheel. The bill also includes a new pilot program designed to address Border Patrol personnel retention.

"Instead of wasting billions of dollars on a border wall that New Mexicans don't want or need, we should make smart, responsible investments," Heinrich said in a statement. "I am proud to introduce pragmatic proposals that address the gaps in the border security debate and reflect the realities of our border communities."

A "massive, wasteful wall" along the entire southern border, Udall said in a statement, is not a realistic or effective approach to keeping people safe or keeping the nation secure.

"We face complex challenges at our border, and those challenges demand serious and common-sense solutions like those included in these bills," Udall said. "... I hope Congress can move beyond the president's message of division and work toward these meaningful solutions."

Facing a Feb. 15 deadline, a bipartisan group of congressional negotiators continues to work on a plan to fund border security measures and the Department of Homeland Security through the end of the fiscal year.

President Donald Trump has threatened to shut down the government for the second time since December or unilaterally declare a national emergency if he is not satisfied with an agreement reached on border security.

The shutdown that started just before Christmas lasted a record 35 days and affected 800,000 government employees.

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Watch live: Beto O'Rourke joins protest march past Trump's border wall rally in El Paso

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Texas Democrat Beto O'Rourke is joining a protest march past President Donald Trump's border wall rally in El Paso on Monday evening.

O'Rourke said he sees it as an opportunity for the city to take control of the narrative.

"I think the president's decision to focus on El Paso and his horrible demonization and vilification of immigrants, specifically Mexican immigrants, and his desire to make us afraid of the border can work to our advantage," he told the El Paso Times. "In other words, as he comes down here and as he referred to El Paso in his State of the Union speech, the eyes of the country are literally on us and will be even more so on Monday."

The protest march is being organized by former Rep. O'Rourke, Rep. Veronica Escobar, Women's March El Paso, the Border Network for Human Rights and dozens of local organizations.

For photos of the Beto Rally, here are five by Tzatzil Willebeek-Lemair"-Latinas For Beto

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Authors Website: https://www.facebook.com/groups/592985284186083/

Authors Bio:

Early in the 2016 Primary campaign, I started a Facebook group: Bernie Sanders: Advice and Strategies to Help Him Win! As the primary season advanced, we shifted the focus to advancing Bernie's legislation in the Senate, particularly the most critical one, to protect Oak Flat, sacred to the San Carlos Apaches, in the Tonto National Forest, from John McCain's efforts to privatize this national forest and turn it over to Rio Tinto Mining, an Australian mining company whose record by comparison makes Monsanto look like altar boys, to be developed as North America's largest copper mine. This is monstrous and despicable, and yet only Bernie's Save Oak Flat Act (S2242) stands in the way of this diabolical plan.

We added "2020" to the title.


I am an art gallery owner in Santa Fe since 1980 selling Native American painting and NM landscapes, specializing in modern Native Ledger Art.


I have always been intensely involved in politics, going back to the mid's 1970's, being a volunteer lobbyist in the US Senate for the Secretary General of the United Nations, then a "snowball-in-hell" campaign for US Senate in NM in the late 70's, and for the past 20 years have worked extensively to pressure the FDA to rescind its approval for aspartame, the neurotoxic artificial sweetener metabolized as formaldehyde. This may be becoming a reality to an extent in California, which, under Proposition 65, is considering requiring a mandatory Carcinogen label on all aspartame products, although all bureaucracies seem to stall under any kind of corporate pressure.


Bills to ban aspartame were in the State Senates of New Mexico and Hawaii, but were shut down by corporate lobbyists (particularly Monsanto lobbyists in Hawaii and Coca Cola lobbyists in New Mexico).


For several years, I was the editor of New Mexico Sun News, and my letters to the editor and op/eds in 2016 have appeared in NM, California, Wisconsin, New York, Maryland, the Christian Science Monitor, USA Today, and many international papers, on the subject of consumer protection. Our best issue was 10 days before Obama won in 2008, when we published a special early edition of the paper declaring that Obama Wins! This was the top story on CNN for many hours, way back then....


My highest accomplishments thus far are

1. a plan to create a UN Secretary General's Pandemic Board of Inquiry, a plan that is in the works and might be achieved even before the 75th UN General Assembly in September 2020.


2. Now history until the needs becomes clear to the powers who run the United Nations: a UN Resolution to create a new Undersecretary General for Nutrition and Consumer Protection, strongly supported ten years ago by India and 53 cosponsoring nations, but shut down by the US Mission to the UN in 2008. To read it, google UNITED NATIONS UNDERSECRETARY GENERAL FOR NUTRITION, please.


These are not easy battles, any of them, and they require a great deal of political and journalistic focus. OpEdNews is the perfect place for those who have a lot to say, so much that they exceed the limiting capacities of their local and regional newspapers. Trying to go beyond the regional papers seems to require some kind of "inside" credentials, as if you had to be in a club of corporate-accepted writers, and if not, you are "from somewhere else," a sad state of corporate induced xenophobia that should have no place in America in 2020!

This should be a goal for every author with something current to say: breaking through yet another glass ceiling, and get your say said in editorial pages all over America. Certainly, this was a tool that was essentially ignored in 2016, and cannot be ignored in the big elections of 2020.


In my capacity as Editor of the Santa Fe Sun News, Fox interviewed Mikhail Gorbachev: http://www.prlog.org/10064349-mikhail-gorbachev