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PRESIDENT TRUMP’S BUDGET PROPOSAL
SOUTH TEXAS
Border wall funding, prosecutions top list John Moore / Getty Images
A road crew improves a road along the Rio Grande this week in Hidalgo, south of McAllen.
DHS reviving border fence plans John Moore / Getty Images
A Border Patrol agent stops traffic as immigrants are deported across an international bridge into Mexico on Tuesday from Hidalgo, Texas. The Trump administration has ordered an increase in deportations, part of the larger strategy to get tough on illegal immigration and strengthen border security.
Acerage near the Rio Grande will be condemned By Jason Buch SAN ANTONIO
Rep. Cuellar: Plan would be a disaster for Texas
By Alicia A. Caldwell and Sadie Gurman ASSOCIATED PRE SS
W
ASHINGTON — For core supporters counting on President Donald Trump to crack down on illegal immigration, his proposed budget reads like a wish list: billions of dollars for some of his most controversial campaign
Cuellar
promises, including a $2.6 billion down payment on a border wall that he had insisted Mexico
would pay for. Trump’s spending blueprint released Thursday is light on specifics, but makes clear that his cam-
paign pledge to confront illegal immigration is a top priority. Even as he plans to cut the Justice Department’s budget by more than $1 billion, Trump is asking for hundreds of millions of dollars to hire 60 federal prosecutors and 40 deputy U.S. Marshals to focus on border cases. “The president’s proposed budget would be a Budget continues on A10
VERACRUZ, MEXICO
Mexico state has so many mass graves, lacks space for bodies By Mark Stevenson A S S OCIAT E D PRE SS
MEXICO CITY — The clandestine graves being unearthed in Mexico's Veracruz state are of such an industrial scale that backhoes or bulldozers were likely used in creating them and contain so many bodies that officials aren't digging in some places because they don't have space for the remains, a prosecutor said Thursday. Veracruz state attorney general Jorge Winckler said there were already 300 bodies or sets of bones in state forensics facilities.
Jonathan Estudillo / AP
This image shows the area known as Colinas de Santa Fe in Veracruz, Mexico where mass graves were found.
Winckler said trained dogs have detected another site south of the city of Veracruz
where there were apparently also clandestine graves. But with morgues
filling up, some sites just aren't being explored. "There are a lot of towns where clandestine graves have been found," Winckler said. "There are pits where we are not working because we don't have space to put the bodies that we might find." Winckler spoke at a site north of the state capital where 253 skulls and bodies have been found. He confirmed that victims' advocates were led to the site by a map drawn for them by someone who was familiar with the pits. The person handed them the Graves continues on A10
EXPRE SS-NEWS
The Homeland Security Department is moving forward on condemning property for several miles of South Texas border fence that was authorized a decade ago but never built. Landowners in Los Ebanos, near McAllen, and in Roma, 30 miles upstream, said that in recent months, they received notices the federal government is reviving long-dormant lawsuits to condemn acreage they own near the Rio Grande. Noe Benavides, a former Roma city councilman, said earlier this month that he received a letter telling him the government is taking 5.7 acres of real estate his family owns near the riverbank. The land initially was condemned in 2008 after then-President George W. Bush signed the Secure Fence Act, but a clerical error kept the government from taking control of his property, Benavides said. “It’s a strip 60 feet wide by the lands on the river that we have there,” he said. “And you know, I wouldn’t mind if they went parallel to the river, but they’re not.
They’re following a road that I have there, and there’s probably about 20 acres plus left behind the fence.” Spokespeople for homeland security, the Border Patrol and the U.S. attorney’s office, which has filed lawsuits to condemn property for the fence, didn’t respond to requests for comment Wednesday. President Donald Trump has ordered homeland security to build a wall, one estimated to cost $21 billion, but Congress has yet to fund it and the notices sent out this year are related to an earlier law that authorized construction of a physical barrier on the border with Mexico. Scott Nicol, co-chair of the Borderlands Team for the Sierra Club, said homeland security is likely trying to build 14 miles of fencing that were abandoned in 2008 because they were planned in the Rio Grande floodplain. About 650 miles of fencing was constructed, much of it in Arizona and New Mexico, under the 2006 Secure Fence Act. Almost 60 miles were built in the Rio Grande Valley, most of it on levies above the river. An international treaty restricts conLand continues on A10