Yesterday, local Arizona news stations began reporting that a group of undocumented immigrants were shot at in an area of Parker Canyon located near Rio Rico Arizona on Friday. According to reports, a group of undocumented border crossers were shot at by two men wearing camouflage using high-powered rifles. One of the five immigrants was hit by a bullet in the forearm and treated at an area hospital for his wounds. The migrants also told authorities that they came across two dead bodies. Nogales International reports:

Sheriff Antonio Estrada said that according to his department’s incident report, five undocumented migrants had crossed into the United States and were walking through a canyon around 5 a.m. on Friday when two unidentified males wearing camouflage clothing shot at them with a high-powered rifle.

“The victims claimed no demands were made. They were just walking and fired upon,” said Estrada, who added that the group had not been robbed. Estrada said that when the group ran, one of the men, Manuel Esquer Gomez, 45, from Nogales, Sonora sustained a gunshot wound to the left forearm.

As the group continued, the men stumbled upon skeletal remains of what they thought were two people.

While little is known about the attackers, Sheriff Antonio Estrada has stated that “[i]t’s perturbing to hear of people with high-powered rifles and camouflage. It raises some real red flags.” He also told KVOA that the shooters might have been U.S. citizens. “I hate to think that is what we’re looking at but we’re not going to dismiss any possibilities,” Estrada stated. “They may be individuals who may be hunting illegal border crossers. That’s really a big concern for us.”

Last summer, Shawna Forde, a member of the Minutemen American Defense, was charged with dressing up as a law enforcement officer and breaking into a house near the border in Arivica, Arizona and shooting a Latino man and his 9-year-old daughter. While it’s too early to say who is responsible for Friday’s shooting, it is known that James Gilchrist of the Minutemen Project has boasted about having 240 volunteers ready for a 30-day aerial and ground surveillance campaign on the Arizona-Mexico border. At the very least, last week’s incident further justifies the warnings of law enforcement officials who have pointed out that their presence “could be a very [volatile] situation, one that reasonable people ought to avoid.”

A year after the Green movement took to the streets in protest of Iran’s controversial presidential election, former presidential candidate and nominal Green movement leader Mir Hossein Moussavi has issued a set of demands for specific political reforms. While sounding many of the key points that Moussavi has made over the last year, InsideIran reports that “the charter consists of numerous subsections addressing the intent, identity, ethics, and strategies for the movement”:

The statement emphasizes repeatedly that the Green Movement must be based upon certain fundamental values in order to be a coherent force for progress. The most oft-repeated value is the equality of all citizens regardless of gender, religion, ethnicity, or any other differences. Moussavi describes the primacy of human dignity as the Green Movement’s guiding ideal.

Also in accordance with Moussavi’s previous statements, the opposition leader described the various grievances of the Green Movement, decrying the “totalitarian tendencies” of the government, saying they “violate the fundamental rights of citizens, disrespect human dignity, mismanage public assets, exacerbate class differences with economic and social deprivation, illegally utilize law enforcement, sacrifice national interests for international demagoguery,” and so on. Also as per Moussavi’s previous statements, he called for the opening of civil society and the cessation of all censorship and persecution of dissident voices.

Interestingly, the LA Times’ Babylon and Beyond blog reports that “the PDF version of the statement includes a vital paragraph not published in the version that went up on Mousavi’s website in which the former pillar of the regime calls for the separation of religion and state”:

“Maintaining the independence of religious and clerical bodies from the regime is the only option to preserve the exalted status of religion in the Iranian society and it will be one of the main principles hitting high on the agenda of the Green Movement,” it read.

The rest of the statement, while leveling harsh accusations of corruption and brutality at the government, leaves the impression that Mousavi merely wants to reform the Islamic political system, not undermine its premise.

The question of whether the Green movement wants to overturn the Islamic Republic or reform it remains a key source of tension among pro-democracy activists. While many exiled Iranian activists tend toward the former view, there’s little evidence that those inside Iran have much enthusiasm for completely disestablishing the current system. One Iranian analyst that I spoke to some months ago told me of research that he’d conducted in Iran that suggested that more religiously conservative Iranians who had taken in part in pro-Moussavi demonstrations had become steadily alienated by what they perceived as the extreme “regime change” secularism of some of the Green movement’s younger activists. These conservatives are precisely to whom the Greens will need to appeal if the movement is to regain the vitality and momentum of its earlier days and grow into a credible alternative to the current regime.

Real Clear World’s Kevin Sullivan has a great post analyzing the disingenuous and contradictory charges being leveled at President Obama for his posture toward Iran’s Greens. Sullivan notes that, to the president’s conservative critics, his actual statements and policies in support of Iran’s pro-democracy movement “don’t matter, not because they are, admittedly, modest and inconclusive, but because the objective isn’t to get Obama to do ‘more,’ but to get him out of the White House“:

This means attacking everything the administration does or doesn’t do about Iran, no matter the inconsistency. One minute, Bill Kristol is scolding Obama for not aiding the Greens in regime change, the next he’s arguing that an American attack on Iran would result in a more inward-looking, cautious Iranian regime – in other words, diminishing the likelihood of revolution and regime change.

Are these arguments consistent? No. Must they be? Of course not. So long as they can be used to raise Obama’s negatives here in the States, they needn’t mean a thing for actual Iranians.

This really can’t be said enough: Kristol and his gang aren’t interested in helping Iranian democrats any more than they’re interested in “keeping America safe.” They’re interested in helping conservatives take and hold power.

Earlier this week, the State Department released its annual report on “Trafficking in Persons.” For the first time in its history, the U.S. was listed as a “suspect nation” in a report that experts describe as one that is “candid” and “doesn’t pull any punches.” “Human trafficking is not someone else’s problem,” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said. “Involuntary servitude is not something we think or hope doesn’t exist in our own communities.” Though the U.S. received the highest ranking in terms of its efforts to combat human trafficking, the State Department still highlighted various weaknesses — many which relate directly to the nation’s broken immigration.

The U.S. is described as “a source, transit, and destination country for men, women, and children subjected to trafficking in persons, specifically forced labor, debt bondage, and forced prostitution.” According the State Department, NGO reports and prosecutions indicate that private recruiters for temporary worker programs often charge excessive fees, which leave migrant workers “vulnerable to debt bondage; identity documents are confiscated; and victims feel they risk deportation should they report labor violations.” The Kansas City Star has further reported that many times victims are threatened by their traffickers. “If I kill you, I won’t get in any trouble. No one knows you are here. You don’t exist,” one victim was told by her trafficker. To make matters worse, the State Department points out that local police who are authorized to enforce immigration law under the controversial 287(g) program and trained in victim-based immigration relief have not “enhanced the response to or identification of trafficking victims or other immigrant victims of crime.” Advocates have also encountered difficulty “securing law enforcement assistance to request public benefits and immigration relief.”

The biggest challenge is, because the immigration status of the victims is dependent on their employment-based visa, victims are difficult to identify and unlikely to seek help on their own. However, assistance is available. The Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVSA) allows for foreign human trafficking victims to obtain “immigration relief,” or work authorization that makes them eligible for legal permanent residency and eventually qualify for citizenship. The TVSA additionally mandates that victims not be inappropriately incarcerated, fined, or otherwise penalized for unlawful acts committed as a direct result of being trafficked. However, the State Department reports that there have been several instances in which trafficking victims have gone unidentified in immigration detention. The Kansas City Star has blamed that on the fact that immigration agents simply don’t screen enough for trafficking victims when going about their enforcement efforts. Regulations also allow for the debarment of employers who abuse the temporary worker programs, but during the reporting period no employers were debarred — despite what seems like common knowledge that violations are occurring.

While none of the State Department’s recommendations deal specifically with fixing the immigration system, experts maintain that “whatever progress is made in the United States will be limited until lawmakers — and the American public — finally accept that human trafficking is but one dimension of illegal migration.”

Our guest bloggers are Lawrence Korb, a former assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan administration and senior fellow at the Center for American Progress; and Kelsey Hartigan, a policy researcher at the National Security Network.

The New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) deserves the full support of the United States Senate. Strategic arms control treaties have historically had strong, bipartisan support. There is nothing in this treaty should prevent the Senate from following that tradition. That’s why the recent proclamation from the Heritage Foundation’s president, Ed Feulner, is so troubling. Feulner’s assertion that New START is a “nonstarter” suggests he is more interested in presenting a distorted picture than fulfilling his role as president of a well-known think tank. The New START agreement is in line with the principles embraced by Ronald Reagan. That the president of the Heritage Foundation would attempt to tarnish that legacy is disappointing.

As Secretary of Defense Robert Gates wrote in his May 13 op-ed, “The new START Treaty has the unanimous support of America’s military leadership — to include the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, all of the service chiefs, and the commander of the U.S. Strategic Command, the organization responsible for our strategic nuclear deterrent.” Feulner has opted to ignore the advice of our uniformed military and instead put forth three false claims.

First, Fuelner’s assertion that Russia will not have to reduce its number of strategic nuclear warheads while the United States will be forced to make cuts is simply not accurate. Not only has Secretary Gates clearly testified that the Russians “will be reducing the number of warheads,” but they will have to do so significantly. According to the Federation of American Scientists, Russia currently deploys 2,600 warheads, making New START’s limit of 1,550 warheads a much more drastic cut than for the United States, which deploys 1,950 warheads.

While the New START treaty establishes a counting rule for strategic bombers, as was the case under START I, this does not leave either side with an overwhelming advantage. Strategic bombers have long been considered to be the most stabilizing leg of the nuclear triad, as they are not first-strike weapons. Furthermore, neither the U.S. nor Russia maintain warheads on their bombers, making it necessary to establish a rule for how to count the number of warheads. Under the New START accord, the number of warheads counted per bomber is one.

Second, the Bipartisan Congressional Strategic Posture Commission — the very report that Fuelner cites — actually recommended that the U.S. “pursue a step-by-step approach with Russia on arms control,” and that the U.S. “make the first step on U.S.-Russian arms control modest and straightforward in order to rejuvenate the process,” something which former Secretary of Defense James R. Schlesinger (and the Vice-Chairman of the Commission) endorsed when he appeared before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Dr. Schlesinger highlighted the need to ratify this agreement in order to pursue future negotiations over tactical nuclear weapons, a concern for those in Eastern Europe and an issue that would have significantly complicated the negotiations and severely delayed the process. The administration has already announced that it will address tactical weapons in the next round of negotiations. This makes ratifying New START even more important.

The United States will also continue to explore the full range of technologies and systems for a Conventional Prompt Global Strike. Should the U.S. decide to move ahead with this program, the conventional warheads that are loaded on strategic delivery vehicles would count against the treaty’s limits. Because the U.S. does not currently deploy conventional warheads on its ICBMs or SLBMs, the number of warheads and delivery vehicles that would count against the treaty limits would minimal.

Third, the New START accord will not limit the missile defense plans of the United States. The Director of the Missile Defense Agency, Lieutenant General Patrick O’Reilly, testified on April 20 before the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Strategic Forces, saying that, “The New START treaty actually reduces constraints on the development of the missile defense program.” Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Admiral Mullen, as well as four very distinguished statesmen, including three who had served under republican presidents, have also all discussed missile defense at lengt — and to date, no one who has appeared before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee has said that New START limits missile defense in any serious way.

The day after Feulner’s op-ed appeared, the National Security Advisers for both George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush joined the chorus of support for New START and urged the Senate to give its advice and consent for ratification. Every single national security expert who has testified on this treaty has recommended ratification. With this kind of support, it calls into question the motives of those who call this treaty a “nonstarter.” Critics will continue to throw mud against the wall to see what sticks. This is to be expected from those who are more interested in pushing a partisan agenda than protecting our national security. It is unfortunate, however, that the president of a think-tank has decided to take on that role.