Here's the Kind of PR Pitch DHS Should Be Pushing All over Mexico

Here's the story: Eight hapless Mexican would-be illegals got hopelessly trapped in the mud on a near-freezing day and needed three fire departments, two units of the Border Patrol, and the El Paso County Sheriff's Office to rescue them.

The guys involved must have been terrified. Think what it would be like to be stuck in the mud, in a newly irrigated cotton field, miles from nowhere somewhere east of El Paso, and even the Border Patrol unit at the site can't free you. Apparently it was almost freezing — not quite cold enough to solidify the mud, but cold enough to make the mud hard to escape.

The first agents on the scene called the other five outfits, including an ambulance, and the eight were ultimately pulled from the mud; two were dispatched to the hospital, and all presumably were processed and taken to the border, though the account by KTSM News was silent on that point.

My reaction was: I hope someone got some photographs of Border Patrol Agents tenderly saving the lives of the law-breakers, preferably video footage.

What the Border Patrol should do, but I do not think did, was to make every effort to get the story in every Mexican newspaper, on every Mexican radio station, and on every TV news program. The releases would carry the double implication that crossing the border illegally is a dangerous venture, in any kind of weather, and that the Border Patrol agents can be angels of mercy as well as cops.

Similarly, when corpses and skeletons are found in the desert near the border, particularly in midsummer, these images should be sent to the Mexican press.

There should be a steady drumbeat of press releases, with names, photos, and short sketches on illegal aliens deported or jailed (or preferably both) for illegal entries, all sent to the hometown newspapers inside Mexico. The material should be in good Mexican-Spanish and written in such a way as to attract attention, but not to needlessly irritate Mexican editors.

The last listed activity would probably fall into the hands of ICE, rather than the Border Patrol.