Remember when we reported this:

A Tucson Sector Border Patrol agent was held at gunpoint by the Mexican military last night south of Ajo. Mexican military personnel crossed over the border and pointed rifles at him. Backup units arrived from the Ajo Border Patrol station, and the Mexican military personnel eventually returned to Mexico. Unfortunately, this sort of behavior by Mexican military personnel has been going on for years. They are never held accountable, and the United States government will undoubtedly brush this off as another case of “Oh well, they didn’t know they were in the United States.”

The question at the time was: did the Mexican soldiers know they were crossing the border? Did they know they were in America?

The answer is yes, they did.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Commissioner W. Ralph Basham, in a private letter to the National Border Patrol Council Local 2544 in Tucson, Ariz., described the Aug. 3 border incident as a “potential lethal encounter involving four Mexican armed military soldiers north of the international boundary.”

To see the letter, click here

“There is a barbed-wire fence and new tactical infrastructure within sight that marks the borderline where the incident took place,” Mr. Basham said. “Our uniformed agent, in a marked Border Patrol vehicle, identified himself in both English and Spanish.”

Mr. Basham, who oversees the Border Patrol, said that while most incursions into the United States by Mexican military or law enforcement authorities take place in remote areas where the international border is poorly marked, “that was not the case in this particular incident.”

So what will be done about this? These guys held a federal agent at gunpoint with automatic weapons. What is going to be done about it? Well, “the matter has since been sent to the State Department ‘with a request for diplomatic action.’”

Wow.

See, here’s the problem with that course of action. When this happened, the State Department was falling over itself to excuse the soldiers behavior.

During a press briefing in Washington, State Department spokesman Gonzalo Gallegos said U.S. officials were aware of the incident and had brought it to the attention of the Mexican government, but that the encounter “stemmed from a momentary misunderstanding as to the exact location of the Mexican-U.S. border.”

As I noted before, this is not a unique incident. This happens far too often.

It’s time to put the military on the border. But who is going to do it? Obama? McCain?

Right. Thank God for the Minutemen.

_{Icon by O.Cosma}