Sometimes it takes a small tragedy to call attention to expose a much bigger one. The small tragedy happened when Nicholas Ivie, a US Border Patrol agent, was shot dead on a dark night in rough terrain along the border with Mexico in Arizona, a state that has been obsessing about illegal border crossers coming into the US from Mexico seeking jobs.

The story, as reported by FBI and Cochise County Sheriff’s Office investigators, as well as the border patrol union’s president, is that Ivie was with one set of border patrol agents responding to a motion sensor that had been triggered — perhaps by a person or an animal — and ended up getting shot by a second border patrol team that had also been dispatched to investigate, but that had approached the location from another direction.

What reportedly happened is that Ivie opened fire on the other team, and when they returned fire, thinking they were under attack by armed smugglers, Ivie was killed. The incident is being called a case of “friendly fire,” a term that is used by the military for cases where US troops kill one of their own by accident in a firefight.

But the incident is more than just an accident. It highlights the sorry state that the gun-obsessed and war-crazed US has reached when it comes to the issue of immigration.

Unasked is the question: Why would a border agent investigating possible illegal border crossing take the first shot at someone he suspected of trying to sneak into the country?

Many of us in this nation of immigrants are descendants of people who sneaked, lied or cheated in order to get into this country. If Agent Ivey and the US Border Patrol had been around when our forebears tried to get their chance at the so-called “American Dream,” our forebears would have been slain, and we wouldn’t be around today.

I can understand that a nation needs to have control of its borders. No nation have a free-for-all open border policy. But having said that, killing people for trying to find a better life is not an immigration policy. It is a war on the poor. This is all the more true when you factor in the fact that the disastrous economies in Mexico and the countries of Central America which most of the immigrants crossing into Arizona and Texas are fleeing have been largely created by US policies like NAFTA and the so-called Drug War, which have in the first case encouraged huge corporate agribusiness conglomerates to move in, set up vast industrial monoculture farms, and destroy local farming economies, and in the second funded the emergence of huge, heavily armed and violent criminal drug gangs.

Arizona is ground zero in the anti-immigrant craze. Gun-obsessed Arizonans have volunteered to conduct armed patrols along the desert border. Never mind that illegal immigration into the US has fallen off substantially because of the economic crisis, since it has become increasingly hard for immigrants to find work here. In Arizona the state government passed a law, and battled mightily to sustain it in the face of federal opposition to a state’s usurping of federal authority to control borders, which allows police to randomly demand documents of citizenship or legal residency of anyone they suspect of being in the country illegally. It’s amazing that more people — suspected illegal immigrants and whacked-out, pumped-up white gun nuts alike, along with the occasional cop — haven’t been blown away in all this, as was Agent Ivie.

ENTIRE ARTICLE HERE: Shooting to Kill Immigrants on the Mexican Border » Counterpunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names.