A big, and terrible, story has been brewing about a wave of deadly attacks on prosecutors in Texas, coupled with the murder of prison chief Tom Clements in Colorado.  (Another violent incident involving a home invader shot by a Colorado prosecutor and her sheriff’s deputy husband is not currently believed to be connected to the rest of the killing spree.)

These attacks are widely described in the media as the work of “white supremacists,” but there is considerable evidence that the group in question, the Aryan Brotherhood, might actually be working as hit men for Mexican drug cartels.  Drugs are big business for the Brotherhood, and their merchandise comes from Mexico.  The media focus on white supremacy may, therefore, be concealing the true nature of these outrages, and their connection to border security.

Virtually the only prominent figure currently talking about that connection is Governor Rick Perry of Texas, as quoted by Politico:

When asked about the possible involvement of the Aryan Brotherhood in the killings, the Republican governor said it is too early to speculate about who was behind the killings, but added that it also wouldn’t be wise to overlook any angle.

“We know the drug cartels are very, very active in our country now. It goes back … to the whole issue of border security and the failure of the federal government to put the men and women, whether they are military or whether they’re border patrol or whether working with the local law enforcement, expend the dollars necessary to secure the border with Mexico,” Perry said on Fox News.

“That’s of great concern. I would suggest to you, it is really at the heart of this issue. You secure the border, then it makes it harder for these individuals to have access into this country as well as it addresses this whole issue that’s hanging out on immigration,” the three-term governor added.

Hopefully the authorities will determine whether these killings were engineered entirely by the Aryan Brotherhood, ordered by Mexican cartels, or carried out for some other dark purpose as yet unknown, and bring all involved to justice.  It’s remarkable that the media seems to have zero interest in making even the most passing reference to the very plausible cartel connection.  It seems like the questions come to a halt once “WHITE SUPREMACISTS” floats up from the Magic 8-Ball of Evil, doesn’t it?

Katie Pavlich at Townhall.com has been collecting photographs of heavily armed cartel thugs skipping merrily across the border.  One of them dropped a cell phone in the Arizona desert, filled with photos of cartel henchmen showing off their assault weapons.  Guns provided by Eric Holder’s Justice Department were found at the scene of U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry’s murder; less well-known is that his killers appeared to be some sort of paramilitary cartel death squad, rather like the groups captured in the photos Pavlich published.

A Mexican national named Gustavo Cruz-Lozano confessed to killing Terry in January 2013, although his confession was later dismissed as a fabrication during FBI interviews.  The reason Cruz-Lozano turned himself into the authorities had nothing to do with Terry’s killing, however.  It was because he allegedly made death threats against a Texas sheriff.

The president of the union representing Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, Chris Crane, held a conference call on Wednesday in which he worried about the absence of concern about border security in the immigration reform debate, beyond its use as a bargaining chip to get Republicans on board.  “I mean, if these folks coming over here taking work, we know that the drug cartels’ troops and the soldiers are all within the interior of the United States as are many other criminal elements and criminal individuals,” Crane warned.  “There are people coming here for this to be a land of opportunity and there are people coming here because this is a target of opportunity.  We believe there is a very disproportionate number of criminals coming into the United States.”

Crane also noted that the “majority” of the invaders intercepted at the border are accomplished identity thieves, well-provisioned with fake Social Security cards bearing valid, stolen Social Security numbers, along with phony permanent resident cards.  This level of identity theft represents another dimension of the national security crisis boiling at our insecure border.

And yet, President Obama and his allies feel free to play around with border security as though it were nothing but a talking point, a penny to be tossed into the ante while a high-stakes game to nationalize illegal aliens is played out.  These people are openly, brazenly holding their duty to secure the border hostage to their political agenda… and even when they’re willing to concede that they might be willing to address that duty, after they’ve been paid off with various concessions, it’s painfully clear that they are not serious about following up, or even restoring a regime of hard-and-fast measurements that could be used to measure their failure.

America’s national security should not be treated as a “trigger” for activating parts of a deal cooked up by some “Gang of Eight.”  A disturbing number of those coming across the border in violation of our clear and just immigration laws have their fingers on a far more serious set of triggers.