San Diego Border News

UPDATE! CONSTRUCTION COMPLETED! JUNE 2019 CLICK HERE FOR THE NEWS REPORTING OF THE COMPLETION OF THE SAN YSIDRO BORDER CROSSING     ORIGINAL REPORTING December 17, 2009   Construction begins at San Diego border crossing   By ELLIOT SPAGAT (AP)   SAN DIEGO — The federal government has begun replacing the nation's busiest border crossing, promising shorter waits into California for tens of thousands of people who enter daily from Tijuana, Mexico.   The $577 million blueprint unveiled Thursday calls for increasing the number of lanes into San Diego to 30 from 24 and equipping each lane with two inspection booths instead of one. Six existing lanes into Tijuana will be moved slightly to the west.   Construction is scheduled to finish in September 2015, though the date hinges on money. Congress has funded about half — $293 million — none of it from the federal stimulus package.   Waiting times for the 50,000 vehicles that enter San Diego daily often reach two hours, c

Image Courtesy AFN Tijuana

Hitting Where It Hurts   September 17, 2009 Assistant Homeland Security Secretary Alan Bersin — the so-called "Border Czar" — was back in the old neighborhood last week to visit the U.S.-Mexico border and address an audience at the Institute of the Americas at the University of California at San Diego. The former United States attorney in San Diego played a big role in increasing border security in the 1990s by helping to implement "Operation Gatekeeper" along the U.S.-Mexico border. Before his speech, which covered everything from immigration to the drug war to the safety of U.S. travelers in Mexico, Bersin took a moment to draw attention to the issue of vehicle inspections at the border and the good they’ve done in the war on drugs. According to Bersin, stepped-up inspections of vehicles heading to Mexico from the United States have yielded more than $40 million in seizures of bulk cash since April. That’s a serious blow to the drug cartels, which are forc

Is Mexicali a success story for the Calderon program, or merely operating as in the good ol' days?  It's interesting to see how few drug agents the Mex-Feds have deployed in and about Mexicali.   By Richard Marosi (AP)   September 16, 2009   Mexicali, BC. Mexico -- In Tijuana, schoolchildren get lessons on how to duck during gangland shootouts. Ciudad Juarez cops patrol with military escorts, and the morgue there is spilling over with gunshot victims. But here in Mexicali, people fear the desert sun more than drug hit men. The city of 700,000 has a homicide rate comparable to that of Wichita, Kan., and one of the biggest police deployments is Operation Beat the Heat, in which officers haul blocks of ice to shantytown residents. There hasn't been a bank robbery in Mexicali in 18 months, or a reported kidnapping in a year. Mexicali is considered so safe that top law enforcement officials from Tijuana raise their families here, and are seen visiting restaurants an

The Mutation of Crime and Terror on The Border    By Jerry Brewer (AP) Monday, September 14, 2009   SAN DIEGO — Latin American insurgents, narcotraffickers, organized criminals, and revolutionary ideologists appear to no longer have empirical estrangements. A terrorism nexus continues to slowly come into focus. Transnational criminal groups and terrorist networks have an ironic need for each other and evidence continues to emerge, especially in the Western Hemisphere.   As this motley association of misery and destruction merge in many transparent venues, an overlap of motivation becomes necessary to achieve some common goals. The manner in which these criminal, political, and ideological fanatics morph and mix within their insurgencies is hard to disguise in anything other than death, violence, and