California Borders Mexico

Gov. George Deukmejian delivered his final State of the State address on Tuesday, outlining an ambitious lame-duck agenda that steers California toward year-round schools, requires earthquake insurance for high-risk buildings and helps first-time home buyers. The governor--who leaves office at the end of the year--also proposed an expanded drug education program for the schools and noted that the California National Guard will increase its narcotics interdiction efforts along the Mexican border.

Federal agents seized more than $430,000 worth of narcotics within a span of three hours at the San Clemente Border Patrol checkpoint, authorities said Thursday. The first seizure occurred at 3:30 p.m. Wednesday when a 25-year-old man riding in a rental car began acting nervous while crossing the checkpoint, said Border Patrol agent Ted Swofford. Agents discovered 7.

It opened in 1924, when Calvin Coolidge was President and a slugger named Babe Ruth was in his prime with the New York Yankees. Seventy years later, illegal immigration has never been a bigger issue in California, but many say the U.S. Border Patrol checkpoint just south of San Clemente has outlived its usefulness and ought to be closed. Congressional forces on both sides of the aisle, including Rep. Ron Packard (R-Oceanside) and Rep.

Something about the 31-year-old woman driving across the border in pre-dawn darkness with two small children made the U.S. Customs inspector suspicious. She was making her way home to Los Angeles, she said. But her explanation, that they were just a family returning early Sunday morning after a visit to Tijuana, was unconvincing. She was ordered to pull over at the San Ysidro port of entry. Inspectors searched the trunk of the woman's 1986 Mitsubishi and found 54 pounds of marijuana.

Political pressure on both sides of the Southwest border produced an agreement last week for unprecedented U.S.-Mexican cooperation on border issues while heating up a debate about whether a Border Patrol crackdown here is working. On Wednesday, Mexico announced significant measures including expansion of the Grupo Beta border police unit, tougher action against smugglers and a joint pilot program to repatriate illegal immigrants from San Diego to the Mexican interior.

As the setting sun gleamed off the steel border fence where Mexican immigrants gather in the shadows between despair and uncertainty, Operation Gatekeeper rumbled into action Saturday. Using horses, bicycles, sedans, all-terrain vehicles and small high-speed boats, about 200 agents of the U.S. Border Patrol deployed in a three-tiered formation along fields, canyons, riverbanks and beaches.

Federal agents Thursday seized more than 3 1/2 tons of cocaine stashed in a propane-filled tanker truck, the largest volume of cocaine ever confiscated at the California-Mexico border, officials said. Drug Enforcement Administration and U.S. Customs agents discovered the cocaine at 2 p.m. Thursday after waiting more than a day to bleed the propane from the tanker. Agents stopped the Hidro Gas Juarez truck at about 6:30 a.m.

As a bemused crowd of would-be illegal immigrants looked on from a makeshift hilltop refreshment stand, Republican presidential candidate Patrick J. Buchanan on Tuesday stepped into a confrontational arena that sums up his often confrontational campaign: the U.S.-Mexico border. "I am calling attention to a national disgrace," Buchanan told reporters, his suit and shoes dusty from a Border Patrol tour of the rugged terrain.

Reversing a three-year decline, arrests of illegal aliens in the San Diego area--the nation's major alien-smuggling corridor--rose by 29% during the last fiscal year, leading immigration officials to estimate that total arrests along the Mexican border will top 1 million. Almost 475,000 illegal immigrants were arrested in the San Diego area during the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, officials said.

Fifteen-year-old Eduardo Garcia Zamores, one of the legions of youths who make their living selling gum and newspapers at the U.S.-Mexico border, had one leg in Mexico and another in the United States early Nov. 18 when he was shot in the torso by a U.S. Border Patrol agent. Garcia, being curious, had scaled the fence to check out a scuffle in the United States, when suddenly he spotted la migra , as the Border Patrol is called, and tried to hustle back to Mexico.