Illegal Aliens California

The bodies of two smugglers leading a group of illegal immigrants across the Imperial Valley desert from Mexico were among the eight bodies found near the Salton Sea last week, authorities said. The group was apparently waiting for a van that never arrived and died in the heat. At least 22 people were part of the group that left Mexico on June 30; the first body was found July 3, authorities said.

Julio Cesar Gallegos last talked to his family in June from a hotel in Tijuana. The 23-year-old illegal immigrant had just been robbed trying to cross the border through the mountains east of San Diego. In Los Angeles, his wife, Jacqueline, was six months pregnant with their second child, and he was eager to make another try at getting home, this time through the vast expanses of the Imperial Valley. Her sister tried to convince him that it was too remote, too dangerous.

Guy Taylor, a 16-year-old Canadian orphan, entered an INS hearing office in Los Angeles on Friday wearing a Dodgers baseball cap, a black Raiders jersey and baggy jeans--the epitome of an average American kid. He left smiling 20 minutes later, holding a certificate that allows him to continue living the life of an average American kid, at least for a year. "I won," the lanky teenager said as he walked out of the downtown Federal Building.

Another illegal immigrant has died crossing the Imperial Valley desert near the Salton Sea and the Chocolate Mountain Naval Aerial Gunnery Range. A 27-year-old woman died Monday when she collapsed near the Coachella Canal, about 150 miles east of San Diego, the U.S. Border Patrol said. The woman was part of a group of about a dozen illegal immigrants who crossed into the United States from Mexico on Saturday night, a Border Patrol official said.

A controversial billboard near the Arizona border that declared California "The Illegal Immigration State" was taken down Tuesday by an advertising company as a result of threats to destroy the sign by Latino activists who consider it racist.

Pete Wilson's tenure as governor may well close without implementation of one of his most dogged pursuits: the end of state-subsidized care for tens of thousands of pregnant illegal immigrants. That is the prospect facing the lame-duck governor after a unanimous California Supreme Court ruling issued Wednesday that spurned Wilson's latest effort to ban impoverished undocumented women from receiving state-funded prenatal care.

More than 70 law enforcement officers blanketed Blythe on Saturday as an Orange County-based group that had leased a billboard declaring California "The Illegal Immigration State" rallied near a gathering of Latino activists. The peacekeeping effort worked. While members of the group gathered to complain about the billboard being removed, about 10 members of the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) marched without incident nearby.

The Orange County group that paid for a billboard near the Arizona border proclaiming California as the "Illegal Immigration State" is vowing to display the controversial message in another location. The billboard was taken down Tuesday, but the Orange County-based Coalition for Immigration Reform says it will display the message again, perhaps in another form.

A curious little mystery has cropped up at the U.S.-Mexican border. Or more precisely, under it. This subterranean puzzler revolves around assertions that immigrant smugglers have been using a closed "narco-tunnel" that was dug about five years ago by drug traffickers seeking to sneak contraband to the U.S. side. U.S. Border Patrol agents say they have evidence that smugglers have reopened the quarter-mile tunnel, which pops to the surface on the U.S.

The mystery of the tunnel beneath the U.S.-Mexico border has apparently been solved, with officials of both countries feeling vindicated. U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service officials Tuesday said three small "feeder" tunnels, all on the American side, were discovered leading to the quarter-mile tunnel. When the Border Patrol a week ago told of catching illegal immigrants after they emerged from the tunnel, Mexico said the opening on its side was not used as an entry.