Mexican Border

The Arizona Legislature has narrowed a controversial immigration law in response to allegations that the measure legalized racial profiling and forced police to determine the immigration status of everyone they encountered on the streets. The initial law, signed by Gov. Jan Brewer last week, required police to determine a person's immigration status if officers formed a reasonable suspicion about their legality during any "lawful contact." That led to suggestions by some legal experts that police would be obligated to scrutinize even people who asked for directions.

The smuggler threatened to kill 4-year-old Nayli if he didn't receive $11,500 from her parents -- immediately. He had sneaked the girl across the Mexican border nearly a month earlier and now was holding her for ransom somewhere near Los Angeles. "Mommy, I don't want to be here anymore," Nayli said through tears when the smuggler put her on the phone. Her mother, Yaneth, could hear terror in her daughter's voice. "OK, mija , I am coming," she answered in Spanish before the smuggler hung up. Yaneth was desperate.

The last exit on Interstate 5 funnels drivers into a swirl of activity at the U.S.-Mexico border in San Ysidro. Mexican pop music blares from an open-air bazaar where Zapata T-shirts and $6.99 hip-hugger jeans are sold. Women headed back to Mexico drag shopping carts stuffed with bags from Kmart. Cabdrivers sit on a bridge overlooking the border and wait for customers. The sidewalks are jammed with people. An advertising kiosk promotes its busy location to potential customers: 1.5 million eyes see this ad every year!

David E. Metzger seemed destined to be a soldier. "He always had a kind of passion for the military," said his longtime friend, Rob Casillas, who recalled mock childhood battles in the suburbs of southern San Diego County. "We'd play little war games in the fields near the Mexican border." At Mar Vista Senior High School in Imperial Beach, Metzger wore his slacks freshly pressed and his shoes scuff-free, and was careful to stay in shape, his friend recalled. "He always fit the profile of a soldier," Casillas said.

Federal agents are investigating a suspected "drop house" in Reseda, where more than a dozen illegal immigrants, mostly Central Americans, were being held against their will, authorities said. Los Angeles police were called late Sunday to the single-story stucco home in the 7900 block of Newcastle Avenue after someone inside dialed 911 on a cellphone and reported that smugglers were not allowing anyone to leave, authorities said. Police freed 14 people Sunday and discovered two others hiding nearby Monday.

When Mexican Americans begin celebrating the extended Christmas season this Saturday on the feast day of Guadalupe, they will enjoy one big change from a few years ago: ample supplies of tejocote , a peculiar crab-apple-like fruit that most people have never heard of but that is an indispensable ingredient in ponche , the hot fruit punch emblematic of the holidays. Once the most smuggled fruit on the Mexican border, tejocote is forbidden no more. Cheap and abundant in the Mexican highlands, tejocote (pronounced te-ho-COT-e)

Operation Gatekeeper started in October 1994, focusing federal border security efforts on the five-mile stretch from the Pacific Ocean to San Ysidro. Within three years, the budget of the old Immigration and Naturalization Service -- since split into two agencies -- doubled to $800 million. The number of Border Patrol agents also doubled, along with the miles of fencing. Underground sensors nearly tripled. In the 15 years since its inception, Gatekeeper, now shorthand for all federal enforcement efforts at the Mexican border, has had a range of consequences, some expected and others grimly surprising.

The discovery in Santa Ana of a tiny insect that typically carries a tree-killing disease has brought California's $1.6-billion citrus industry one step closer to an agricultural disaster, experts said. State agricultural officials said Tuesday that they recently trapped five adult Asian citrus psyllids on a lemon tree at a home in Santa Ana. They have sent the insects off to a lab to see whether they carry the bacteria that causes citrus greening, a disease that has ravaged groves in Florida and wiped out much of the citrus industries in China, India, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Brazil.

The streets of Juarez are swallowing the young and pretty. Monica Alanis, an 18-year-old college freshman, never came home from her exams. That was more than four months ago. Across town, 17-year-old Brenda Ponce didn't return from a job-hunting trip downtown. That was a year ago. Hilda Rivas, 16, was also last spotted downtown. That was 17 months ago. Two dozen teenage girls and young women have gone missing in this violent border city in the last year and half, stirring dark memories of the killings of hundreds of women that made Ciudad Juarez infamous a decade ago. The disappearances, which include two university students and girls as young as 13, have some crime-novel touches: mysterious dropped calls, messages left by third parties and unsubstantiated reports of the women being kept at a house.