United States Borders Mexico

Southern Californians stand to lose hundreds of million of dollars in federal assistance for mass transit and for newly legalized immigrants and refugees under President Bush's $1.23-trillion budget released on Monday. Cutbacks in spending also threaten the closure of the Long Beach Naval Shipyard and the Los Angeles Air Force Base in El Segundo and promise further delays in modernizing the outmoded air traffic control center in Orange County.

The United States and Mexico will need smarter land use planning along their shared 2,000-mile border during the next two decades to avoid being overwhelmed by an expected population explosion, expanding trade and a stew of related environmental troubles, according to a new report by a group of U.S. and Mexican universities.

Killings, torture and other mistreatment by federal and state police have become an "institutionalized part of Mexican society," a human rights organization charged Wednesday. In releasing its 114-page report on human rights abuses in Mexico, Americas Watch also expressed doubt that last week's formation of a high-profile Human Rights Commission by the Mexican government would do much to alter widespread abuses.

The surge of Christian Iraqis across the U.S.-Mexican border at San Ysidro that began Wednesday spotlights a new and little-known pathway into the United States--as well as a growing community of families fleeing religious oppression to San Diego. More than two dozen Iraqis trooped across the border into the hands of U.S. immigration officials Thursday, for a total of at least 77 who have turned themselves in at the San Ysidro port of entry in an apparent bid for asylum.

The U.S. Border Patrol on Tuesday named Johnny Williams, a 24-year veteran who now heads the agency's El Centro sector, as the new chief of the San Diego sector, the busiest and most volatile jurisdiction on the Southwest border. Williams, 48, inherits the high-profile job at a critical moment in the history of the agency, which has the daunting mission of guarding the 2,000-mile international line.

Buy a team and they will come. That was the vision of Larry Lucchino, the chief executive of the San Diego Padres, who gazed south of the border in December 1994 and saw a 2-million-strong potential market of Mexican baseball lovers. He also saw obstacles. Traffic at the border was so slow, Tijuana fans sometimes sat out the first inning in their cars. How could fans get game schedules, tickets and transportation without a lot of hassles?

Afternoon roll call at Imperial Beach, the nation's busiest and most besieged Border Patrol station. Two dozen men in green uniforms and close-cropped hair assemble at rows of tables, cracking jokes, adjusting sunglasses, girding for the night ahead. Theirs is a youthful gung-ho fraternity forged in the chaos at The Line where First and Third worlds collide.

In a boost for a proposed binational airport near the Mexican border, a regional governmental agency agreed to help the city of San Diego's request for a federally funded study of the proposal. The San Diego Assn. of Governments voted 14-5 to co-sponsor the city's application for federal funds to examine the plan for a binational airport straddling the border between the Otay Mesa area of San Diego and Tijuana.

The fields of wheat and alfalfa here are the new front in a border battle once centered comfortably far off in urban San Diego. Midnight quiet is splintered by Border Patrol helicopters spotlighting undocumented immigrants who've made a pedestrian highway of the irrigated rows below. A game of cat and mouse plays out in the tiny downtown: Crossers eye agents through the shabby border fence and dash into backyards on the U.S. side, a mere football's toss away.

Public enemy No. 1 in the eyes of the Border Patrol. Crafty, nocturnal, predatory, a lifeline to the desperate, a smuggler of illegal immigrants. Coyote. Two bloody incidents in the span of a week--the videotaped beating of two suspected illegal immigrants Monday in South El Monte and the deaths of seven suspected illegal immigrants Saturday morning near Temecula--have thrust the illicit but thriving business of immigrant smuggling into the public spotlight.