A federal judge will rule Tuesday whether the Tucson Citizen must resume publication after the Arizona Attorney General complained that Gannett Co. and Lee Enterprises Inc. violated antitrust laws by ending their joint operating agreement and stopped daily publication of the newspaper to make more money.

The Citizen published its last edition Saturday after Gannett announced there was no viable buyer after about four months on the market. Gannett said the Citizen would continue as a Web-only, blog-like commentary site for local issues, but no news.

Attorney General Terry Goddard filed a motion Friday seeking a temporary restraining order to keep Gannett from closing the Citizen, but U.S. District Judge Raner Collins wasn’t available to hear the case until Monday.

Nancy Bonnell, chief of the state attorney general’s antitrust unit, argued Gannett’s decision to stop publishing the 138-year-old afternoon newspaper violates antitrust laws by eliminating competition and fostering a monopoly situation, while injuring the community by eliminating an editorial and news voice.

Gordon Lang, an attorney representing Gannett, said the opinion and commentary Web site is intended to create a community forum, as well as a weekly Citizen editorial to be published in the Star.

“The Tucson Citizen is a failing newspaper,” Lang said. “There simply aren’t enough people to buy the Tucson Citizen, and the sad truth is that it costs more to publish than the partners get from it.”

Bonnell contended Gannett and Lee Enterprises, which publishes the morning Arizona Daily Star, determined their joint business entity, Tucson Newspapers Inc., “would make more money if they closed one of the papers.”

Tucson Newspapers Inc. handles the non-editorial operations for both newspapers, such as advertising, publishing and distribution.

“Even in recession last year, the parties made $16 million — but that wasn’t enough,” Bonnell said.

Santa Monica Media Corp. LLC offered to buy the Citizen for $250,000 in cash or $400,000 in payments for minimal assets, including the newspaper’s masthead, some editorial equipment and use of the archives, on the premise that it would compete with the Star, Bonnell said.

Gannett said the newspaper’s assets were assessed at $760,000, and its asking price was $800,000, according to court documents.

“Gannett rebuffed the offer,” stopped negotiations and shut down the paper, Bonnell said.

Until Saturday, Gannett and Lee Enterprises were 50-50 partners in a joint operating agreement through which they shared the costs, profits and losses of Tucson Newspapers Inc. The JOA, an exemption to federal antitrust law, was allowed under the Newspaper Preservation Act. The JOA was terminated with Saturday’s final edition, but the business partnership would continue outside of the legal framework of a JOA, a Gannett official said.

Don Kaplan, a lawyer representing Lee Enterprises, said the judge’s decision would reverberate nationwide. He said that if partners in a JOA can’t help out a healthy paper by shutting down the one that is failing, “then this industry is in very serious trouble.” The Citizen, he said, was losing more than $10,000 a day.

Stephen Hadland, CEO of the Santa Monica Media Co., a group of weekly newspapers in California, said he believes when the Justice Department decided it would not go ahead with an antitrust action against Gannett, the company moved quickly to close the paper.

“I believe that was always their intention. I don’t believe they ever intended to sell it,” Hadland said.

Goddard was informed of the Citizen’s pending closure when Hadland wrote a letter Friday morning asking Goddard to intervene. Goddard said he moved forward after the Justice Department notified his office at noon that it would not pursue an antitrust complaint.

Gannett, the country’s largest newspaper publisher, announced in January that the Citizen would close if it didn’t find someone to buy certain assets by March 21, but then delayed the closing to continue negotiations.

Kate Marymont, Gannett’s vice president for news, said she has no firm plans for rehiring staff if the judge orders the paper to publish again.

“I am thinking about all options, but waiting to see what happens before really getting aggressive about it,” she said.

Other than eight people retained for a transitional period, some of whom are working on the Web site, all the other employees were let go with severance packages on Friday, Marymont said. “So, it’s not like they’re sitting there waiting for that phone call,” she said.

Groundbreaking will begin next week in southern Arizona for the virtual border fence project’s first permanent detection towers, a spokeswoman in Washington said Friday.

Contractors preparing sites for the towers “will start moving earth next week,” Customs and Border Protection spokeswoman Jenny Burke said.

The towers will hold sensors, cameras and communications equipment designed to detect illegal immigrants and drug smugglers and to enhance the ability of Border Patrol agents to intercept and apprehend them.

The towers are to be built first in Arizona, the busiest corridor for illegal entries along the Mexican frontier over the past decade. Plans call for also placing such towers along most of the 2,000-mile Mexican border, in New Mexico, California and almost all of Texas within five years.

But within the next few weeks, Burke said, officials with the Secure Border Initiative have to assure that problems that came up with various components during systems testing have been resolved.

“The Department of Homeland Security has to give approval before we hang sensors on the towers,” she said.

“There were some issues that cropped up during systems testing qualifications. SBI believes that they have been fixed,” and will seek to provide assurance of that during the next couple of weeks, Burke said.

The first permanent towers will encompass a total of 53 miles of the Arizona border in two chunks southwest of Tucson. One will replace a prototype temporary virtual fence near Sasabe.

Federal officials plan to start construction within weeks on a new “virtual fence” along the U.S.-Mexico border that they expect to stretch across most of the nearly 2,000-mile frontier within five years.

The executive director of the Homeland Security Department’s Secure Border Initiative program office told The Associated Press in an interview that the first permanent towers holding sensors, cameras and communications gear to detect drug smugglers and illegal immigrants will be built along 53 miles of the Mexican border in southern Arizona. Towers spanning practically all the remaining 320 miles of the state’s southern border will follow.

New Mexico will be targeted next for virtual fencing, said Mark Borkowski, a Customs and Border Protection official in charge of the program, followed by California and most of Texas, all over the next five years.

“Construction should start imminently,” Borkowski said. “We’re in the final throes of convincing ourselves that the engineering is fine.”

Depending on funding, the whole southwestern border except for about 200 miles around Big Bend National Park in Texas would be covered by 2014, Borkowski said. That area would also eventually be outfitted with the system.

Plans for a virtual fence on the Canadian border aren’t fully developed.

The electronic monitoring is meant to supplement pedestrian fencing and vehicle barriers that have been built along 624 miles of the border. About 46 more miles of fencing are planned.

Borkowski declined to estimate what the entire southwestern virtual fence project will cost. “I’m not sure I’ve got that all negotiated,” he said. “It’s not a number that I want to put out.”

But Adam Comis, press secretary for the House Homeland Security Committee, said the cost is estimated to be about $6.7 billion by 2014.

The primary contractor, the Boeing Co., has received about $600 million so far for SBI technology development.

As of a year ago, Boeing also had received some $260 million for construction of physical border fences and vehicle barriers, primarily in Arizona and Texas.

The virtual fence is designed to use radar and cameras with about a six-mile range, including nighttime infrared devices and other technologies, to detect smuggling attempts. The sensors will be able to distinguish people from animals and allow operators to direct Border Patrol agents to intruders.

The system is the follow-on to a prototype virtual fence strung across 28 miles of the southern Arizona border. The prototype has been in use since late 2007. Borkowski said the new system is essentially a final product that can be enhanced.

The Government Accountability Office told Congress last year the prototype fence did not fully meet expectations and its design wouldn’t be used as the basis for future developments. It is still operating, though, and its portable towers will be used in test scenarios elsewhere.

The decision to move forward with construction was greeted with caution by a border security advocacy group.

“They’ve spent a lot of money and time on one (virtual fence) that didn’t work very well, so there’s reason to be skeptical,” said Ira Mehlman, a spokesman for the Federation for American Immigration Reform. He said the high-tech devices aren’t a substitute for the promised actual fencing.

The first new towers will be spread across 23 miles near the small border town of Sasabe, Ariz., and another 30 miles along the Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument. Arizona has been the primary entry point for illegal immigrants from Mexico for at least a decade.

When the prototype system came under criticism, CBP and Boeing officials emphasized that it was built with off-the-shelf equipment to demonstrate that the concept would work. But they acknowledged that the components proved less than ideal.

The Border Patrol continued using the prototype as the new system was developed. Jenny Burke, a spokeswoman for Borkowski, said there have been 5,196 apprehensions as a direct result of sightings since the end of September 2007.

———

ON THE WEB

Boeing Secure Border Initiative and SBINet: tinyurl.com/6xt3yq

U.S. Customs and Border Protection/SBI:0 cbp.gov/x

cgov/border_security/sbi

U.S. Border Patrol agents along the southwestern border with Mexico are on alert for illegal immigrants who may have swine flu, but being on the lookout for contagious diseases is really an everyday part of their jobs.

It’s not unusual for agents who capture illegal immigrants to discover someone with a suspicious cough or illness, and migrants have been found with diseases such as tuberculosis.

But the swine flu outbreak first reported in Mexico did heighten awareness for agents in the field.

“First of all we take the situation with H1N1 (swine flu) very seriously. We share the view that people should be aware but not alarmed or in a state of panic,” said Doug Mosier, spokesman for the patrol’s El Paso, Texas, sector. “We have been the first line of defense between the ports of entry since 1924, so being exposed to various communicable diseases historically is something we’ve always been vulnerable to and been a part of.”

The Border Patrol follows a standard procedure in which immigrants who have been arrested and who show obvious symptoms are given a breathing mask to keep others from continued direct exposure. Border Patrol vehicles used to transport illegal immigrants to processing centers are equipped with separate ventilation systems to protect agents, said Lloyd Easterling, a Border Patrol spokesman in Washington.

The Border Patrol on Friday couldn’t immediately provide any reports on how many illegal immigrants with communicable diseases they encounter or other specific diseases they’ve seen.

The flu outbreak has brought a reaction from some federal workers who regularly screen migrants. A labor union representing Customs and Border Protection officers who man border crossings asked this week that its officers be allowed to wear masks and other protective gear while checking travelers who might have been exposed to swine flu.

But the union for Border Patrol agents, who look for those who have crossed illegally, didn’t follow suit. Agents already have such equipment available and use it at their discretion.

“Name the disease, and since we catch people from all over the globe, there is the risk of encountering someone with a communicable disease,” said T.J. Bonner, a Border Patrol agent and president of the National Border Patrol Council, the union representing agents.

The Arizona Game & Fish Commission has extended a moratorium on killing mountain lions on the Kofa National Wildlife Refuge until July 31, but conservationists said Thursday they aren’t satisfied.

Federal and state officials put the ban in place a year ago after state officials killed two of the cats because they were feeding on bighorn sheep in the refuge outside Yuma.

Conservationists objected and wildlife officials said they would study whether the mountain lions were responsible for declines in sheep herds. The moratorium expired last Friday, but a day later the state commission that directs the Arizona Game & Fish Department voted to extend it.

“It’s a national wildlife refuge, not a state game farm, and it needs to be run as an ecosystem, and that includes protecting these lions,” said Daniel Patterson, a spokesman for Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, known as PEER.

The cats, which are also called cougars or pumas, are rare in low-desert, low-elevation environments like the Kofa refuge. But neither they nor the desert bighorn sheep population found on the Kofa are listed as endangered.

The mountain lions were targeted after the refuge’s once-robust sheep population plunged by more than half, from a high mark estimated at 812 in 2000 to 390 in a 2006 survey, Game & Fish spokesman Doug Burt said.

The die-off was attributed to factors including drought, readily available food and predation.

The refuge population was estimated at 438 as of last fall’s survey, he said.

By law, Game & Fish manages the state’s wildlife, including on national refuges, unless a species becomes threatened or endangered, Burt said.

“While sheep are not endangered, they are at a very low number,” he said. “Our goal is to repopulate the sheep in those areas where they once were . . . They’re an iconic animal and they’re very important to us and they’re very important to the Southwest.”

The Kofa herd is one of the strongest available for repopulating other areas, he said.

PEER threatened court action last year to stop the killings. It said Thursday that neither the study nor an environmental assessment for a refuge mountain lion management plan has been completed.

“We believe there would be a serious legal problem if the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service continues to permit Arizona Game & Fish to continue to go after these lions if they don’t have this environmental assessment done.

“That’s why we’re concerned about the short extension,” said Patterson, an ecologist and Southwest director for PEER, which is representing some concerned Fish and Wildlife employees on the issue.

Fish and Wildlife regional spokesman Jose Viramontes in Albuquerque, N.M., said the agency has been working closely with state officials. He said the assessment might not be completed by July 31 but that the service intends “to move forward as quickly as possible on completing” it.

Patterson also said environmental organizations are concerned about what he called a loophole for Game and Fish that might allow a lion on the 665,000-acre refuge to be killed if it kills a sheep and it leaves the refuge.

The worry is that if the area’s mountain lion population is wiped out, it will be difficult to get the animal re-established.

He said a solution can be reached but would require a recognition that there is a national interest and responsibility at the refuge and that Game and Fish must recognize that there is room for lions to exist on it.

Even 5 1/2 years later, Savana Redding can’t believe she was strip-searched by school officials in pursuit of the equivalent of two Advils.

The 19-year-old hopes a U.S. Supreme Court hearing on Tuesday will ease the pain she feels from an event in eighth grade that’s clouded much of her life and set strict guidelines for school administrators.

“I’m never going to be able to forget about this,” says Redding, a college freshman still living in her hometown of Safford in far eastern Arizona. “I’ll think about it constantly, but I don’t think it’ll be as big a burden.”

The nation’s highest court will hear arguments on whether Safford Middle School officials violated the Fourth Amendment, which prohibits unreasonable searches. Among the questions to be resolved are whether there were reasonable grounds to believe Redding was hiding pills and, even if there were, whether the pills posed a public health threat serious enough to justify a strip search.

Even if the court finds the search was unconstitutional, it will have to decide whether school officials can be held financially liable — determining whether it should have been clear to them in October 2003 that the search was illegal.

“Strip searches of children produce trauma similar in kind and degree to sexual abuse,” said Adam Wolf, an American Civil Liberties Union attorney representing Redding. “For Savana, she thinks about this event every day, has trust issues with her peers and adults … The search has radically altered her life.”

Initially, a federal magistrate dismissed the lawsuit Savana and her mother brought, and a federal appeals panel agreed 2-1 that the search didn’t violate her rights. But last July, a full panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals found otherwise.

“It does not require a constitutional scholar to conclude that a nude search of a 13-year-old child is an invasion of constitutional rights,” Judge Kim McLane Wardlaw wrote in the majority opinion. The court also said vice principal Kerry Wilson could be found personally liable.

The district appealed to the Supreme Court.

The search happened after a schoolmate who was found with prescription-strength ibuprofen pills accused Redding of giving them to her. The Safford Unified School District bans prescription and over-the-counter drugs, and Wilson took Savana, a 4.0 honor student, to his office to search her backpack.

Then, he ordered her to go with a secretary to the nurse’s office. “When they asked me to take off my shirt and pants, I was panicky, but I didn’t want them to know,” Redding said. “I just wanted to get out of there.”

They told her to move her bra to the side and to stretch her underwear waistband, exposing her breasts and pelvic area. She did not resist. “I’m one of those kids who does what they’re told,” Redding said.

No pills were found.

“Her mom was irate,” said Wolf. “She feels that her parental rights were taken away and that the school had no business executing the search on her child.”

In a statement, Matthew Wright, the school district’s attorney, declined interviews but suggested a “reflexive action” in media coverage stemming from “a superficial understanding of the facts.”

He wrote that school officials sometimes are “in the untenable position of either facing the threat of lawsuits for their attempts to enforce a drug-free policy or for their laxity in failing to interdict potentially harmful drugs.”

A 1985 Supreme Court decision that dealt with searching a student’s purse said school officials needed only reasonable suspicions, not probable cause. But the court also warned against a search that is “excessively intrusive…”

Traumatized, Redding left her school and graduated from another junior high.

She developed bleeding ulcers and dropped out of Safford High School because of unexcused absences. When the ulcers flared up, Redding had refused to see the nurse — the woman who had searched her.

She left an alternative school without graduating and says she’s now introverted and untrusting, has few friends and prefers staying home. But she’s back in school at Eastern Arizona College after passing an entrance exam despite not having a diploma, plans to major in psychology and wants to “help other people that are like me.”

She hopes the Supreme Court sets clear guidelines for how school administrators “should go about searches like this.”

Safford’s school officials “never apologized to me,” she said. “They think what they did was right.”

But Redding thinks she’ll have won however the court rules. “It’s made such a big ruckus in the media that people are going to know, and people won’t want this to happen in their schools,” she said.

Missouri National Guard member Brian Coleman, 24, keeps watch on the border in this 2006 file photo.

NOGALES – On her first visit to Arizona as Homeland Security secretary, Janet Napolitano said Wednesday that requests to return the National Guard to duty along the U.S.-Mexico border are under review.

Arizona’s former governor said President Barack Obama wants to know what missions the guardsmen would perform before making a decision.

Napolitano was asked about restoring the National Guard’s border presence during a news conference announcing a $212 million renovation of the border inspection facility at Nogales and assistance for law enforcement agencies in their efforts to prevent a spillover of drug-cartel violence.

Govs. Rick Perry of Texas and Jan Brewer of Arizona have requested border troops. “The president … really has asked questions particularly of the governor of Texas, who was the first one to request it, saying, `Where would they go, what missions would they perform?”’ Napolitano said. “In other words, don’t just throw something like the National Guard at a place. They have a mission and a job to do.”

The Bush administration sent thousands of National Guard troops to the border to perform support duties in a mission called “Operation Jump Start” that began in 2006 and ended last year. It was intended to free up Border Patrol agents to focus on border security while new agents were hired. But since the troops pulled out, violence among Mexican cartels has exploded.

“When we did Jump Start here, it was to help us build the fence along this portion of the border. So that’s being looked at right now,” Napolitano said. “The National Guard issue, without being state-specific, is under consideration.”

Meanwhile, Arizona’s two Republican senators echoed the call for border troops Wednesday during a Phoenix-area luncheon sponsored by the Arizona Chamber of Commerce and Industry.

Sen. John McCain said a National Guard presence on the border is urgently needed. “I don’t envision it for an extended period of time, but right now, we need the Guard on the border because of this violence,” he said.

Sen. Jon Kyl added that the troops proved effective in assisting the Border Patrol and deterring immigrant- and drug-smuggling operations.

Mexico’s government is battling the drug cartels, which are also fighting each other for the most lucrative smuggling routes into the United States. More than 10,650 people have been killed in drug violence in Mexico since President Felipe Calderon sent out 45,000 troops in 2006 to directly confront the traffickers.

Remains of 128 found in past six months

Border Patrol agents trained in emergency health care work on three immigrants from El Salvador who had been without water for three days in June 2008.

Illegal immigrant deaths have risen along the U.S.-Mexico border in the past six months despite a nearly 25 percent drop in Border Patrol arrests that suggests far fewer people are entering the country unlawfully.

The number of migrant deaths along the roughly 2,000-mile border increased by nearly 7 percent between Oct. 1 and March 31, the first six months of the 2009 federal fiscal year. The biggest increase occurred in the patrol’s Tucson sector, the nation’s busiest corridor for illegal immigrants coming through Mexico.

In all, the remains of 128 people were found, compared to 120 in the same six-month period the year before, according to just-released Border Patrol statistics.

Yet apprehensions of people crossing illegally from Mexico into Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California dropped to less than 265,000 – a decrease of more than 24 percent from the comparable period a year ago and 37 percent from the first six months of the federal fiscal year that began on Oct. 1, 2006. The number of arrests is generally considered an indication of how many people are illegally crossing the border into the U.S. The more apprehensions, the more people are thought to be coming.

Migrants rights groups say there’s a direct correlation between the number of deaths and increased enforcement along the U.S.-Mexico border.

“What we’ve seen is that the death rate has gone up even though the number of people crossing has gone down, the direct result of more agents, more fencing and more equipment,” said the Rev. Robin Hoover, founder of the Tucson-based group Humane Borders, which provides water stations for migrants crossing the southern Arizona desert. “The migrants are walking in more treacherous terrain for longer periods of time, and you should expect more deaths.”

Nearly half the dead were found in the Border Patrol’s rugged Tucson sector, which saw a 30 percent increase from the same period a year earlier. Deaths also rose in the Laredo and Del Rio sectors in Texas, and in the El Centro sector of southwestern California.

No sector approached Tucson’s sheer numbers, where the remains of 60 people were found during the first half of the 2009 fiscal year.

Tucson sector Border Patrol spokesman Omar Candelaria said it was hard to say why deaths increased in his area, especially because they’re not being found in summer, when most deaths occur.

He also said it is difficult to determine how long many of the bodies may have been there because many were skeletal remains.

Dr. Bruce Parks, the medical examiner in southern Arizona’s Pima County, said more than half the bodies his office examined were skeletal remains, meaning they had not died recently. But that is down from first half of fiscal 2008, when 75 percent of the cases involved skeletal remains.

“Many of them are people that died sometime earlier, and it could be more than a year or two in some cases,” Parks said. “It would make sense that you would expect the more apprehensions there are reflects a greater number of people crossing, and the more crossings the greater the number of deaths that should follow.”

Parks’ office also conducts autopsies for several other Arizona counties including Santa Cruz, Pinal and occasionally Yuma — all of which have regularly seen illegal immigrant deaths.

Weather, predominantly in the form of unrelenting late-spring and summer triple-digit heat, is often the key factor in illegal immigrant deaths in Arizona.

Hypothermia from frigid wintry conditions in the desert also occasionally can be fatal for unprepared desert crossers, Parks said.

Hoover said he’s measured where the bodies are being found, and the average death locations are farther and farther away from roads than in previous years.

“So they’re going around the fences, the technology and where the agents are,” he said. “And the farther you walk from a safe place, the more likely a broken ankle becomes a death sentence.”

A federal judge in Texas has ordered a subsidiary of mining giant Grupo Mexico SAB to return stock in a Peruvian mining company once owned by Tucson-based copper miner Asarco LLC, now going through bankruptcy reorganization.

An attorney and company officials said the damages award to Asarco – including the return of stock – was valued at more than $6 billion.

In his order Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Andrew Hanen directed lawyers for both sides in the civil lawsuit brought by Asarco to draft a judgment including the return of 54 percent of the stock in Southern Peru Holdings and damages worth about an additional $1 billion.

Hanen issued an opinion in favor of Asarco in August, finding that Grupo Mexico subsidiary Americas Mining Corp. was liable for a fraudulent transfer in the March 2003 sale of Southern Peru Holdings LLC stock from Asarco.

He also ruled that Americas was liable for aiding and abetting a breach of fiduciary duty to Asarco creditors, as well as for civil conspiracy under Arizona law.

Asarco was bought by Grupo Mexico in 1999.

Mexico City-based conglomerate Grupo Mexico subsequently arranged a transaction to acquire Asarco’s majority position in Southern Peru.

It created a subsidiary of Asarco called Southern Peru Holding Co. to which it had Asarco transfer its 54 percent ownership of Southern Peru stock.

Then, Grupo Mexico formed Americas Mining Corp., another subsidiary into which it transferred Asarco’s stock.

In its lawsuit brought two years ago, Asarco asserted that Grupo Mexico’s spinoff of the valuable Peruvian assets left Asarco with mounting debt and a shortage of cash. Asarco was also stuck with numerous environmental remediation liabilities in the U.S. Its situation worsened when miners went on strike in 2005, forcing it to file for bankruptcy.

In Houston, G. Irvin Terrell, Asarco’s lead trial lawyer, said he and his colleagues “are delighted for Asarco and its creditors. Judge Hanen gave us full relief and that will help the EPA and a number of states in the West clean up environmental sites.”

“Justice has ultimately prevailed,” Asarco’s president and chief executive, Joseph Lapinsky, said in a statement. “This award is for the benefit of Asarco’s creditors in the bankruptcy and should assist the company in its efforts to successfully emerge from Chapter 11 in the coming months.”

Attorneys for Americas Mining Corp. did not return calls immediately.

India-based Sterlite Industries Ltd. agreed to buy Asarco’s operating assets for $1.1 billion in cash, plus $600 million payable over nine years, last month. That is a substantially reduced price from Sterlite’s offer last year of $2.6 billion – made before the price of copper plummeted.

NOGALES – A thick underground concrete barrier built to block smuggling tunnels along a stretch of the border with Mexico in downtown Nogales has done the trick so far, a Border Patrol spokesman said Friday.

A private contractor built the 12-foot deep underground wall in four days last month, spanning 100 yards of the border just west of the DeConcini Port of Entry, the main downtown port between Nogales and its sister city, Nogales, Mexico.

A cross-border drainage system, the Grand Tunnel, runs north through both cities and beneath the port of entry under Grand Avenue, a main street in Nogales, Ariz.

Just a few feet south of the border the underground drainage canal turns west, running parallel to the 10- to 12-foot tall fence of corrugated steel – built from World War II surplus landing mats.

The drainage system that extends beneath the port long has been used by illegal immigrants trying to sneak into the country. But the portion south of and parallel to the border fence has become popular with drug smugglers.

In recent years, they have taken to digging crude tunnels that run a short distance north, crossing beneath the border fence.

The reinforced concrete structure, which spokesman Omar Candelaria said is about 1 1/2 to 2 feet thick, was installed to stop the tunnel-diggers.

“Organizations were breaking out of the main tunnel and digging 5 feet and going north,” Candelaria said. “The barrier was built to the west of the port in the area where we’ve had most of our tunnels.”

No tunnels have been found in the area since the barrier was put in place, he said.

Candelaria said patrol officials are evaluating how the barrier works, but have no plans yet for expanding it elsewhere along the drainage system in Nogales.

“As we get better, they (smuggling organizations) look to different alternatives to get their product across the border, and the Border Patrol is always looking for ways to make sure that we keep that stuff out of the United States,” he said.

See-through technology that stirred concerns about privacy of passengers being scanned at airports has been adapted for less sensitive use by the U.S. Border Patrol.

The agency is checking vehicles for hidden compartments and contraband with a breakthrough X-ray detection technology mounted in vehicles it calls Z Backscatter Vans, or ZBV.

The mobile device, loaded on a Ford F-350 pickup truck like a camper shell, can scan any vehicle, including semitrailer trucks, in minutes.

It can detect explosives, plastic weapons, nuclear, radioactive or organic threats as well as drugs, said Al White, patrol agent in charge of the Border Patrol’s station at Nogales, Ariz., about 60 miles south of Tucson. It also can detect stowaways, although White said the system won’t intentionally be used to scan for humans.

“This is closer to the vehicle cargo inspection systems used at most ports of entry,” White said. “It uses nonintrusive inspection technologies.”

So-called backscatter radiation technology uses a narrow, low-intensity X-ray beam the size of a laser pointer. The X-rays are reflected from their target to a receiver and then transmitted to a laptop in the truck’s cab that displays the images.

“It does not contain a source of radiation,” White said. “It creates its own X-rays by using an X-ray tube. Therefore, the safety zone is much smaller.”

In February 2007, the federal government began testing a machine at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport that used backscatter radiation to scan a person’s entire body. The low-intensity beam scanned the entire body at a high speed, and the amount of radiation given off was equal to 15 minutes of exposure to natural background radiation such as the sun’s rays.

Essentially, it looked through people’s clothing, and early versions showed the human body’s contours with embarrassing clarity. The Transportation Security Administration adjusted the equipment to give the image a line drawing likeness but still manage to detect concealed items. The TSA has stopped testing the backscatter devices because their leases ran out and haven’t been renewed, said Nico Melendez, a spokesman in Los Angeles.

Instead, another device, a “millimeter wave” machine, which began testing late in 2007 is now being used, still on a pilot basis, in about 20 airports around the country, Melendez said.

People who support using such scanners insist that they will ease detection of concealed objects like plastic weapons or liquids that traditional metal detectors miss. But critics in the United States and the European Union called the scanners an unacceptable invasion of human dignity.

The Border Patrol said the technology’s versatility is a huge boon for security and smuggling detection.

“This is what’s impressive,” White said. “It’s able to reveal things such as car and truck bombs, explosives . . . and other organic threats, radioactive threats including nuclear devices and dirty bombs. It’s capable of detecting low levels of radioactivity from gamma rays and neutrons. This is ideal for dirty bombs and conventional explosives. And on top of that, stowaways who could be illegal immigrants or potential terrorists.”

Macho B after it was collared by state Game & Fish Department officials last month

Arizona biologists were excited that a tracking collar put on an elusive jaguar might help unlock many secrets. Less than two weeks later, their hopes crashed when the cat had to be euthanized.

The abrupt ending to the jaguar, believed to be 15 or 16 years old and the oldest known jaguar in the wild, came Monday after an Arizona Game & Fish Department team recaptured the animal southwest of Tucson because it appeared ill.

“It was definitely a roller-coaster ride yesterday,” said Bill Van Pelt, the department’s nongame bird and mammal program manager.

Wildlife biologists and a veterinarian shot the jaguar, nicknamed Macho B, with an anesthetic dart from a helicopter about five miles from where it had been caught Feb. 18 in a snare trap set to study bears and mountain lions.

Team members determined from tests at the Phoenix Zoo that the jaguar was in severe, unrecoverable kidney failure, Van Pelt said Tuesday.

In consultations with veterinarians, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service and the head of Arizona Game & Fish Department, “we felt it was in the best interest of the animal to put it down,” he said.

Little is known of the endangered jaguar’s habitat or ecology in this country. It once ranged from the Appalachians to the San Francisco Bay, but New Mexico and Arizona are now thought to be the northernmost reaches of a range extending into South America.

Scientists had hoped to learn more about the jaguar’s use of the borderland habitats to aid in conserving the species.

“Was this male moving across the border? Did it rendezvous with other cats? How was it utilizing the habitat?” Fish & Wildlife spokesman Jeff Humphrey said. “Would it seasonally use one group or one mountain or canyon versus another? Was it requiring a large territory?

“And unfortunately, 10 days and about five miles worth of data is about all we will have at this point.”

Michael Robinson, a spokesman for the Center for Biological Diversity, called Macho B’s death “a major setback for the jaguar.”

Further tests were expected to determine whether blood taken in February preserved for genetic analysis showed signs of renal failure, and necropsy results were expected in a few days.

Officials called Macho B healthy when it was first captured. Transmissions from its GPS-equipped collar grew infrequent Friday, Humphrey said.

“The movements were really limited,” he said, “a hundred yards here, a hundred yards there” – far less than long movements when he had been foraging.

A three-member team tried to get a visual sighting Saturday, and another tried to dart the jaguar on Sunday but missed.

It’s not known whether stress from having been caught in the trap or the anesthetic used in the dartings may have contributed to kidney failure, which Humphrey said is common among older cats.

“We did learn the area where he went,” Van Pelt said. “But unfortunately, there is not a lot of information that is going to be available.

“We were hoping to unlock some of the secrets about the jaguar from years past. Those secrets will now be kept forever with him.”

Highest percentage spent by Michigan

Arizona spent a higher percentage of its general fund on corrections in fiscal 2008 than all but three other states, according to a study released Monday.

The Pew Center on the States report looks at offenders on parole and probation.

It said Arizona spent 9.5 percent of its state general fund, or $951 million, on corrections that year. That’s more than 4 1/2 times as much on some form of correctional control as it spent 20 years earlier.

Only Michigan at 22 percent, Oregon at 10.6 percent, and Florida at 10 percent devoted a higher percentage of their general funds to corrections-related expenditures.

The study found that the number of offenders on probation and parole has surged nationwide, and corrections was the fastest growth segment of state budgets last year, even as fiscally challenged states look toward cuts in corrections expenditures amid crippling budget deficits.

But the report also found that strategies for improving community supervision for those on parole and probation, including a performance incentive program that Arizona uses, offer one of the likeliest means for states to curtail corrections spending and shrink recidivism.

It noted that Arizona’s prison population exploded 60 percent from 1997 to 2007, which led to doubling the state’s corrections budget.

“Despite the prison growth, the state still had the highest crime rate in the nation,” the report said.

It also noted that projections forecast another 50 percent increase in the prison population by 2017, costing an estimated $2 billion to $3 billion. Doing nothing would still cost another $1 billion in state tax dollars, one legislator warned.

So in 2008, the state adopted the Safe Communities Act, creating performance incentives for the county-based probation supervision program and for offenders.

Under it, probationers are eligible to have their probation reduced by 20 days for each month that they complete community service, pay court-ordered restitution and comply with other conditions of supervision.

In addition, counties that cut recidivism get 40 percent of the money saved on housing repeat offenders and probation rules violators.

The counties use those refunds to expand access to drug treatment, improve victims’ services and pay for other programs to reduce recidivism.

“Projections show that if counties reduce probation revocations by 10 percent, the state could save nearly $10 million, with 40 percent of that amount returned to the local level,” the report said.

The national study found that supervising someone on probation cost an average of $3.42 a day in fiscal 2008, versus $78.95 a day for a prison inmate.

One in every 33 Arizona adults, or 144,221 people, were under correctional control at the end of 2007 — 60 percent on parole or probation and 40 percent behind bars. That is just below the national average of 1 in 31.

In 1982, one in every 79 Arizona adults were under correctional control, and 35 percent of those were in prison or jail. The rate of adults incarcerated in the state has nearly tripled over that period, putting Arizona in the top 10 states.

Arizona State University has proposed suspending its scholarship program for high school students who pass the state AIMS test because of severe budget cuts. The proposal would require the approval of state regents and affect hundreds of students entering the university next fall.

Neither University of Arizona nor Northern Arizona University officials has formally broached the idea, but they will be watching with interest as a regents’ committee discusses the future of AIMS scholarships at a mid-March meeting and the full regents’ board takes up the matter at its April meeting.

“We’re avidly awaiting the outcome of any discussions,” said John Nametz, director of student financial aid and scholarships at the UA. “For some time it’s been a struggle for the universities, all three of us, to fund these scholarships.”

Craig Fennell, ASU’s executive director of student financial assistance, called the program an unfunded state mandate that can no longer be sustained because of major cuts in university funding by the state Legislature.

Since 2006, AIMS high honors tuition scholarships have been offered to incoming freshmen at the three state universities who have exceeded standards on the 10th grade AIMS (Arizona Instrument to Measure Standards) test and who meet other academic requirements.

Recipients who will be sophomores, juniors or seniors in the fall would remain eligible for renewal of the scholarships, which cover all or most tuition costs, by meeting certain criteria.

Tom Horne, Arizona’s superintendent of public instruction, who instituted the AIMS program, said the scholarship program is of great benefit to the universities because it provides an incentive for incoming students to exceed basic entrance requirements.

“We’re vigorously opposed to any suspension of the AIMS scholarship fund,” Department of Education spokeswoman Amy Rezzonico said. “People are in the queue and they depend on it.”

Currently, 5,785 freshmen through juniors attending ASU, UA and NAU receive AIMS scholarships, with a total value of $25.5 million, according to regents and Department of Education figures.

Of that, ASU has 2,509 recipients of AIMS scholarships totaling $12.5 million, UA has 2,265 students receiving tuition waivers worth $10.6 million and NAU has 1,011 with scholarships valued at $2.4 million.

In-state tuition for NAU freshmen for the fall 2008 semester was $5,145; Arizona’s $5,274, ASU’s $5,409. Fees are not included in the scholarships.

Arizona’s Nametz said he would expect the university to enroll about 1,000 students who have AIMS or Regents’ high honors designations next fall.

“Many of those students will also have university scholarships that are as large or larger,” he said. His counterparts at ASU and NAU also emphasized that most of the AIMS scholarship recipients would qualify for other scholarship programs, too.

But David Bousquet, NAU’s vice president for enrollment management and student affairs, said the Flagstaff-based school has no other scholarships that cover a full tuition.

“Our resources aren’t such that we can afford to do that,” he said. “The largest award we have would be $3,750,” Bousquet said.

There is no doubling up of scholarships, and not all those eligible for AIMS awards end up accepting them. Officials said many of the students who qualify for the AIMS scholarships would be eligible for president’s, provost or university scholarships, so part of the savings from cutting the program would be erased by students taking those stipends instead.

“I believe that it would save very little money,” Horne said. “But what we would lose is the incentive it provides for high school students to work harder to exceed on the AIMS test.

“It would be bad for the universities and the students, and the lack of effort by our brightest students in high school is one of our country’s biggest problems.”

Bousquet noted that the three universities allocate nearly $250 million a year in support of student financial aid. He described the AIMS scholarships as “foregone revenue. It’s money that’s not collected,” he said.

University-provided aid to students, including the AIMS scholarships, comes primarily from the universities’ tuition revenues, said Andrea Smiley, a spokeswoman for the board of regents. There is also a state-funded financial aid program.

But Smiley said the Arizona Financial Aid Trust, through which the Legislature has appropriated approximately $10 million annually for several years, is significantly smaller than financial aid funding offered by other states across the country.

She noted that Colorado invests more than $55 million annually in financial aid, Washington state $167 million and Indiana $281 million each year.

But Roger Barnett is liable on claims of assault; must pay $78K damages

Perla Valenzuela (left) and Sofia Mavhado stand outside the federal courthouse in downtown Tucson, calling attention to the border civil rights trial.

A federal jury in Tucson found Tuesday that a southern Arizona rancher didn’t violate the civil rights of a group of illegal immigrants who claimed he detained them at gunpoint in 2004.

The eight-member civil jury also found Roger Barnett wasn’t liable on claims of battery and false imprisonment.

But the jury did find him liable on four claims of assault and four claims of infliction of emotional distress and ordered Barnett to pay $77,804 in damages, $60,000 of which were punitive.

Barnett declined to comment afterward, but one of his attorneys, David Hardy, said those who sued lost on the bulk of their claims and that Barnett has a good basis for appeal on the two counts on which he lost.

“They won a fraction of the damages they were seeking,” Hardy said.

All six plaintiffs are citizens of Mexico, five of whom live in the United States with visa applications pending, and the sixth resides in Mexico but was allowed into the U.S. for the trial, said Nina Perales, an attorney with the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund. She declined to say where in the U.S. they reside.

Perales called the outcome “a resounding victory that sends a message that vigilante violence against immigrants will not be tolerated.”

David Urias, attorney for those suing, said, “Obviously we are disappointed with some aspects of the verdict. But I think that overall this was a victory for the plaintiffs.”

For years, Arizona has been the busiest stretch along the Mexican border for illegal immigrants entering the United States.

For more than a decade, Barnett has been a controversial figure in southern Arizona. He’s known for aggressively patrolling his ranch property and along highways and roads in the area, often with his wife and brothers, on the lookout for illegal immigrants.

The plaintiffs claimed that Barnett threatened them with his dog and told them he would shoot anyone who tried to escape.

Barnett’s lawyers argued that his land was inundated with illegal immigrants who left trash on his property, damaged his water supply and harmed his cattle.

Barnett’s wife and a brother were dismissed as defendants; in addition, another 10 people initially named as plaintiffs were dropped from the proceedings.

Barnett has been known to wear a holstered 9 mm pistol on his hip and upon coming across groups of migrants, to flash a blue and gold badge resembling that of the highway patrol, with the wording “Barnett Ranch Patrol. Cochise County. State of Arizona.”

The Barnetts detain and turn over those whom they encounter to the U.S. Border Patrol. In 2006, Barnett estimated that he had detained more than 10,000 illegal immigrants in 10 years.

His actions have resulted in formal complaints from the Mexican government against what it considers vigilante actions, and in several other lawsuits, including one stemming from an October 2004 incident.

In that case, a jury awarded a family of Mexican-Americans on a hunting trip $100,000 in damages, later upheld by the Arizona Supreme Court.

Barnett’s 22,000-acre ranch, about five miles north of the Mexico border, includes private and federal lease holdings in addition to nearly 14,000 acres of state-leased land.