Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, left, accompanied by new Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) Director Craig Fugate, gestures during a news conference at FEMA headquarters in Washington, Tuesday.

WASHINGTON — A long-delayed requirement for Americans traveling to Mexico or Canada to have a passport will take effect June 1 as promised with no further postponements, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said Tuesday.

The Department of Homeland Security has handed out more than 6 million information sheets to people crossing the borders and has run TV ads reminding Americans that it will no longer be possible to cross the borders and re-enter the U.S. without a U.S. passport or special U.S. passport card.

Americans have become accustomed to crossing the borders by car or on foot without having to show anything more than a driver’s license.

“These are real borders, the law is the law, and this is not going to be postponed any more,” Napolitano said at a breakfast meeting with reporters.

The passport requirement, part of an anti-terrorism measure known as the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative, had originally been scheduled to take effect last summer during the Bush administration. It was delayed largely by northern border lawmakers in Congress, who feared it would disrupt commerce and tourism between the U.S. and Canada.

Napolitano said federal border officials are ready to implement the new requirements, and she said she is confident the program will go well, without big backups at the borders.

“If you’d have asked me four months ago if we were ready, I’d have said I don’t know,” the former Arizona governor said. “But the department has done everything humanly possible to give this thing a smooth landing.”

Napolitano said she knows some Americans will be caught by surprise on June 1st, and some have procrastinated too long getting their passports.

“We’ll work with them at the border,” she said.

Under the new requirements, Americans must have a traditional U.S. passport book or a less-expensive passport card to re-enter the country by land or sea after traveling to Mexico, Canada, Bermuda or the Caribbean region.

Americans traveling by plane to and from those countries must have a passport book. A passport card will not be accepted.

The Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative was created after Congress passed the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004, requiring all travelers to the U.S. to carry a passport as proof of citizenship.

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On the Web

www.dhs.gov, Department of Homeland Security, search for “Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative”

U.S. Customs and Border Patrol agents stop traffic recently in a search of weapons headed into Mexico at the Mariposa border crossing in Nogales.

NOGALES – Federal agents tap on car windows, opening trunks, looking in vain for contraband.

“We’re sucking up a lot of exhaust out here,” supervisory Customs and Border Protection officer Edith Serrano says, shrugging in her uniform.

This is what the Obama administration’s new commitment to help Mexico fight its drug cartels looks like.

President Obama this spring promised his Mexican counterpart, Felipe Calderón, that the United States would fight two of the biggest contributions U.S. residents make to the drug cartels Calderón has vowed to eradicate: cash and weapons, the latter hard to come by in Mexico.

For the past five weeks, hundreds of agents participating in a newly intensified $95 million outbound inspection program have been stepping into southbound traffic lanes, stopping suspicious-looking cars and trucks.

The Associated Press fanned out to the busiest crossings along the Mexican border – San Diego, Nogales, El Paso and Laredo – to see how effective the inspections are.

The findings? Wads of U.S. currency headed for Mexico, wedged into car doors, stuffed under mattresses, taped onto torsos, were sniffed out by dogs, seized by agents and locked away for possible investigations. No guns were found as the reporters watched; they rarely are.

“I do not believe we can even make a dent in (southbound smuggling) because that assumes the cartels are complete idiots, which they’re not. Why in the world would they try to smuggle weapons and currency through a checkpoint when there are so many other options?” said Border Patrol Agent T.J. Bonner, president of the agents’ union.

According to CBP, between March 12 and April 30 officers seized:

• Fifty-one pieces of ammunition, weapons parts and guns, a minuscule fraction of the 2,000 weapons the Mexican government estimates are smuggled south every day.

• $12 million in cash, less than one-tenth of 1 percent of the $17 billion to $39 billion the U.S. Justice Department estimates is illegally sent to Mexico from the U.S. annually, but more than the $10 million seized in outbound checks in 2008.

• Sixty-one people on charges involving weapons or currency offenses and on outstanding warrants.

Millions of cars pass into Mexico from the United States every year. The federal government doesn’t keep track but a count by Texas A&M International University’s Texas Center for Border Economic and Enterprise Development shows more than 27 million vehicles a year drove into Mexico just from Texas.

The outbound checkpoints the AP observed stopped sometimes 1 out of 4 cars, sometimes 1 out of 100, and not every day. Even that amount created huge traffic backups at some locations and, agents said, might have allowed spies to call any smugglers heading that way and warn them to put off their Mexico trip.

Agents across the border said the first few minutes of their operation are the most precious. That’s how long it takes for “scouts” watching from a bridge in San Diego lined with taxis to radio ahead to smugglers to stay away. In Nogales, a dozen men dashed along a Mexican hill about 150 yards from the checkpoint last week.

“We tend to see spotters up there,” said CBP agent Brian Levin. “They sit up on those hills and watch everything we do.”

Inspectors retreat, then mount another “surge” after a while standing on the side of the freeway.

Some of those stopped were sanguine, others annoyed.

“I guess they think I have drugs or something,” said Daniel Saucedo, a 15-year-old Albuquerque high school student who clambered out of the passenger side of a small white pickup truck with his two dogs last week in El Paso. “It’s dumb,” he said.

William Molaski, port director in El Paso, said agents at his four El Paso bridges haven’t found much since the focus on outbound checks started in early April – one handgun and only about $400,000 – “but not for lack of trying.”

Without providing any numbers, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano told attendees at the Border Trade Alliance International Conference on April 21 that, just a few weeks into the intensified outbound inspections, she was amazed at how much had already been seized. “It’s unbelievable,” she said. “So the notion that there wasn’t a river of cash and a flood of guns going into Mexico is a myth. I mean, there was. We want to stop that river.”

CBP’s 2010 budget request, released May 7, includes an additional $46 million specifically targeted at southbound enforcement.

Customs inspectors’ techniques range from primitive to high-tech, with about an equal success rate. Sometimes a small white truck drives slowly alongside vehicles that have been pulled over, beaming X-rays at them to reveal hidden cash or weapons. A smaller X-ray unit scans spare tires or pieces of luggage, a hand-held density meter called a “Buster” can reveal hidden compartments loaded with cash, a fiber-optic scope snaked into gas tanks looks for hidden cargo and trained dogs can sniff out cash or weapons.

But before they get to any of the gadgets, officers knock with a knuckle or flat palm on a car’s body panels. And they ask, again and again: “Do you have any weapons? Cash? Merchandise?”

Often the dogs make the finds.

Grill, a “currency canine,” smelled something on 63-year-old Isabel Ortega Garcia on April 3 in Hidalgo, Texas, when Ortega was walking into Mexico. When Grill got excited, agents patted Ortega down and found $148,000 in neat wads of $100 bills taped around her waist.

Two weeks earlier in Laredo, Akim sniffed cash under the floor of a southbound bus. Under the seats, in a hidden compartment, were 75 bundles of bills totaling $2,997,510.

But even finding that much cash doesn’t always yield an arrest. Without a U.S. attorney’s say-so, the best an agent can do is seize any cash amounts over $10,000 that the traveler does not declare, hand them a receipt and send them on south.

The best case scenario for agents who seize undeclared currency is that federal prosecutors decide to bring charges and begin a forfeiture procedure. But often it is a race against the clock as inspectors on the scene try to collect enough evidence to make it an attractive case for prosecutors.

Obama said while campaigning that he favored a ban on sales of assault weapons. But Congress isn’t budging on the issue, and guns in the U.S., particularly in southern border states, remain easy to buy legally.

“The real issues of assault weapons and bulk cash do not initiate at the border and cannot be solved there,” said David Shirk, director of the University of San Diego’s Trans-Border Institute. “But gun control? That’s a discussion the current administration is reluctant to wade into.”

Mexican customs inspector Ricardo Briseno, 27, says the increase in U.S. inspections of Mexico-bound cars has made his job easier, even though the only effective solution would be to stop every car.

“At least it’s something,” he said. “We are working together on a shared problem.”

The man in charge of building a virtual fence along America’s southern border said Thursday that the much-maligned network is moving ahead and will work despite criticism and public misunderstanding.

Mark Borkowski, executive director of the Secure Border Initiative, conceded that initial testing of the system near Tucson seemed like a “disaster” because of equipment glitches. However, he added, flaws are expected with new technology, and the problems have been resolved.

“It was a prototype. We did a bad job of communicating that,” said Borkowski, speaking at the Border Security Expo and Conference in Phoenix.

“When we got out there, it didn’t work very well,” he added. “We fixed it.”

The electronic monitoring system known as SBINet is being built by the Boeing Co. and other contractors at an expected cost of $6.7 billion. As planned, it would in the next five years cover much of the 2,000-mile Southwestern border.

The virtual fence employs motion sensors, laser lights, cameras, radar and other instruments to alert agents when people are trying to cross the border illegally.

Borkowski said the entire system, which is supposed to detect up to 80 percent of incursions in a zone, has been upgraded to meet Border Patrol specifications and needs.

Early depictions created unrealistic expectations that a virtual fence alone would stop smugglers and undocumented immigrants, Borkowski said. Rather, he said, SBINet is one tool in a defense arsenal that relies on 20,000 Border Patrol agents and physical barricades as well.

“It is not the be-all and end-all of border security,” Borkowski said. “It is a critical element of a much larger approach. . . . The idea is how to mix those three things together the right way to secure every inch of the border.”

Borkowski said 624 miles of physical fencing and vehicle barricades have been erected to delay illegal crossers long enough so Border Patrol agents can catch them.

“We know people can cut through a fence. We know they can climb over a fence,” he stressed, “but we want to slow them down.”

By contrast, Borkowski said, the virtual fence is designed for surveillance and intelligence. Sensors detect human traffic and relay signals to nearby towers with cameras. The intelligence is transmitted to Border Patrol stations, where agents monitor the network and respond to breaches.

The first operating segment covers a 23-square-mile section of desert south of Tucson.

Borkowski said the fence will be completed and evaluated this summer by the Border Patrol. If all systems are go, a second segment will be built near Ajo, then towers that stretch across most of the Arizona border zone.

The project has been criticized for its costs, and last year the Government Accounting Office panned SBINet for delays and technological glitches.

Technical woes surfaced also. For instance, Borkowski said, sensors were linked to cameras by satellite communications that took several seconds to transmit. By the time cameras were automatically trained on a target zone, intruders had moved out of view.

Their spending more than triples since 2001

Ana Cota, Carlos Silva and their daughter, Carla Silva, 7, of Hermosillo, Son., arrive at Park Place mall, where they planned to shop for clothing and a large-screen television. The family makes the 4- to 5-hour trip to Tucson to shop about once a week.

Mexican visitors’ annual economic impact on the Tucson area has grown dramatically and is approaching the $1 billion mark, according to a University of Arizona study released last week.

“It’s a huge economic driver for us here in Tucson,” said Felipe Garcia, vice president of community affairs and Mexico marketing at the Metropolitan Tucson Convention & Visitors Bureau.

Metro Tucson reaped a $968.7 million direct economic benefit from Mexican tourists from July 2007 through June 2008, up 245 percent over the $280.2 million in 2001, according to “Mexican Visitors to Arizona: Visitor Characteristics and Economic Impacts 2007-2008.”

Pima County reaped the largest share of their economic impact in Arizona, with more than 36 percent of the $2.7 billion in statewide spending occurring here, the report said.

Carlos Silva, Ana Cota and their daughter, Carla Silva, 7, make the four- to five-hour drive from Hermosillo, Son., weekly to shop in Tucson.

Tucson offers a better selection of products than he can find at home, Silva said Sunday as the family prepared to enter Park Place, ranked in the study as the No. 2 shopping destination in Tucson, behind Tucson Mall.

The family’s favorite stores at the mall are Old Navy, Sears and Macy’s, he said. They also like to get to Tucson Mall, Best Buy, Wal-Mart and Target, he said.

Silva said he was looking for clothing for Carla and a large-screen television.

The family typically spends six to eight hours shopping per trip to Tucson, he said.

Carla said the trips are about more than shopping. The family had breakfast at IHOP to celebrate Mother’s Day before hitting the mall, she said.

And her mom would be getting a nice gift at the mall, Carla said.

About 65,000 Mexican residents on average came to Arizona each day to legally work, visit friends and relatives, shop and play in 2007-08, the study says.

That comes to 24 million visitors for the year, a 4.9 percent increase over the 2001 total of 22.9 million.

Each day, visitors from Mexico spent $7.3 million in Arizona stores, restaurants, hotels and other businesses, an increase of 213 percent from 2001.

“Over 5 percent of taxable sales in Pima County are attributed to the Mexican visitors,” Garcia, of the visitors bureau, said. “It’s really good for us.”

The study was prepared by Vera Pavlakovich-Kochi and Alberta H. Charney of the University of Arizona Eller College of Management’s Economic and Business Research Center for the Arizona Office of Tourism.

Mexican tourism “really plays a significant role,” Pavlakovich-Kochi said. “Spending has occurred when our regional economy shows signs of recession. It has really offset to a degree the effect of the declining regional economy.”

Mexican consumers seem to be more willing to spend during the current economic downturn than Americans, Garcia said.

“When we talk to our visitors, they don’t seem to have a lot of anxiety about the economic turmoil,” Garcia said.

“They don’t stop spending because of what they see and read. The Mexican consumer is more used to it, better prepared, and they know things happen. They say things are bad but we’ll get out of this.”

More staying overnight

Local efforts to boost Mexican visitors and spending have paid off, Garcia said.

Mexican visitors who stayed here overnight jumped from 4 percent in 2001 to 16 percent in 2007-08, Garcia said.

“Overnight visitors always spend more than day trippers,” Pavlakovich-Kochi said.

A Tucson tourism office in Hermosillo, Son., has helped boost the number of visitors and their spending in recent years, Garcia said.

The office sells tickets for concerts or shows at Tucson-area casinos and offers other Tucson tourism services, he said.

Lower prices and greater product selection draw shoppers from Mexico, Garcia said.

Many textile and electronic products sold in Mexico are imported from Asia, he said.

Mexico and China are engaged in a “non-declared” tariff war, which means high prices for goods in Mexico, which pushes shoppers to Tucson, Garcia said.

Growing challenges

The Convention & Visitors Bureau has increased its spending aimed at attracting Mexican visitors from $30,000 to $300,000 in recent years, Garcia said.

But other communities – Scottsdale, Phoenix, Tempe and Las Vegas – are also going after Mexican visitors, he said.

Maricopa County’s economic benefit from Mexican visitors jumped from $36.5 million in 2001 to $694.2 million in 2007-08, an 1,800 percent increase.

“We’re definitely ahead of the curve,” Garcia said, “but there are a lot of communities that are trying to position themselves and gain market share. Here in Tucson, we know that retail is directly impacted by tourism. We cannot slow down, we cannot say we have been successful.”

One area being investigated for growth is drawing visitors here from Mexico for medical services.

That includes cosmetic and elective surgery, Garcia said.

“We are working with the medical industry to develop more medical tourism into Tucson,” he said.

“They come here and they pay cash. No insurance, no billing.”

A slide in the peso’s value against the dollar has made it more expensive for Mexicans to shop in the U.S., so fewer customers may be crossing now.

In April, the average exchange rate was 13.3944 pesos to a U.S. dollar compared with 10.5146 in April 2008, a decline of 27 percent.

Increasingly restrictive regulations for crossing the border and more stringent entry documentation policies could pose another challenge to Mexican visitor spending, Pavlakovich-Kochi said.

Making it tougher for Mexican visitors to get here means less revenue for local merchants – something few people consider when pushing for making crossing more difficult, she said.

“The focus has really been on the border issues and the illegal immigration,” she said. “This (economic benefit) has been on the back burner.”

While spending by Mexican visitors may decrease from 2007-08 levels, the area will continue to reap some economic benefit, Pavlakovich-Kochi said.

“Realistically, looking at the near future, we will probably expect a decrease in total spending,” she said.

“Maybe we had an extraordinary year of Mexican visitors and expenditures in Arizona. But it will continue: It is not something that will be totally erased overnight.”

Cronkite News Service contributed to this report.

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TOP DESTINATIONS

Where Mexican visitors to metro Tucson shopped 2007-2008.

Malls/shopping centers

1. Tucson Mall

2. Park Place

3. Foothills Mall

4. Plaza Palomino

5. El Con Mall

6. St. Philip’s Plaza

7. La Encantada

8. Casas Adobes Plaza

9. Crossroads

Other stores

1. Wal-Mart

2. Costco

3. Best Buy

4. Target

5. Ross

6. Mervyn’s*

7. Walgreens

8. Circuit City*

8. Marshall’s

9. Home Depot

10. Food City

* now closed

Metro Tucson attractions visited by Mexican tourists

1. Casinos

2. Reid Park Zoo

3. Old Tucson Studios

4. Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum

5. Other museums

6. Saguaro National Park

7. San Xavier Mission

8. Tucson Convention Center

9. Concerts/theaters

10. Colossal Cave

11. University of Arizona

12. Downtown

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WHY TUCSON?

A number of factors led to an increase in local expenditures by Mexican visitors between 2001 and 2007-08, said Vera Pavlakovich-Kochi of the University of Arizona Eller College of Management’s Economic and Business Research Center.

Metro Tucson saw a fourfold increase in overnight visitors from Mexico, she said.

The peso/dollar exchange rate was very favorable to Mexican visitors, who could purchase more goods for their cash, particularly in the first half of 2008, she said.

Fears of an impending peso devaluation, which occurred later that year, saw Mexican consumers increase their Arizona spending during the time of the study, she said.

And 2008 was the last year Mexican visitors were allowed to enter the U.S. before more stringent documentation requirements were enforced, she said.

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$968 million

Tucson-area expenditures by Mexican visitors in 2007-08

245%

Increase in Tucson-area expenditures by Mexican visitors from 2001 to 2008

5.2%

Portion of taxable sales Mexican visitors accounted for in Pima County in 2007-08

This 2008 photo shows the type of surveillance equipment to be deployed on the border.

Construction has begun on towers for the final version of the virtual fence project in southern Arizona, and project leader Mark Borkowski said Tuesday he’s confident the multibillion dollar will system work well.

Borkowski, executive director of the Homeland Security Department’s Secure Border Initiative program office, said he’s 75 to 80 percent confident in the engineering of the revamped project.

“And I have higher confidence than that that if there were issues, they’d be issues that we could solve,” he said.

Plans call for extending the towers along almost the entire Mexican border by 2014 — at a cost estimated at $6.7 billion.

President Obama has not requested that money, nor has Congress appropriated it — yet.

“Right now, the administration and the Congress are both very interested in continuing this program,” Borkowski said. “What level will it be at — $200 million a year or will it be $2 billion a year? That’s part of the broader national debate about what are the priorities and budgets. But there seems to be a continued interest and priority in this at some reasonable level.”

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

The first section will cover about 53 miles of Arizona’s border with Mexico, with additional towers, up to 120 feet tall and spaced miles apart, to follow on the remaining 320 miles of the state’s southern border. Virtual fencing then will go up in New Mexico, followed by California and most of Texas.

Borkowski said towers with cameras, radars and sensors and communications gear won’t stop people or substitute for a physical fence. But he said it will tell the Border Patrol where people are entering the country illegally.

“Technology’s not going to secure the borders,” Borkowski said. “Frankly, the personnel fundamentally are going to secure the borders.”

Border Patrol agents have discovered yet another smuggling tunnel in Nogales.

Agents found the tunnel about 150 yards west of the downtown DeConcini Port of Entry and about 50 feet north of the international border fence.

Spokesman Rob Daniels says the tunnel crossed beneath the border and was tied into a corrugated-steel drainage system inside Mexico a few feet south of and parallel to the east-west fence.

Agents came across it Friday while searching the area because Nogales police had seized marijuana and apprehended several illegal immigrants nearby the day before.

The tunnel was the 11th discovered in the Nogales area since October, when the current fiscal year began. Six were discovered in the same period a year earlier.

Merchants: Customers avoid us; agents cite improved security

Border Patrol agent Alex Pulliza waves through northbound traffic on Interstate 19. Arizona uses random Border Patrol checkpoints, while Texas, New Mexico and California have permanent checkpoints.

GREEN VALLEY – Local business owners say a U.S. Border Patrol checkpoint on Interstate 19 north of Tubac is killing tourism, putting residents in harm’s way and costing millions of dollars in home sales.

But Border Patrol officials credit the checkpoint with helping them seize tons of illegal drugs, make hundreds of arrests and boost security in the area.

Opposition to the checkpoint has heated up since an expansion was announced last week.

“The checkpoint is a safety hazard to the communities north and south of us,” said Carol Cullen, executive director of the Tubac Chamber of Commerce.

Cullen is concerned that smugglers looking to get around the checkpoint are driven up the Santa Cruz River, Anza Trail or along railroad tracks and gas lines, pushing them closer to homes and people.

The “temporary” checkpoint has been in place since 2007, when a rule requiring the Border Patrol to change sites every two weeks and championed by former U.S. Rep. Jim Kolbe expired.

In June, the Border Patrol will add $1.5 million in “interim” facilities that include a modular building, outdoor lighting and a canopy to protect agents and their search dogs from heat, rain and wind.

A planned $27 million permanent checkpoint could be years off, but its funding is included in the 2008-09 fiscal year budget for the Department of Homeland Security.

Mike Scioli, a spokesman for the Tucson Sector of the Border Patrol, understands the opposition but points out that many residents are thankful for the “second layer of defense” against smugglers and other criminals.

Recently, the sector reported a decrease in arrests at the checkpoint, “which means it’s working,” Scioli said.

Even with a decrease, the numbers are formidable: From October 2008 through March 2009, agents at the checkpoint seized 19,000 pounds of marijuana and made more than 300 arrests, Scioli said.

Out of 20 sectors in the United States, the Border Patrol’s Tucson Sector is the busiest, accounting for more than 50 percent of marijuana seizures and 44 percent of all arrests, he said.

“The numbers speak for themselves,” Scioli said.

After two years of having the temporary checkpoint in place, some business owners in the quaint, historical town of Tubac still eye it with disdain.

The Crowe’s Nest clothing boutique owner David Camet said he relies heavily on shoppers from communities north of the checkpoint. He said some customers, especially those from Green Valley, have called the checkpoint an inconvenience.

“People only come in now if they have to,” Camet said. “They don’t come to browse and enjoy a shopping day because they don’t want to have to wait 20 minutes in a line of cars to get home.”

Gary Hembree, owner of Old Presidio Traders, said the checkpoint has “done nothing to help business during these hard economic times.”

He said he has had Canadian customers ask if a passport is needed to get back through the checkpoint, and added that it creates an atmosphere of apprehension and confusion that drives away return customers.

But Don Stout of Tucson, who was shopping in Tubac last week with out-of-town company, said driving through the checkpoint doesn’t bother him.

“The checkpoint makes me feel secure,” Stout said. “I don’t think it should scare anybody, unless they have something to hide.”

Real estate agents said they have lost millions of dollars in sales because of the checkpoint.

“I’ve had people tell me, ‘I’m not going to drive through that thing every day,’ or that Tubac seems like a high-crime area,” said Zachary Freeland, director of new home sales for Brasher Realty in Tubac.

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A Mexican man in the U.S. illegally and driving drunk with only a Chiapas, Mexico driver’s license was sentenced Friday to 10.5 years in prison for killing a passenger in his vehicle in April 2008.

The vehicle of Carlos Antonio Balanzar-Ortiz, 37, had open containers of alcoholic beverages when it was searched, Pima County sheriff’s deputies said.

He was found to have a blood alcohol level of 0.15, nearly twice the legal limit for intoxication of 0.08.

He was charged with manslaughter and pleaded guilty to that charge in a deal with the county attorney to avoid a trial.

The April 22, 2008, crash killed his passenger, Antonio Aros-Gutierrez, 38.

Balanzar-Ortiz was sentenced to 180 days for misdemeanor driving under the influence but Pima County Superior Court Judge Richard Nichols gave him credit for 180 days served in jail awaiting sentencing.

Other lesser charges were dropped.

The victim’s two sons, ages 3 and 4, attended the sentencing hearing along with their mother.

Court documents show that Balanzar-Ortiz failed to yield to a tractor-trailer while he was making a turn at Alvernon Way and Ajo and the vehicles collided.

Aros-Gutierrez died at the scene.

Balanzar-Ortiz had only his Mexico driver’s license and a Mexican voter identification card on him at the time of the incident.

He is in the United States illegally and will be deported to Mexico on his release from the Arizona Department of Corrections, Nichols 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.

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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

$1 million could be lost in Tucson

WASHINGTON — Members of Congress quickly denounced an Obama administration plan to end federal payments to states and communities for jailing illegal immigrants.

President Obama asked Congress in his budget Thursday to end the State Criminal Alien Assistance Program. Instead, the $400 million it received for the 2009 fiscal year could be used for border security and immigration enforcement, the administration said.

The SCAAP program reimburses states and counties for jailers’ salaries for holding illegal immigrants who have at least one felony and two misdemeanor convictions. But the Obama administration says the reimbursements also can be used for bonuses, consultants and buying vehicles.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., said killing the program “deprives communities of critical funding for public safety services.” The California state corrections received more than $118 million in 2008 through the program.

“We cannot afford to let our public safety services crumble under the weight of our immigration policies, especially during this time of economic uncertainty,” Feinstein said.

State and local officials vehemently protested several attempts by former President George W. Bush to end the program. Congress regularly funded the program. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano was among state officials – when she was Arizona’s governor – who petitioned Bush to continue paying the jailing costs. Arizona state corrections received $12.8 million in reimbursements last year.

It will cost Pima County about $1 million in lost funding to the sheriff’s and county attorney’s departments.

“It’s just another federal obligation that gets passed on the the local taxpayers,” County Administrator Chuck Huckelberry said Thursday.

“It is especially difficult on border communities and border states,”he said. “It’s another million we’re going to have to find somewhere else.”

President Barack Obama has done what many critics of immigration reform wanted — put border security first.

Obama sent more investigative agents to the border, poured money into upgrading ports of entry and targeted traffickers who smuggle in people and drugs, then smuggle out guns and cash.

Shifting the focus away from those who come to the U.S. illegally in search of work, he planted it squarely on criminals who foment violence in Mexico and kidnap and kill inside the United States.

Obama hopes those moves will gain him leverage in dealing with the thorniest part of immigration reform: creating a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants. But will his gambit work?

In three tries in three years, Congress has failed to pass an immigration bill, mainly due to opponents’ vague insistence on “border security first.” No one has said who and what will determine that the border is secure, but the mantra provides clever cover for an unwillingness to deal with the nearly 12 million people living in the U.S. illegally.

Last week, Obama hinted he’s aware of that.

“If the American people don’t feel like you can secure the borders,” he told reporters, “then it’s hard to strike a deal that would get people out of the shadows and on a pathway to citizenship who are already here, because the attitude of the average American is going to be, ‘Well, you’re just going to have hundreds of thousands of more coming in each year.”‘

There is no comprehensive immigration bill moving through Congress so far this session, although there are several bills dealing with various aspects of the issue. In his 2010 budget proposal, Obama plans to ask Congress to provide $27 billion to beef up border enforcement and security.

Under Obama’s predecessor, George W. Bush, nearly 670 miles of fence and barriers went up on the U.S.-Mexico border. The Border Patrol was doubled to about 18,000 agents. The immigration agency’s Fugitive Operations Teams saw its budget soar from $9 million in 2003 to $218 million in 2008.

Thousands of people were arrested in crackdowns on employers and in raids of private homes. Nearly 350,000 immigrants, a record, were deported. It took billions of dollars to create jail space to house those awaiting deportation. Thousands of employers began using an immigration database to check whether the people they’ve hired can legally work in the U.S.

Still, Bush’s record doesn’t satisfy a main congressional critic, Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas.

“It’s not enough,” Cornyn said, pointing out that the number of border agents pales in comparison with, say, New York City’s police force, which has nearly 40,000 officers.

Obama has been building on Bush’s work. He said he wants to take a more thoughtful approach to enforcement than, as he put it, “just raids of a handful of workers.” His administration is concentrating on companies that recruit undocumented workers who may be depressing U.S. wages, but won’t ignore people working illegally at those businesses.

He hasn’t given in to the demands of some of his strongest supporters — immigration advocates and Latinos — for a moratorium on workplace raids. He’s also made Mexico’s drug violence a high priority for the Homeland Security Department.

“It’s been clear since Janet Napolitano became secretary, the border enforcement is not going to weaken one iota,” said Edward Alden, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of the book “The Closing of the American Border: Terrorism, Immigration and Security Since 9/11. “She has not backed off any of the significant border measures put in place by the previous administration.”

Some immigration opponents warn that Obama is shifting enforcement from cracking down on illegal immigration in the U.S. to helping Mexico with a problem it should be solving itself.

Concerns over Mexico’s drug violence and its spillover into the U.S. make it tough to criticize Obama’s efforts. It’s difficult to argue that the U.S. should be spending money arresting hotel maids and day laborers while drug dealers and gun traffickers are on the loose.

After the release of the department’s raid guidelines, one of the harshest immigration reform critics, Texas Republican Rep. Lamar Smith, said he was cautiously optimistic.

So for now, Obama can show he’s at least made an attempt to placate the critics.

Money also would fund crackdown on firms that hire illegal immigrants

WASHINGTON – President Obama will ask Congress for $27 billion to beef up border security and immigration enforcement, administration officials said Wednesday.

The president’s fiscal 2010 budget request, to be delivered to lawmakers Thursday, calls for an 8 percent increase over the current fiscal year.

It also represents a shift away from what Obama officials see as headline-grabbing by the Bush administration, which emphasized erecting fences at the border and conducting high-profile workplace raids that targeted workers. New efforts will crack down on employers who drive the demand for illegal immigrants, White House officials said.

White House officials said their budget request would:

• Increase by nearly 18 percent funding for the Justice Department’s Southwest Border Initiative, which is aimed at slowing the flow of criminals, weapons and drugs across the U.S.-Mexico border. This $2 billion request would support efforts by Mexico to combat drug cartel violence and apprehend criminals.

• Double funding and provide $46.8 million to the Department of Homeland Security to stop the southbound flow of guns and drug money from the U.S. to Mexico. It would allow DHS to add 44 Border Patrol agents and 65 Customs and Border Protection officers.

• Combat border violence by providing $70 million in new DHS funding to hire 349 special agents, intelligence analysts and criminal investigators to coordinate efforts with the Mexican government.

• Step up efforts to remove criminal immigrants by increasing funding for the DHS Secure Communities program by 30 percent to nearly $200 million. The money would finance hiring 80 law enforcement officers to identify the worst suspected foreign-born criminals in U.S. prisons and elsewhere and help deport them.

• Beef up security at airports and seaports by providing a 12 percent increase for the Transportation Security Administration, for a total of $7.5 billion. The money would be used to buy new X-ray and imaging equipment to help detect concealed weapons and explosives. It would be used for additional security officers at seaports.

• Strengthen E-Verify, the voluntary Web-based system designed to help U.S. employers confirm whether would-be workers are in the nation legally. The request calls for $112 million to improve the reliability of the system and expand its capacity to handle more employers.

Sheriff Clarence Dupnik

A group of local, state and federal politicians demanded an apology from Sheriff Clarence Dupnik for statements regarding schools checking the citizenship of students.

U.S. Rep. Raúl Grijalva was among the politicians – all Democrats – to sign a letter criticizing Dupnik’s statements.

“It is wrong to force teachers and school administrators to become immigration officers,” the letter said.

Dupnik, a Democrat, said at a news conference last week that 40 percent of the students in the Sunnyside Unified School District were in the country illegally and that the South, Southwest and West sides had high crime rates linked to illegal immigration.

“These false charges are inflammatory and prejudicial,” the letter stated. “Your comments only further divide our community and debase a large part of the population.

“The Pima County electorate trusted you to protect and serve our community, not to humiliate and instill fear,” the letter said. “Every child is entitled to an education regardless of race, religion, sexual orientation and status.”

Dupnik called last week’s conference to clarify comments he made during a hearing on border violence held by the U.S. Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee last month.

Dupnik, who could not be reached for comment Monday afternoon, stressed last week that his statements were his opinion only. He said he knew they would be “divisive.”

He suggested that a Supreme Court ruling that forbid schools from checking the citizenship of students should be challenged, saying that it would heighten border security if the ruling was overturned.

Adelita Grijalva, a Tucson Unified School District board member, said, “I think the comments he made were simply wrong, inflammatory and egregious.

“We talk about (Maricopa County) Sheriff Joe Arpaio and say that we’re happy we don’t have a sheriff like that,” she said. “If this is the way (Sheriff Dupnik) felt, I wish he would have made those statements a year ago when he was running for re-election, and then we could have decided if that’s the type of person we wanted for sheriff.”

Grijalva said she was eager to hear Dupnik’s response because she thought his statements were “really out of character from (the) whole time he has been sheriff. I’m still unclear what the motive was.”

When he said Sunnyside had about 40 percent illegal immigrants, “how would he even know that? Sunnyside doesn’t know because it doesn’t ask.”

Eva Dong, a Sunnyside Unified School District board member for more than 10 years, said she signed the letter because she was shocked and disappointed with Dupnik’s comments.

She said she didn’t like Dupnik putting Sunnyside into a position of law enforcement against immigrants, which, she added, is against the law.

“And I’d like to know the ‘credible’ source he has that said that 40 percent of Sunnyside students are illegal immigrants,” she said.

“The large majority of our community is not involved in crime. I was in shock when I heard the things he said. That he would lump us into a category of high crime is not right,” she said.

“We’ve worked hard this year to try to remove those images. We have businesses and the university working with us to be successful,” Dong said. “You work at it and work at it and work at it, and bang, someone comes and shoots you down. It’s just very hurtful.”

Dong, who works at the Pima County Juvenile Court Center in the CAPE program, which educates children incarcerated there, also took offense at Dupnik equating illegal immigrants with crime.

Even at the center, “the majority of kids there are not illegal immigrants,” she said. “They are very, very few.”

U.S. Rep. Raúl Grijalva

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Elected officials who signed the letter to Sheriff Clarence Dupnik

Richard Elías, chairman of the Board of Supervisors

Regina Romero, Tucson Ward 1 Councilwoman

Adelita Grijalva, board member of the Tucson Unified School District

Eva Dong, board member for the Sunnyside Unified School District

State Rep. Daniel Patterson, D-Tucson

State Rep. Matt Heinz, D-Tucson

State Sen. Linda Lopez, D-Tucson

State Sen. Jorge Luis Garcia, D-Tucson

State Rep. Olivia Cajero Bedford, D-Tucson

State Rep. Phil Lopes, D-Tucson

U.S. Rep. Raúl Grijalva, D-Ariz.

By Mary Bustamante, Eric Sagara

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.