Undocumented workers begin to flee Arizona ahead of Governor Jan Brewer’s immigration law going into effect; businesses suffer — and experts say the exodus could really hurt the state’s economy

Mexican drug cartels now maintain permanent lookout bases in strategic locations in the hills of southern Arizona from which their scouts can monitor every move made by law enforcement officials; the scouts are supplied by drivers who bring them food, water, batteries for radios — all the items they need to stay in the wilderness for a long time; “To say that this area is out of control is an understatement,” says a border patrol agent

In the first public incident of its kind, Mexican drug cartels are making direct death threats to U.S. law enforcement officials in Nogales, Arizona, the police chief there says; less publicly, the drug cartels have been targeting U.S. law enforcement personnel for intimidation and assassination for sometime now; members of the cartels have even found a new way to make the task easier: using “cloned” Border Patrol vehicles; driving a Border Patrol look-alike vehicle allows the assailants to get closer to their targets without arousing suspicion

The original plan of the Secure Border Initiative (SBINet) called for spending $833 million to build a virtual fence — a system of sophisticated sensors, cameras, and other barriers — along 655 miles of U.S.-Mexico border in Arizona, New Mexico, and a slice of Texas, at a cost of about $1.2 million per mile; Boeing, the prime contractor, used $800 million to build the system along only 53 miles of border at a cost of $15.1 million per mile; the virtual fence’s technology is now judged a failure

SBINet, to ambitious plan to build a fence with the most sophisticated technology along the U.S.-Mexico border, may not be the mother of all boondoggles, but it will surely compete for top honors in a competition for such a title; the Government Accountability Office has just issued a withering report about this troubled-from-the-start, never-up-to-speed project; GAO says that the designers of the virtual fence have lowered the fence’s technical standards “to the point that —-system performance will be deemed acceptable if it identifies less than 50 percent of items of interest that cross the border”; GAO also says that the project has been characterized by “decreasing scope, uncertain timing, unclear value proposition, and limited life cycle management discipline and rigor —-“

The Border Patrol agent who shot and killed a 15-year old Mexican boy last Monday said he was “surrounded” by rock-throwing Mexican youth; a video of the incident shows no such thing: the agent is seen without anyone near him except one Mexican boy he, the agent, had detained; the boy is on his knees near the agent; the agent is seen drawing his gun and firing in the direction of a second suspect, standing about 60 feet away from the officer — on the Mexican side of the border; the video shows the suspect running away when the agent drew and fired his gun

A 15-year old Mexican, Sergio Hernandez, was shot dead by a U.S. Border Patrol agent; the agent was on the U.S. side of the border, and Hernandez and his friends on the Mexican side; unnamed U.S. sources say Hernandez was a known ” juvenile smuggler,” and that in 2009 he was charged with alien smuggling; he was also on a “most wanted” list of juvenile smugglers compiled by U.S. authorities in the El Paso area; the Border Patrol says its agents came under “assaulted with rocks” by Hernandez and his friends; the Mexican government wants to know whether it was necessary to shoot a teen-ager dead for throwing rocks

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit ruled that an April 2008 search of the cabin of a crew member of a cargo ship docked in Miami was constitutional; the search of the ship was looking for prohibited agricultural materials, but the searchers found child pornography in the cabin; the court found that the ship was docked at the equivalent of a border, making the act a border search; the court ruled that an individual has a lesser expectation of privacy at a border and the government has a greater interest in searching thus the balance tips more favorably to the government

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) says that the legal status of applicants for disaster relief will be taken into account in determining whether or not they are eligible for the agency’s Individual Assistance program’s grant funds