DHS secretary Janet Napolitano said that by the beginning of next year, the number of UAVs operating along the U.S.-Mexico border would be up to six, providing “critical aerial surveillance assistance”; previously, drones were not approved by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) for use in a stretch of west Texas

Faced with the threat of smuggling attempts by criminal organizations in Mexico, foreign companies are simply doing more, spending more, and in the process charging consumers more to shore up security in a country where killings, kidnappings, and extortions have become a part of daily life

U.S. and Mexican law enforcement authorities only seize about 1 percent of cash from drug trafficking, despite increased efforts by both countries; stemming the flow of cash is vital to efforts by the United States and Mexico to take down drug cartels, as drug cartels depend on cash from wholesale drug sales to gangs in the United States

Since December 2006, nearly 30,000 Mexicans have been killed in that country’s increasingly vicious drug war; the relentless flow of guns from the United States into Mexico has significantly strengthened the drug cartels, allowing them not only to withstand the efforts by the Mexican authorities to impose law and order, but in many cases to take the operational initiative, making large swaths of the country ungovernable; the Mexican government, for its part, is bolstering its own capabilities: last year it has secretly purchased surveillance UAVs from Israel to perform monitoring tasks in border areas and near strategic installations in the country

Under Obama, employer audits are up 50 percent, fines have tripled to almost $3 million, and the number of executives arrested is slightly up over the Bush administration; the numbers of arrests and deportations of illegals taken into custody at work sites, however, plummeted by more than 80 percent from the last year of the Bush; both administrations agree that jobs are the magnet that attracts illegal immigrants to the United States, but critics of the Obama approach say it makes no sense to allow employees known to use fake or stolen identification to go free to duplicate the fraud again

There is growing problem along the U.S.-Mexico border: tunnels which connect the bad guys on both sides of the border; in the past several years, the number of border tunnels has increased 63 percent, and U.S. and Mexican authorities use robots and radar to detect them

As the drug war in Mexico escalates, drug cartels have began to employ sicaria, or hit women; the women assassins, ranging in age from 18 to 30, work alongside men in cells of La Linea, as the Juárez drug cartel is known; cells are assigned to different jobs — such as halcones (lookouts), hit squads, and extortionists — and operate independently; the hit women are trained to use rifles and handguns and sometimes accompany their male counterparts; women in Juárez have been previously accused of being part of kidnapping rings, often assigned to keep watch on captives; women have also held roles as recruiters, transporters and leaders of drug-smuggling cells

In response to the 28 July decision by U.S. District Judge Susan Bolton to block the more important provisions of the controversial Arizona immigration law, Governor Jan Brewer suggested that Arizona may “tweak” the law in order to address Bolton’s objections; Arizona legislatures say there is no point in rewriting the law while the state is appealing the judge’s decision; in any event, since Bolton blocked the provisions on grounds that they are preempted by federal authority over immigration matters, then the preemption issue will have to be settled by the courts before the legislature revisits the law

Unlike most baggage-screening systems that create two-dimensional images of objects inside luggage, the CTX 9800 DSi scanners from Morpho Detection create three-dimensional images that can be digitally manipulated by personnel when a bag is deemed to be suspicious; the machines also use advanced software to detect suspicious items; Mineta San Jose International Airport once used 28 machines to process 1,800 bags an hour, but the new system will be able to process the same number of bags using eight machines and require fewer employees to supervise the process; the technology reduces reliance on human observation and interaction with the bags; for the majority of bags, employee contact is only required when a piece of luggage is placed on or taken off the conveyor belt