As a girl growing up in Tijuana and San Diego, Joanna Loaiza read adventure stories, swam laps at her local pool, and dreamed of one day becoming an engineer.

Today, the 22-year-old is preparing to graduate from CETYS Universidad in Tijuana with a degree in computer engineering. She’s learning about electronic chips, or semiconductors, the small devices essential for everything from cell phones to fighter jets.

“I love the science behind it all,” Loaiza told me after I visited her class last week. “We are all in contact with electronics, but people don’t normally get to see what’s inside.”

As Baja California’s leaders strive to entice more advanced manufacturing to their state – from aerospace to semiconductors – their hopes are riding on students like Loaiza.  

“The companies are already interviewing them,” said professor Nataly Medina, who teaches at the private university. “They’re interested specifically in the students who are taking this specialized course.”

The syllabus for Medina’s class was developed in collaboration with Qualcomm, the multinational semiconductor and telecommunications equipment company headquartered in San Diego. The company has been quietly operating a facility in Tijuana since last May. About 100 employees, mainly engineers, work out of an unmarked and fenced building in the sprawling Santa Fe housing development south of downtown.

The course is part of an effort by state leaders to position Baja California as a center for semiconductor assembly, testing and packaging following a worldwide chip shortage during the pandemic. The plan involves academia, industry and government, and aims to build a workforce of engineers, technicians and operators prepared to meet the needs of the companies such as Qualcomm.

“To find a low-cost, high reliability, prepared workforce just south of the border, logistically it makes all sorts of strategic sense for these companies to outsource to Baja,” said Dan Shunk, an emeritus engineering professor from Arizona State University who is advising the project. “And when you look at the caliber of individual that is necessary to run a test operation for Qualcomm, they have talent there that’s equivalent to any university in the world.”

Though the state is dreaming big, the presence of semiconductor companies at Mexico’s northern border is small compared to other sectors such as medical devices, aerospace and automotive. With the opening of Qualcomm’s facility in Tijuana, Baja California now has three semiconductor operations – including Irvine based Skyworks in Mexicali, and Germany’s Infineon in Tijuana.

A July 2024 “road map” of Mexico’s semiconductor industry by the United States-Mexico Foundation for Science – and funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development – identified Baja California, with its 60 industrial parks, as “one of the top prospective regions for semiconductors in Mexico.” But it added that “the state government and local companies must make major improvements to meet requirements for infrastructure, such as water, clean energy, and logistical hubs.”

Despite uncertainty under President Donald Trump, who has said he is considering tariffs on semiconductors, Baja California’s industry promoters say they are moving ahead as planned. Last month, they celebrated the graduation of 110 educators from 18 and technical schools from a course in semiconductors. 

One of the state’s biggest strengths lies in its large pool of young people that could be trained for jobs in the semiconductor industry, said Juan Terrazas, head of engineering at CETYS. The university this year launched a master’s degree program in engineering with specialization in semiconductors. 

As for the looming tariffs, “we’re waiting to see what’s going to happen,” Terrazas told me when we spoke last Friday. “But Mexico is not on pause. Mexico will invest its own resources to develop semiconductor infrastructure, independently of whether or not we have support from the United States.”

On Tuesday, I listened in as a group of 20 upper-level undergraduates, all of them bilingual in Spanish and English, gathered for their night class, “metrology and characterization of semiconductors.” I watched as professor Medina wrote out lines of formulas and students clustered in teams around laptops and circuit boards. The lesson of the day involved designing a small component making up a chip.

Osiel Gastelum, a 20-year-old majoring in computer engineering, explained some of the concepts behind the assignment: microprocessors, transistors, and VLSI design. Both Gastelum and his lab partner had few doubts about their chosen field.

“I will get to be a part of what comes next,” said Rene Lozano, 20, who was born in Chula Vista but raised in Tijuana. “I’ll be the one working to bring the new technology that is going to revolutionize something that affects our daily lives.”

Meanwhile: Tariffs Raise Anxiety in Tijuana’s Maquiladora Sector

The anxiety over President Trump’s threat of tariffs, however, was palpable among leaders of the maquiladora industry.

Wednesday morning leaders of the maquiladora industry – or export-oriented manufacturing centers – gathered over plates of huevos con machaca for their monthly breakfast meeting at Tijuana’s Grand Hotel. They discussed the possibility of tariffs.

“Obviously, this generates uncertainty, and uncertainty means you cannot plan for the medium or long-term,” said Federico Serrano, president of INDEX Zona Costa, the maquiladora association that encompasses Tijuana, Tecate, Rosarito Beach and Ensenada.

“We need to be more focused on keeping the investments that we have, that’s the main thing,” Serrano said. 

Maquiladoras are the largest employer in Tijuana. In January of this year, Mexico’s Social Security Institute registered 279,196 workers in the maquiladora industry in Tijuana alone – a decline of more than 13,000 workers since the same time last year. 

Some say the drop is a result of a restructuring of the maquiladora industry, as some areas lose employees while others gain positions. But INDEX leaders decried federal government policies on both sides of the border for hurting their industry. 

Alfredo Dueñez, an INDEX board member and head of the medical device cluster, said any higher costs resulting from U.S. tariffs would be passed on to clients across the border. “Definitely hospitals, patients, doctors, health care professionals that use these devices would be affected,” he said.

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As the Biden administration ended a pandemic-era border policy and launched new restrictions on asylum in May 2023, images of hundreds of migrants held between San Diego border walls broadcasted nationwide. 

Some of the migrants waited in the open air holding areas for more than a week with limited access to food and water except for donations brought by humanitarian volunteers.

I witnessed how families waited in the open air, unable to leave, when I wrote about the issue last year. I also was among the few who hiked up a steep hill from the Tijuana side to speak with a group of men who were held between a less-accessible stretch of border wall. I wanted to know what, if anything, has changed. 

Ex-Border Patrol Chief Drops Bombshell Revelation

At a recent House Homeland Security Committee hearing, former San Diego Border Patrol Sector Chief Aaron Heitke revealed that the Biden administration had pushed him at the time to move the migrants out of sight of the cameras.

“It looked bad, and they wanted them moved,” Heitke said at the hearing in mid-September. 

Humanitarian volunteers, human rights organizations and members of Congress have criticized the practice of holding migrants for extended periods of time in the open air, including in the location between San Diego border walls behind the International Wastewater Treatment Plant in a section of border that agents call “Whiskey Eight.” Despite the pushback, according to humanitarian volunteers, agents continue to use the space as a holding area — though the groups are smaller and wait for less time than they did a year and a half ago.

A Customs and Border Protection official speaking on background said Heitke’s claim was incorrect. Heitke retired from his position with the agency last summer.

According to CBP, agents prioritize migrants based on vulnerability and transport them as quickly as possible for processing. The agency said that it directed extra resources to the San Diego Sector last year to move people more quickly during the timeframe that Heitke described.

Investigation Findings TBD

CBP has argued in the past that the people between the border walls are not in custody, but as I witnessed when I first covered the issue in April 2023, they are not free to go, which suggests that they are detained. 

Detention standards for the agency require it to provide certain necessities to people in its custody, including food, water and basic hygiene items. But this doesn’t happen for the people held between the walls.

“The issue is that the agents are not following their own policies,” said Lilian Serrano, a volunteer at Whiskey Eight and director of the Southern Border Communities Coalition.

Several members of Congress launched an investigation last summer into the practice of holding migrants between the walls. Officials from the Department of Homeland Security Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties visited months ago, according to Serrano. 

The DHS office has not yet released a public report on the issue. The office did not respond to a request for comment.

Waiting Children

Earlier this year, a judge ruled in a case about CBP custody conditions for children that the space between the border walls counts as a detention space and that agents could not continue to hold children there.

But, humanitarian volunteers said they are still seeing children who spend hours waiting in custody in the open air.

Serrano said that includes a 12-year-old girl from Jamaica who crossed with her mother and grandmother a couple of weeks ago. She said she met the family around 7:30 a.m. She said the family told her that the three had crossed around 11 p.m., and an agent told them to wait in an area west of Whiskey Eight. 

The mother was injured from falling off the border wall, Serrano said. The family told Serrano that agents passed them on all-terrain vehicles throughout the night, but no one asked if they needed medical attention until the morning shift agent picked them up and brought them to Serrano for an ice-pack for the woman’s swollen ankle.

“Our worry has always been that we know based on limited access we have at Whiskey Eight that the court orders are being violated right there in front of our eyes,” Serrano said. “There are other areas where we have always suspected Border Patrol hides migrants from our view.” 

She said Heitke’s statements at the hearing confirm to her that agents “have interacted in the past to hide migrants from our view not to ensure that policies aren’t being violated but so that we don’t see violations of the policies.”

Pedro Rios, another volunteer at the site and director of the American Friends Service Committee’s U.S./Mexico Border Program, said he met a family that included an infant about a week and a half ago when he was monitoring Whiskey Eight. The family appeared in the area around 7:30 p.m., he said, with a group of several dozen people. 

Rios said agents took the family for processing around 3 a.m. — more than seven hours later.

CBP said that currently migrants generally wait no more than a few hours to be taken to stations for processing.

Fewer Crossings

According to Heitke, the practice of holding people between the walls began because of the rate of people crossing to request asylum.

“Groups were coming in to turn themselves over faster than we could keep up,” Heitke said at the hearing. “We only had so much space. We keep people within our stations. There’s no other place to put them while they’re being processed.”

But, apprehensions have dropped significantly, and still the practice continues.

In April 2023, San Diego agents made more than 25,000 apprehensions and nearly 23,000 in May, the month of the policy change, according to data from CBP. After that, the number decreased through the summer before growing again through the fall to a peak of more than 37,000 in April of this year.

In August 2024, the most recent month available, San Diego agents made just over 14,400 apprehensions.

Though Border Patrol apprehensions of migrants have dropped significantly since May, San Diego has been the busiest part of the border for the past several months. That’s a major change from recent years.

Roughly one year ago, in August 2023, San Diego Sector agents made just over 10 percent of Border Patrol apprehensions along the southwest border, according to CBP data. This August, the most recent data available, San Diego agents made about 25 percent of the border’s apprehensions.

Though the number of people waiting at Whiskey Eight fluctuates from none to dozens rather than the hundreds from months past, the humanitarian volunteers said they don’t plan on giving up their work anytime soon.

“When will Border Patrol completely follow their standards?” Rios said, listing access to food and water and children’s needs as his main concerns. “These questions for me need to be answered with satisfactory answers to conclude we are no longer needed there.”

In Other News

No renewal: The Biden administration won’t extend the two-year humanitarian parole it has granted to thousands from Cuba, Nicaragua, Haiti and Venezuela, according to CBS’s Camilo Montoya-Galvez. The program was one of the administration’s ways of offering alternatives to migrants coming to the border to request asylum.

Another way to separate families: KPBS’s Gustavo Solis spoke with a Colombian woman whose husband was deported without being given the chance to request asylum. Officials separated the couple at the border, and while they allowed the woman to make a request and wait in the U.S. for her asylum process, her husband was deported without any screening.

A new mayor in town: Tijuana’s new mayor was sworn in at the beginning of October and promised to make Tijuana safer, according to Alexandra Mendoza of The San Diego Union-Tribune.

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The Mexican military is taking over reconstruction of a broken wastewater treatment plant in Tijuana that pollutes southern San Diego beaches in summertime. 

It’s the latest infrastructure project Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador is entrusting to the military to complete, like Tren Maya, a new massive railway looping the Yucatan peninsula and a new airport in Mexico City. Now that list of projects includes Punta Bandera, a Tijuana wastewater plant that has been broken since at least 2014, which spews untreated sewage into the Pacific Ocean just six miles south of the U.S. border.  

Fixing Punta Bandera, also known as San Antonio de los Buenos, is a growing priority in the decades-long Tijuana River sewage crisis. Recent research by Scripps Institution of Oceanography linked the sewage pouring from that plant to swimmer illnesses during the summer in Imperial Beach, San Diego’s southernmost coastal city.   

“That plant if and when fixed … would eliminate 100 percent of our beach closures during the summer months,” said Imperial Beach Mayor Paloma Aguirre during a Dec. 1 forum held by the local League of Women Voters.  

The military takeover is welcome news to the governor of Baja California, Marina Del Pilar Ávila, who announced last month that SEDENA, the Secretary of National Defense, would take over the project.  

“The president told us not to worry, we put it in the hands of our friends, SEDENA, which has done extraordinary things throughout the country and this plant will be no exception,” Pilar Ávila said at a Dec. 27 press conference.  

Mexico pledged $144 million in 2022 under a treaty with the U.S. to fix a bunch of its broken wastewater infrastructure including Punta Bandera. The plant, which sits atop a mesa next to the coastline, is basically three giant ponds full of old wastewater that regularly flush into the Pacific Ocean. Victor Manuel Barragan, Pilar Ávila’s secretary of water, recently said the state was already working to dry out those lagoons.  

The leader of the U.S. International Boundary and Water Commission, Maria Elena Giner, during that same forum, signaled the military takeover was “good news” in that it meant a more secure source of funding to rehabilitate the plant. But 2024 is a presidential election year. López Obrador has termed out of the office he assumed in 2018. Whoever takes his place in the June election could reshuffle all of his priorities.  

Giner said she was told it would still take about two years for the military to build the plant. But Fernando Aguado, a SEDENA engineer, on Thursday committed to having it done by September of this year. 

The military takeover is the latest in a series of attempts to rectify Punta Bandera. Plans for a private Israeli company to partner with the Mexican government to rebuild the plant languished for years.  The company, Odis Asversa, wanted to recycle that wastewater into irrigation for Baja California’s famous but thirsty vineyards in Valle de Guadalupe.  

Fabian Yañez, a spokesman for the Israeli water company, told Voice of San Diego in 2021 that the company planned to pay the Mexican government for the sewage, treat it and sell it to grape growers for a profit. But the company struggled to get farmers to agree on a price for that water, which they otherwise pump from groundwater wells or purchase cheaply.  

Francisco “Kiko” Vega, Baja California’s governor from 2013 to 2019, signed the initial contract with Odis Asversa to sell treated wastewater. The next governor, Jaime Bonilla, announced in 2021 that his administration got approval for funding to fix the plant. Then Pilar Ávila, who used the Punta Bandera sewage spilling into the ocean as a backdrop for her gubernatorial campaign, promised clean beaches.  

It’s still unclear if recycling wastewater would be part of the military-built plant. But Baja California’s cities could certainly use it. The drought-stricken Colorado River is Tijuana’s only drinking water source. Wells are drying up further south toward Ensenada. And many Baja Californians experienced water shutoffs at some point during the debilitating drought of the past few years.  

Since Tuesday, about 60 percent of Tijuana’s 1,000 neighborhoods had their water shut off while workers make repairs to another leak in the Florido-Aguaje aqueduct which distributes drinking water from the Colorado River to 60 percent of the city. Tijuana had to buy expensive emergency water from California when that aqueduct sprung a leak last January.  

The U.S. Ambassador to Mexico, Ken Salazar, joined a groundbreaking ceremony at the Punta Bandera rehabilitation Thursday with Governor Pilar Ávila and Mayor Aguirre. He said solutions to the Tijuana River crisis can’t be solved on the U.S. side alone, referring to another broken and underfunded wastewater treatment border plant in San Diego that President Joe Biden has targeted in his budget requests.  

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More than two years after the San Diego-Tijuana region was designated “World Design Capital” 2024, the man charged with leading the effort was abruptly fired this week.

In a message obtained by Voice of San Diego, Carlos de la Mora wrote to his board that he was surprised to hear the news and shocked to learn that Tuesday would be his last day as CEO.

“I will always look back at this time of my life with sincere love and gratitude,” he wrote.

The timing has surprised many in the cross-border community, coming just as San Diego and Tijuana start their year-long tenure as World Design Capital 2024, a designation made by the Montreal-based nonprofit, World Design Organization. 

Supporters hope the distinction puts an international spotlight on design and culture in the cross-border region for the next 12 months. They hope it will increase the region’s visibility, create new opportunities for collaboration between the two cities, and generate millions in revenue through tourism.

Heading the binational effort is the nonprofit World Design Capital San Diego Tijuana 2024, or WDC. It is led by five board members representing the Design Lab at the University of California San Diego, the Burnham Center for Community Advancement, Design Forward Alliance, and the cities of San Diego and Tijuana.

De la Mora became CEO in July 2022. He holds degrees in architecture and urban design from schools in Mexico and the United States. He previously led the Urban Land Institute office in Mexico City. 

The WDC is responsible for staging seven major “signature events.” That includes exhibits, lectures, festivals, and design tours. Staff members are currently evaluating more than 300 proposals for community events that focus on a series of issues from arts and culture to climate and sustainability to science and technology.

Tijuana-San Diego is the first bi-national region to get the World Design Capital designation. The region prevailed over a competing bid from Moscow. 

But winning the designation is just the first step. Making it work means fundraising millions of dollars and obtaining the buy-in of the region’s business and political leaders.

To date, the city of San Diego is WDC’s biggest known funder. The City Council approved a $3 million contribution last year. The WDC has not announced any other sizable contributions, and organizers have been under growing pressure to find additional sponsors. One big challenge has been communicating the project’s scope and purpose to members of the general public.

“It’s a great event, but people might initially have an issue understanding what it’s about,” said Jose M. Larroque, managing partner of Mexico of the international law firm Baker & McKenzie and a member of the WDC’s advisory board.

Several members of two WDC advisory boards told me they were puzzled by the timing of the leadership change.

Members of  WDC’s board of directors did not respond to interview requests.

WDC sent out a statement on Thursday about how it plans to move forward.

“Carlos has played an important role in the growth, development and success of WDC 2024. ” the statement read. “We are deeply grateful for Carlos’ dedication and hard work and wish him the best of luck in his endeavors.”

The statement also said WDC “will be leaning into its esteemed leadership team to lead them through the year as they work to design a better future for our cross-border region.”

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On weekday mornings, Adan Montaño waits less than 45 minutes to cross the border from Tijuana to San Diego. He’s one of the lucky commuters with a special pass that allows quick travel into the United States. But going home is a different story.

When the 22-year-old Playas de Tijuana resident returns at rush hour – anytime from 3 p.m. to 7 p.m.– the wait to cross from San Ysidro to Tijuana can take closer to two hours.

Here’s what’s happening: Lengthy northbound border waits have long been the bane of cross-border commuters. For those without expedited entry, known as SENTRI, the morning queues can last from two to three hours. But in recent weeks hours-long southbound waits have also become increasingly common. Commuters are becoming increasingly frustrated. 

“I’m wasting my time inside a car,” Montaño told me. He works and studies in San Diego, then drives home to Tijuana at night. “It’s affecting my grades, I get home too exhausted to study, and I have other things I need to do. So many hours in traffic is unsettling.”

Multiply that exhaustion by tens of thousands of people who cross each day between Tijuana and San Diego, many of them workers and students and others with lives that straddle the international border. They must not only wait, but jockey at the end of the workday with other tired and impatient drivers to squeeze through a narrow bottleneck at Mexico’s El Chaparral Port of Entry.

Joaquin Luken, executive director of the Smart Border Coalition, says the result in recent weeks has been “a parking lot of cars” as two U.S. federal highways – Interstates 5 and 805 – merge at the border. 

“It’s a throughput issue,” he told me. The San Diego-based coalition has been studying ways to speed the passage of vehicles with the opening of new lanes, and hopes to present a proposal to Mexican officials. 

Commuters Are Growing Impatient   

More than 1,900 crossers have signed an online petition launched this month to demand that federal, state and municipal authorities in Mexico do something.

Commuters want to know: Can officials build more access lanes into Mexico? Can they redesign the Mexican port of entry? Why not create a program for frequent crossers into Mexico at Otay and San Ysidro? How is staffing decided at the ports of entry?

“It is not just inexplicable but inexcusable for more than 80,000 vehicles that cross in both directions on a daily basis…” the petition states.

The federal authorities in Mexico City who oversee border crossings “don’t understand the border dynamic and especially the Tijuana dynamic,” Minerva Padilla, one of the petition signers. She is a 41-year-old San Diego-born psychologist who lives in Tijuana, but crosses daily to take her children to private school in San Ysidro. 

“Instead of looking for options to improve the infrastructure, they reduce it. So it’s just chaotic,” she said.

There are several reasons for  this soul-crushing bumper-to-bumper traffic. 

There aren’t enough gates and lanes open at El Chaparral: Even at peak afternoon rush hour, authorities often open only six out of 20 available gates. Once inside the Mexican port, drivers must squeeze through an even tighter corridor of three or four lanes, where officials pull the occasional vehicle aside for inspection.

Inadequate infrastructure in Tijuana: One obstruction has been the closure in January of a damaged two-lane bridge built by the federal government that connected some 15,000 drivers daily to the Via Rapida highway. Repairs to the El Chaparral bridge began in August, and are scheduled for completion by the city early in the first part of next year – I’ve heard estimates anywhere from January to May.

At peak crossing times, city police have also closed a second bridge that feeds border crossers heading west to Playas de Tijuana on the heavily traveled Avenida Internacional – a move to divert traffic and avoid complete gridlock.

More San Diegans are moving south: Tijuana’s new customs administrator, Col. Alejandro Robles, has not given interviews on the subject of the lengthy wait times. I was able to reach Obed Silva, who is secretary of mobility for the city of Tijuana.  

Silva told me that one factor is the rising numbers of border crossers, as more and more San Diegans have moved to Tijuana, pushed out by high rents, gasoline prices and other costs. The long-term solution lies either in building more infrastructure – or finding ways to use mass transit to move people across the border. 

“It’s a combination of things that are provoking this phenomenon that we are seeing,” Silva said. “There is not a single explanation.”

In Other News

Migrant death: U.S. Customs and Border Protection has continued to hold migrants in between border fences at San Ysidro following the death of a 29-year-old woman from Guinea who died Oct. 11 shortly after crossing illegally into the area. Humanitarian workers have decried the open-air detention sites in San Ysidro and Jacumba, where migrants wait with few medical services and no protection from the elements, KPBS reports.

Chinese migrants: Bleak economic prospects and political repression are prompting growing numbers of Chinese citizens to travel to the U.S. border in search of asylum. After flying to Ecuador, many make their way by land through Panama’s Darien gap, with some ending up at the San Diego border. Associated Press, San Diego Union-Tribune.

Immigrant and Refugee Center: San Diego County supervisors accepted a more than $430,500 state grant for a second center for immigrants and refugees in North County. The county opened its first such center in National City in March. The precise location for the second center has not been determined. KPBS, San Diego Union-Tribune.

Hurricane relief for Acapulco: Migrant shelters in Tijuana anticipate a new wave of arrivals in the wake of Hurricane Otis, which devastated Acapulco earlier this month. El Imparcial.

Presidential candidate visits: Claudia Sheinbaum, presidential candidate for Mexico’s ruling Morena Party in the country’s June 2024 election, made stops both in southern California and Baja California earlier this month. Milenio Noticias, ABC7-Los Angeles.

Mexicans vote abroad: The Mexican Consulate in San Diego will be one of 23 locations outside Mexico where voters will be able to vote in person in the June 2024 elections, according to Mexico’s National Electoral Institute. San Diego Union-Tribune.

Historic designation: A house north of  Ensenada built in 1930 received protection as a cultural heritage site by the state of Baja California this month. The house was built for General A.L. Rodriguez, who served as governor of the territory of Baja California in the 1920s–and from 1930 to 1932 was president of Mexico. The two-story residence includes  stucco walls,  a red tile roof,  Corinthian columns and French windows and is “an excellent example of the Spanish Colonial Revival style,” according to the Save of Heritage Organization of San Diego. The house is located in the community of El Sauzal, and  designed by a San Diego architect, Frank W. Stevenson. (Baja California Cultural Secretariat, SOHO, Zeta) 

La Boheme in Tijuana: For two nights this month (Oct. 20 and 21), the 400-seat theater at Tijuana’s Casa de la Cultura was packed for performances of Giacomo Puccini’s four-act opera La Boheme presented by Opera de Tijuana and the Baja California Orchestra. From the staging to the musicians to the performers, there was much hometown talent on display, starting with Jose Medina, the stage director and Armando Pesqueira, the orchestra conductor. 

San Diego Symphony in Tijuana: For the first time in its 113-year history, the San Diego Symphony will perform in Tijuana on Thursday at the federal Centro Cultural Tijuana in the city’s Rio Zone. The free performance is being offered as part of the Dia de los Muertos celebrations at the CECUT.

Altar for slain journalists: A Day of the Dead altar honoring slain Mexican journalists will be installed on Thursday in Tijuana at Centro Estatal de las Artes. Local journalists will gather at noon to remember slain colleagues, demanding an end to the violence against journalists and calling for justice for those slain across Mexico. 

Are there topics you’d like to hear about in the Border Report? I’d love to hear from you. Contact me at this email. 

This story has been updated to correct Claudia Sheinbaum’s name.

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San Diego’s Congressional delegates had no idea a U.S. treatment plant at the Mexican border needed such pricey repairs. 

News dropped last week that the South Bay International Wastewater Treatment plant was so run down that fixing it would eat up almost half the money Congress dedicated toward building a bigger and better plant. 

“We always knew that hundreds of millions more would be needed to build out the full suite of projects to tackle the problem in the long term, but this new price tag for the plant expansion alone was a very unwelcome shock,” wrote MaryAnne Pintar, Congressman Scott Peters’ chief of staff, in an email Monday. “Congress may have the power of the purse, but Congress can’t fix it if we don’t know how broken it is.”  

It’s unclear how or why past leaders of the International Boundary and Water Commission – or the IBWC, which owns and operates the South Bay Plant – allowed it to fall so far behind on maintenance.  

In a recent interview, IBWC’s current leader Maria-Elena Giner didn’t point fingers at anyone but herself.  

“The person responsible for advocating for this agency is the commissioner, and that’s me,” Giner said.  

But it’s clear the state of the plant is a problem she inherited, not created, when President Joe Biden appointed her to take over the helm at IBWC in 2021. 

The aging plant has been working overtime for many months as it takes on more sewage than it was built to treat from Tijuana due to numerous breaks of pipes or pumps on the Mexican side of the border. Some of the plant’s critical hardware is original to when it was completed in 1997. 

And the South Bay plant isn’t something that’s particularly easy to fix. In the absence of a functioning wastewater treatment plant in the bustling city of Tijuana, South Bay basically lives to handle the city’s sewage, even though it can’t handle or control how much Mexico sends it.  

You can’t just turn the plant off to do the necessary repairs. David Gibson, executive officer of San Diego’s Regional Water Quality Control Board, compared it to re-construction of Terminal 1 at the San Diego International Airport: Planes and passengers are still bustling in and out of the old, cramped terminal while the airport builds an expansion next door.  

“Except, the airport can do construction during evening hours when air traffic is slow. The treatment plant runs 24 hours a day,” Gibson said.  

San Diego’s Congressional delegates are now on extra-high alert over the state of the South Bay plant. They’ll have to come up with more money so the U.S. can hold up its end of a treaty signed with Mexico that commits funds from both countries to stop Tijuana sewage pollution. 

Right now, the IBWC can only use money appropriated to them by Congress via the U.S. State Department, which oversees the IBWC’s budget. Importantly, this year’s State Department budget request includes some language that would let the IBWC accept money from non-federal sources. 

Another thing that might help mobilize more dollars: the San Diego County Board of Supervisors vote Tuesday on whether to declare a local state of emergency on the Tijuana River sewage crisis. Paloma Aguirre, mayor of Imperial Beach, which suffers continuous beach closures from sewage contamination, was the first to declare the emergency in her town.  

If they can get Gov. Gavin Newsom on board, California can ask the Biden Administration to declare a federal emergency, thereby fast-tracking money toward fixing the plant. 

In Other News 

• Watch me try to breathe feet away from a vat of raw Tijuana sewage at the broken treatment plant in a new Tik Tok video.  
• We now know the terrible fate of those aboard the Titan submersible that imploded on its way to the Titanic shipwreck site. San Diego-based Scripps Institution of Oceanography scientists shared some harrowing experiences using submersibles in the name of deep ocean research with the Washington Post.  
• San Diego Community Power, the region’s publicly owned power company, green-lighted two solar plus battery storage projects in Imperial valley and Clark County, Nevada, which should be online in 2025. (Union-Tribune) 

Correction: A previous version of this story incorrectly spelled MaryAnne Pintar’s name.

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A San Diego treatment plant at the U.S.-Mexico border is having a hard time cleaning Tijuana sewage before it contaminates the Pacific Ocean.  

That’s because parts of the plant are basically broken, which is not great news for beach communities waiting on the federal government to build a bigger, better plant with newly-promised funding from the U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade agreement. It’s clear now that a large chunk of that money will be spent fixing parts of the old plant before building anything new.  

Some of the plant’s most critical equipment hasn’t been replaced since former Vice President Al Gore helped break ground on the South Bay International Wastewater Treatment plant in 1994.  

It was built to treat 25 million gallons of Tijuana sewage per day, pollution that would otherwise spill over the border into the Tijuana River and eventually the ocean, closing beaches up and down the coast. Today, the plant is often running on overdrive. There’s widespread acknowledgement that the government initially built a plant that was too small. But Congress put $300 million on the table in 2020 to double its size. 

The plant now needs about half that amount in repairs, according to a recent assessment of plant facilities. 

“I had sticker shock,” said Héctor Aguirre, assistant director of EPA’s regional water division, when he reflected on the depth of deferred maintenance. The EPA is in charge of the plant expansion project.  

Others were less surprised.  

“The Water Board has been shouting for people to pay attention to this for years,” said David Gibson, executive officer of the San Diego Regional Water Quality Control Board. “We’ve been very clear that $300 million wasn’t half of what was needed to do the job right.” 

The plant has a two-step treatment system and the first step is what’s not working. That’s called primary treatment, where solids like human waste, trash and sand or other large matter that make its way into wastewater settle-out and separate from liquids. But the tanks are so overrun, the end product of the plant is much like watery poo.  

The plant could only remove about 34 percent of the gunk in the water, according to an April water quality report. It should be hitting 85 percent to comply with the Clean Water Act.  

Other stuff is broken, too. For instance, the U.S. can’t control the flow of sewage into the treatment plant from Mexico because a valve is stuck open. The plant has racked up 218 related Water Quality Control Board violations since 2021. 

The city of Imperial Beach, San Diego’s southernmost town where beaches are polluted by Tijuana sewage most of the time, declared a state of emergency over the pollution on Jan. 6. 

The International Boundary and Water Commission – or IBWC, the federal agency that handles binational border water issues – built, owns and operates the South Bay plant among other infrastructure along the border. Its leader, Commissioner Maria-Elena Giner, appointed by President Joe Biden in 2021, revealed recently that her agency has documented $1 billion in things it needs to fix and build and only a $50 million budget to do it.  

IBWC spent less than $5 million on major maintenance at the South Bay plant over the last 15 years, Giner said. About 37 percent of the pipes, pumps and other sewage-separating infrastructure need immediate attention. 

“It’s not going to collapse. It’s in need of serious repairs,” Giner said in an interview with Voice of San Diego. 

That’s why Giner invited California Sen. Alex Padilla to tour South Bay’s huge, concrete vats of stagnant Tijuana sewage sitting in inoperable primary treatment tanks earlier this month. These tanks have filled up with so much sand and sediment that they need to be cleaned before they can function properly.  

Giner said Padilla is the first high-ranking official to visit South Bay since Gore. As the two walked the plank between the pungent primary treatment vats, Giner explained the state of disarray she inherited at IBWC two years ago.  

“There were spreadsheets all over the place. There wasn’t a work order system,” Giner said.  

In short, IBWC administrations past didn’t have a clear understanding of what infrastructure needed fixing and when. Giner said that when she took over, she visited all eight field offices from San Diego to Mercedes, Texas to take stock of all the maintenance needs. 

“People were stunned,” Giner said.  

While South Bay needs an alarming number of upgrades, there’s also a leaking dam in Del Rio, Texas, a $276 million project. It’s up to Congress to decide how much of the U.S. State Department budget goes toward the IBWC. Padilla called South Bay’s upgrades a top priority during his June visit.  

“Over the course of decades there has been vast insufficient operations funding that leads to conditions like this which are unacceptable,” Padilla said during a June press conference at the South Bay plant.  

Ginger said she hopes to direct some money in the IBWC budget toward fixing the South Bay plant’s primary treatment system. And, she’ll be testifying before the U.S. House of Representatives in July to make the case that IBWC needs help.  
 

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Two dozen university students – and three history professors – traipsed through downtown Tijuana on a recent overcast morning. Carrying a copy of a 134-year-old map of the city, they walked by graffiti-covered fences on Callejon Zeta, the city’s oldest street, and one of its most neglected. 

Tijuana is a city of constant change and renewal, a center of industry and enterprise, where many strive for a better future. But when I joined this group the focus was the city’s past. 

“One of the greatest challenges for those of us who live in the city, is that we don’t know the city,” said Luis Carlos Lopez Ulloa, a historian and professor at the Autonomous University of Baja California.

Lopez and two colleagues, adjunct professors Abraham Uribe and Diego Saavedra, are counting on their project, Iniciativa Zaragoza Tijuana, to build awareness of Tijuana’s origins. 

Before the year is out, they aim to complete a catalog of the area’s historic structures, and present workshops and conferences in public schools. By the end of 2024, they hope to have it designated as a conservation district–a step that would require approval of both municipal and state governments. A virtual reality project, in collaboration with university colleagues in other disciplines, would look at how the area has evolved over the decades.

The professors run monthly two-hour tours to raise awareness of the area’s historic value. As they led us down congested city blocks, we stepped quickly past the city’s famed Avenida Revolucion tourist district – into the streets that lie behind it, where many of the city’s original families settled. “What we are hoping is that this area we are calling Zaragoza, is one that Tijuanenses come to recognize as their own,” Ulloa said.

Among the highlights: Wooden bungalows built from a Sears & Roebuck catalog, a crumbling adobe wall with a Seven-Up sign, the Plaza Santa Cecilia, a diagonal walkway packed with merchants and restaurants. And the crown jewel: Parque Teniente Guerrero, built in the 1920s, with its central kiosk and tall trees, a picture of traditional Mexico in a city that defies tradition.

The name Zaragoza honors General Ignacio Zaragoza, the 19th century hero of the Battle of Puebla. As a guide, the historians used a map traced in 1889, the year the city was formally founded. At the time there wasn’t much there, apart from a handful of ranchos where cattle grazed by an intermittent stream now known as the Tijuana River, and a road that led to the California border. But after settling a family land dispute, members of the Arguello family hoped to develop the area and commissioned a map to delineate streets and plazas.

The map, dubbed Pueblo Zaragoza, and drawn by a federal government engineer, shows an orderly rectangle, with a central plaza, connected with diagonal streets to four smaller plazas. But this pueblo never came to be: A  large flood in 1891 obliterated settlement on the river’s banks, including a border boundary marker and the customs depot. 

Another factor, the professors explained, was the lack of local decision-makers to insist that as the population grew and the area developed, the plan be taken into account. “That’s a big part of the problem, Lopez said. We were a northern territory, administered by the federal government from Mexico City.” 

Rather than create a central plaza, for instance, authorities built an elementary school in 1927. Part of what once was Avenida Argüello now leads through a parking garage. Yet to this day, vestiges of this diagonal street remain – the most vibrant stretch being Plaza Santa Cecilia, with its musicians, merchants and restaurants and heavy foot traffic. 

Though it continues to be called “el centro,” downtown Tijuana stopped being the city’s economic and social center in the 1970s, as government policies shifted resources farther east, following a flood control project that involved channeling the Tijuana River.

“No thought was given as to what to do with the center of the city,” Lopez said. “Downtown was relegated and abandoned.”

Historic preservation laws exist, Ulloa said but persuading private property owners to agree to the designations is difficult. As they work on their catalog of structures, they hope to involve the owners in the project as well.

Far from the Aztec pyramids and colonial structures of central Mexico, the border followed a different path to development, and many structures that could speak to its history have been paved over or demolished or burned down. Still, as long as I’ve been here, groups of Tijuana residents have fought to preserve pieces of its history – not always successfully.

What struck me as I listened to these professors interact with students, was that this is a fresh effort by a new generation. All three grew up here in the 1990s. Lopez moved to downtown Tijuana in 1989 from Culiacan at age 12 while Saavedra and Uribe, both in their early 30s, are both natives – Saavedra was born in a hospital on Second Street, Uribe says he is a “son of downtown,” where he spent his childhood years. Though all three now live in other parts of Tijuana, they say the project has felt like a homecoming.

“It’s been like re-discovering what I used to see 25 or 30 years ago,” Ulloa said, remembering the old Woolworth de Mexico store on Calle Segunda–now replaced by a Soriana supermarket. “It’s been reconnecting with my memories of adolescence.”

Updates on the project are on Instagram and Facebook at Zaragoza.Tijuana.

In Other News 

World Design Capital: Tijuana and San Diego comprise the first binational region to receive the World Design Capital designation–and a signing ceremony on May 26 made it official. The idea is to shed a spotlight on the region throughout 2024 with a series of events on both sides of the border focusing on sustainable design-led policies and their potential for improving lives. These include lectures, art installations, exhibits, design competitions and tours on both sides of the border. Proponents hope the designation will have a long-term effect on the region by finding new ways to address its challenges.

The Montreal-based nonprofit World Design Organization selects cities every two years for the designation. The group aims to raise “awareness of the power of industrial design to effect positive change in the world.”

The ceremony at UC San Diego Park and Market brought the organization’s president, David Kusuma, together with civic, political and academic leaders from both sides of the border, including San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria and Alejandro Mungarray, Tijuana’s secretary of economic development. 

Violence at off-road racing event: Ten people died in battle rival criminal groups faced off south of Ensenada on Saturday, May 20. Among those killed in the roadside attack was the alleged target, Alonso Arambula Pina, “El Trebol,” identified by Baja California authorities as a member of the Arellano Felix Organization. Arambula had been participating in the “Cachanillazo” rally of light off-road vehicles known as Razors. Killed alongside Arambula in the same vehicle was an Ensenada government official, Jose Eduardo Orozco Gil. Authorities have told reporters that the incident was initiated by members of the Sinaloa Cartel.

Shots broke out as the rally participants stopped by a gas station and convenience store at Kilometer 90 of the Transpeninsular Highway in the community of San Vicente. The U.S. State Department reported that three U.S. citizens were among the victims. Three suspects have been taken into custody, authorities said.  Reforma, San Diego Union-Tribune, Zeta, Milenio, Punto Norte.

Sentence reversed in domestic violence case: In a precedent-setting ruling, a Baja California three-judge panel on May 24 ordered the immediate release of Alina Mariel Narciso Tehuaxtle, a former Tijuana police officer serving a 45-year sentence in the December 2019 killing of her supervisor and domestic partner, Luis Rodrigo Juarez. The judges reversed a state judge’s October 2022 ruling, on the grounds that Narciso had been acting in self-defense when she shot her partner several times. Narciso testified that Juarez had come home inebriated, threatened her with his service revolver, and beat her repeatedly before she grabbed the weapon and pulled the trigger. Reporte Indigo. Esquina 32, Agencia Fronteriza de Noticias. Nomadas, Punto Norte.

Bottlenecks in port of Ensenada: The takeover of customs inspections by members of the Mexican military has led to bottlenecks in the port of Ensenada, according to the leader of a business group. The president of the Association of Otay Mesa Industries, Jose Luis Contreras Valenzuela, said that transactions that once took four to six hours now take three days.

He warned that if the issue is not addressed, companies will turn to Long Beach.

The Mexican military has been in charge of customs operations in Mexico since 2020. Mexico’s president has said the purpose is to prevent corruption and drug smuggling.

Blind Mules: The phenomenon of blind mules–in which drivers unwittingly carry drugs across the U.S. border–has been around for decades. An update by inewsource says that though it continues to occur, the U.S. government has done little to warn the public about the danger of having drugs planted in their vehicles by drug traffickers.

New migrant camp in San Ysidro: Less than a month after the end of Title 42, hundreds of asylum seekers have been camping out in Tijuana by the San Ysidro Port of Entry, hoping to gain admittance to the U.S. and submit an application. KPBS, Border Report.

Got an idea for the Border Report? Please send suggestions to: sandradibblenews@gmail.com

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The end of Title 42 as a pandemic-era border asylum policy has been both a major international story and a local one. As changes loomed last week, hundreds of asylum hopefuls camped out for days on the U.S. side of the California-Mexico border, uncertain of what awaited them.

Meanwhile, the first group of asylum seekers able to secure appointments in San Diego under the Biden administration’s new policy entered the San Ysidro Port of Entry on Friday. 

The pandemic restrictions, in effect since March 2020, allowed U.S. officials to expel most migrants back across the border to avoid the spread of COVID-19. But those who were sent back could try again without facing legal sanctions. The Biden administration’s new policy, which went into effect Thursday at 9 p.m. PST, is a return to processing for asylum seekers outlined in Title 8 of the United States Code. 

The transition has once again focused attention on the U.S.-Mexico border, as shifts in U.S. immigration policy play out on both sides. This week, the Border Report takes a look at how events unfolded along San Diego County’s border with Mexico–from San Ysidro to Jacumba Hot Springs.

The new rules: The changes include stiffer consequences for illegal entry into the U.S., and stipulate that only those with appointments at U.S. ports of entry–obtained through an U.S. Customs and Border app known as CBP One – are allowed  to apply. Those who cross illegally are subject to deportation, a minimum five-year ban on re-entering, and potential criminal prosecution. To be considered  for asylum, applicants (for nationalities other than Mexican) now must show they have been rejected for asylum by another country.

In Tijuana, there have been widely reported problems with the appointment process. Many migrants have struggled on their cellphones to register on CBP One, only to be kicked off the platform. Intended to allow direct access for migrants, the process prioritizes, “asylum seekers who have the resources to have newer phones and strong internet connections,” according to the San Diego Union-Tribune. 

Relative calm: Both nationally and locally, fears of chaos failed to materialize as the new asylum rules took hold. While crossings rose to near-record levels in the days before Title 42 expired, U.S. Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas on Sunday announced an overall 50 percent drop in U.S. Border Patrol encounters along the Mexican border after the new rules went into effect.

Hours after the switch on Friday, KPBS News reported “relative calm” at the Tijuana border. Tijuana’s Agencia Fronteriza de Noticias described “normal operations” at the San Ysidro Port of Entry.

Makeshift camps: But just to the west of the Port of Entry, off of Monument Road, news cameras continuously rolled as a few hundred people, many families with young children, formed an impromptu camp in a buffer zone between two U.S. border fences. 

Some of the migrants said  they hoped to be o processed under Title 42_, rather than the new rules, though one advocate said many were not even aware of the change. The migrants wore colored wristbands indicating their arrival dates. One man from Afghanistan told Channel 10 he had paid someone in Tijuana $350 for a chance to crawl under a hole under the primary border wall with his family.

U.S. Border Patrol Vehicles took away small groups at a time for processing. As TV reporters

filed live on-the-scene updates, volunteers with the American Friends Service Committee and other groups passed out food, water, blankets and sanitary supplies to migrants who reached through the steel bollard fence. Some volunteers manned a charging station for migrants’ cell phones.

About a mile-and-a-half to the west, at a stretch of the border fence that is more difficult to access, several hundred male migrants traveling without families also waited by the border fence for processing. They told the Union-Tribune on Friday they had been separated from the other group after some of the men had problems with the women there. 

Far to the east in the unincorporated San Diego County community of Jacumba Hot Springs, a third group of migrants – as many as 1,400 by some estimates – waited in the desert last week about a mile from the border, many without food and water, inewsource reported Friday.  Volunteer groups soon mobilized to help the migrants. 

By late Sunday, members of the first two groups had been taken for processing by the U.S. Border Patrol. Some 400 people in Jacumba were still waiting for processing, according to the Union-Tribune.

San Diego reaction: Anxious about an influx of migrants entering under the new rules, public officials in San Diego have grappled with how to prepare, and asked federal representatives for help in the days before Title 42’s application to the pandemic ended. 

On Friday, after the asylum rules changed, El Cajon Mayor Bill Wells told KUSI-TV, “I don’t think we’ve begun to see the number of people who will be on our streets. El Cajon hasn’t seen anything yet, we’re certainly watching.” But San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria, according to Channel 7, said that San Diego is a pass-through city for migrants, and 90 percent are on their way elsewhere.

What’s next: Large numbers of migrants remain in northern Mexico – close to 60,000 according to the U.S. Border Patrol’s figures, though the Mexican government’s count was less than half that number last week, 26,560.

According to Mexican federal figures, some 3,000 are in Tijuana, though others cite a higher number. KPBS has reported that some 16,000 migrants were waiting in Tijuana before Title 42 ended. 

Got ideas for Border Report? Email me at sandradibblenews@gmail.com

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This post originally appeared in the May 11 Morning Report.

Local officials are bracing for an influx of migrants as the federal government’s order under Title 42 expires on Thursday. But what it all means is still anyone’s guess. 

The order allowed border authorities to turn away asylum seekers during the pandemic. Now, the president is lifting emergency orders related to the pandemic including this one. Thousands of people may cross seeking asylum and not be able to move on to their destinations immediately, straining local shelters.

The city of San Diego put together a “toolkit” for shelter providers to distribute, which includes a list of service providers, but is otherwise looking to the county to take the lead. 

The county said it’s coordinating with state, federal and local agencies and organizations while advocating for more funding. 

Strain on emergency services: UC San Diego Health is preparing for a possible influx of patients, according to an email sent to staff. The hospital system is under a “Code Orange” alert, which is to say hospital management expects an increase in patients that could put a strain on resources.

Shelter space is the immediate issue: Last week, the county told us it had prepared a list of unused and underused properties that may be used to build out shelter infrastructure. When shelters have reached capacity in the past, federal authorities have dropped off hundreds of people on the streets. 

“That’s what we don’t want to happen,” said Vino Pajanor, CEO of Catholic Charities of San Diego, which runs three shelters totaling 1,500 beds and is the fiscal sponsor for other groups. 

Money finally coming: FEMA awarded $33 million to Catholic Charities to support migrants in need of food, shelter and other services while awaiting immigration court proceedings. Pajanor reiterated, as he also told KPBS earlier in the week, he’s still in the dark because the feds haven’t given local nonprofits any idea of how many migrants will be allowed to enter. 

“Nobody knows exactly whether the surge is going to happen, or what the level of the surge is going to be,” he said.

East County took a shot: El Cajon Mayor Bill Wells said he’s expecting 1,000 people to cross over the border each day, a quarter of which are likely to be dropped off at a light rail station in his city, which is already home to a large refugee population. 

“I am concerned that without Federal intervention, our current crisis, which takes our resources to an extreme level, will precipitate a full crisis,” he wrote in an open letter to federal authorities. 

Supervisor Joel Anderson, in the meantime, said he’s grateful for the FEMA funding but also urged federal officials to do more. He called on FEMA “to ensure we have enough shelter space for the incoming surge of migrants and avoid federally-sponsored homelessness,” in a statement. 

Looking ahead: The Union-Tribune warned that, while the Title 42 order is lifting, it’ll have a longer imprint on the asylum process. The federal government plans, the newspaper reported, to still restrict asylum eligibility and ramp up speedy deportations.

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