Fence Book

SAN DIEGO — A 16-year-old girl has been arrested for allegedly trying to smuggle 12 illegal immigrants while posing as a construction worker on the border fence in San Diego.

The Border Patrol says the girl, wearing a yellow hard hat and safety vest, was apprehended early Thursday. She was driving a pickup truck marked as belonging to Kiewit Corp. of Omaha, Neb., which is building about three miles of border fencing.

The Border Patrol says a Mexican passenger also wore a hard had and vest. There were eight men and three women in a modified compartment below the pickup truck bed.

After a drawn out legal battle and months of negotiations behind closed doors, UTB-TSC President Juliet V. Garcia spoke openly on Friday about the border fence that once threatened to divide the university's campus.

For nearly a year, the University of Texas at Brownsville and Texas Southmost College was embroiled in a lawsuit with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. At the end of July, the university reached a compromise with the federal government, agreeing to enhance an existing fence instead of erecting a new one through campus.

Several South Texas congressmen are asking President Barack Obama to temporarily suspend the construction of the border fence to give him the chance to evaluate border security operations along the U.S-Mexico border.

U.S. Reps. Solomon P. Ortiz, D-Corpus Christi, and Ruben Hinojosa, D-Mercedes, are among five members of the Texas congressional delegation who sent a letter to Obama Tuesday asking him to temporarily halt construction until his administration can review the fence's merits.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The fence along the U.S.-Mexico border is mostly finished.

Customs and Border Protection spokesman Lloyd Easterling says that 601 miles of the project had been completed as of a week ago.

Easterling says 69 miles of the fence still must be built to meet the goal set during the Bush administration.

In December, then President-elect Barack Obama said he wanted to evaluate border security operations before he considers whether to finish building the fence under his administration.

A welder works on the border fence near in El Paso, TexasFederal bureaucrats call it the "border fence." The residents along the Texas-Mexico border say it's a wall echoing the Cold War. And south of the Rio Grande, Governor Humberto Moreira of the Mexican state of Coahuila has dubbed it a "wall of hate." But no matter what the controversial barrier being constructed between Mexico and the U.S. is called, the $1.6 billion, 670-mile-long first phase is close to completion as President Barack Obama enters office.

In this photo provided by the National Park Service, flooding around border fencing at the border of Lukeville, Ariz.(CBS/AP) The Department of Homeland Security will allocate as much as $50 million to mitigate the environmental impact of the U.S.-Mexico border fence ordered by the Bush administration.

The agency signed an agreement Wednesday with the Department of the Interior to set aside funds for projects that the Interior department determines will soften the environmental damage caused by the fence.

The Mexican side of the fence in Naco, a village that straddles the border with ArizonaNACO, Ariz. — As the Department of Homeland Security pushes to complete 670 miles of fencing along the Mexican border by the end of this year, it is confronting the sharpest resistance yet while conceding that physical barriers alone do not stop illegal crossings.