Amy Isackson

Andrew Tahmooressi maintains he took a wrong turn and mistakenly drove into Tijuana with his guns, which are legally registered in the U.S. The case has inflamed cross border tensions.

A former U.S. Marine sergeant is in a Mexican prison just across the border from California. The reservist says he missed his freeway exit in San Diego and drove across the U.S.-Mexico border.

The Francisco Villa Public School is a big, cement block of a fortress in an eastern Tijuana neighborhood just south of the Mexico-U.S. border.

Many of the nearby houses are patched together out of discarded materials, like old garage doors. The roads are unpaved and deeply rutted.

The school bell ...

Ruben prances across the street one recent morning on his way to work on a corner of Tijuana's famous tourist strip, Avenida Revolución.

Ruben's hair is freshly dyed. His nametag is shiny.

But both he and his boss, Victor Reyes, have long faces.

Ruben, well, he's a donkey, (a "zonkey" ...

In this segment we discuss how a border security surge would change the dynamic along the border--both in terms of the flow of people and the flow of money. To do so, we have three guests who are intimately familiar with the territories along the border: Jude Joffe-Block, senior field correspondent in Phoenix for Fronteras: The Changing America Desk, Amy Isackson, freelance reporter in San Diego and Tijuana and Mónica Ortiz Uribe, also a senior field correspondent for Fronteras in El Paso and Ciudad Juarez.

After living underground in the United States — figuratively speaking — some undocumented immigrants deported to the Mexican border city of Tijuana are living in holes. These migrants have dug bunkers along Tijuana's sewage canal to protect themselves from police who routinely burn down their makeshift homes.

The Tijuana River ...

Vicente Calderon, editor of The Tijuana Press, and Amy Isackson, KPBS border reporter, talk about the spike in violence along the Mexico/U.S. border.