Bob Ortega

Arizona Republic — The U.S. spent more than $106 billion over five years securing and militarizing its border with Mexico. That effort has rerouted illegal crossings and drug trafficking, but it hasn't stopped them.

Arizona Republic — TUCSON - A long, sharp, high-pitched beep sounds every 30 or 40 seconds at the Border Patrol’s windowless sector-control room. Agents here monitor a vast array of video screens and sensors linked to cameras, radar and other surveillance equipment along 262 miles of the Arizona-Mexico border — including hundreds of ground sensors that beep loudly whenever one detects something. That something might be a drug smuggler or a migrant — but far, far more often, it’s a cow, or the wind, or some other false alarm, which may be why the agents seem to pay these constant beeps little mind. To complement the 651 miles of barriers along the U.S.-Mexican border, Customs and Border Protection deploys drones, tethered radar blimps, P-3 Orion surveillance aircraft, thermal-imaging devices, towers with day and night video cameras, ground surveillance radar and much more. But, as the ceaseless beeping of the sensor alarms illustrates, many pieces of that technology are flawed: Some produce frequent false alarms, some suffer detection failures or leave gaps in coverage. Then, too, CBP — despite spending more than $106 billion over the past five years militarizing and securing the border — struggles to mesh these pieces smoothly together so it can make good use of the data they provide. The flaws, the gaps and the challenges in analyzing the data have left CBP, of which the Border Patrol is a part, unable to answer such seemingly basic questions as how well all of this technology works and how many of the people and how much of the drugs coming across the border make it through.

Arizona Republic — More than 12,000 women in the United States will be diagnosed with cervical cancer this year. Hundreds more may go undiagnosed because of the widespread use of a screening test that the Food and Drug Administration has not approved for detecting the human papillomavirus, or HPV, which causes nearly all cervical cancers. Some of the largest national labs have for a decade routinely used test kits that contain a preservative, BD SurePath, that is approved for Pap tests but not HPV testing. The labs continue to use the tests despite a June 8 FDA warning that HPV tests using SurePath can produce false negatives and national guidelines that call for using only FDA-approved tests, an Arizona Republic investigation has found.

Arizona Republic — For more than 12 years, as part of two massive U.S-funded studies in India, researchers tracked a large group of women for cervical cancer but didn’t screen them, instead monitoring them as their cancers progressed. At least 79 of the women died.

Arizona Republic — The land where the antelope play, where Arizona meets Mexico, has been divided in recent years by taller and longer border fences. They are meant to keep out or slow undocumented migrants and drug smugglers coming north from Mexico, but environmentalists say they’re also helping drive two southeastern Arizona pronghorn antelope herds to the brink of dying out.

Arizona Republic — The pipeline bringing a flood of Central American migrants to the United States, including thousands of unaccompanied children, begins in villages like Quebrada Maria, near the Caribbean coast of Honduras. That's where dimple-faced, 14-year-old Brayan Duban Soler Redondo lived in daily fear of being beaten up or killed by members of gangs like Mara Salvatrucha, also called MS-13, and Calle 18. Gangs such as these terrorize neighborhoods throughout Central America. Over three days in May, gang members in another Honduran city, San Pedro Sula, murdered five children ages 5 to 13.

Arizona Republic — A ghost is haunting Nogales. His face stares out from shop windows. It is plastered on handbills and painted on walls under the shadow of the U.S.-Mexican border fence here. Candles and doves are stenciled onto steel posts of the fence itself in his memory, each a promise not to forget the night, 14 months ago, when teenager Jose Antonio Elena Rodriguez was shot 10 times in the back and head by one or more Border Patrol agents firing through the fence into Mexico. Similar specters haunt other border towns in Arizona, Texas and California, with the families of the dead charging that Border Patrol agents time and again have killed Mexicans and U.S.