Fronteras

Several large wildfires continue to burn in Arizona, Nevada and New Mexico. Severe drought led to an aggressive start to this year’s fire season.

It’s Chuck Maxwell’s job to predict how intense this year’s fire season might be. He’s a meteorologist working for the Southwest Coordination Center in Albuquerque that tracks all kinds of fire information for federal government and state agencies. He looks at several factors including the abundance of dry grass, the amount of snowpack and how severe the drought is.

Under a new federal policy, undocumented immigrants arrested for minor traffic violations may not be immediately flagged for deportation.

On Friday, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, or ICE, announced a change to its "Secure Communities" program, under which federal immigration agents partner with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and local law enforcement to identify and deport unauthorized immigrants who end up in jail.

Until now, immigration agents could place a hold on an arrested immigrant and start deportation proceedings as soon as that person was deemed to be in the U.S. illegally.

The Mexican border town of Mexicali is making a push for more tourists from the American Southwest to visit that city's dentists, surgeons and doctors. Starting April 30, medical tourists from the U.S. with the right documents will be able to skip much of the wait on the Mexican side of the border by using a new designated medical tourism lane.

Mexicali's tourism director, Omar Dipp, says the new lane is one part of the city's plan to boost medical tourism by 50 percent.

"So you can drive to Mexicali, take care of your health, and you can only do 20 minutes to cross the border instead of two hours," Dipp said.

Senate Bill 1070 may be Arizona’s most famous self-deportation bill, but it was not the first. Long before legislators came up with a law that would make it difficult to live in Arizona, they passed a law that made it difficult to work in Arizona. This was the 2007 Legal Arizona Workers Act.

 A federal judge stopped the most controversial parts of Arizona's 2010 immigration law from going into effect. But supporters say that hasn't prevented the law from achieving one of its stated goals: Thousands of people who were living in Arizona illegally have left.

Jossie is one of them.

"A lot of time when the police was driving behind me, start shaking my body, stop breathing," says the mother of two teenagers, who now lives in Albuquerque, N.M.

Jossie is still afraid of getting deported, so we agreed not to use her last name.

The terms "Latino" and "Hispanic" are often used interchangeably. In fact, we, at the Fronteras Desk, have done so in our reporting. But we recently embarked on an investigative journey to figure out what those terms really mean, and which term most accurately describes the population we often assume it does.

Congestive heart failure is one of those medical conditions that has patients in and out of emergency rooms constantly. That’s tough on the Navajo Nation, where hospitals, are few and far between. So the Indian Health Service, the National Institutes of Health and several private companies have formed an unprecedented health care partnership to come up with a solution.

She would have been the youngest person to have hiked the entire length of the Grand Canyon - about a thousand miles off trail. Ioana Hociota, 24, was close to her goal when she stepped on the wrong rock and died in a hiking accident.

February 25 was a beautiful, windless day. Ioana Hociota and her hiking partner Matthias Kawski had just finished lunch in Owl Eyes Canyon on the south rim. Matthias chose to hike through snow and bushes while Ioana took a higher route on a wide cliff band. They were about 20 yards from each other when Kawski heard some small rocks fall. Often big horn sheep would kick a rock loose, so he didn’t think much of it.