The Brief

Government agencies are spending billions of dollars to improve wait times at the U.S.-Mexico border, but the checkpoints remain severely clogged — and border communities are hurting.

In recent months lines at the border often stretched for several hours, frustrating more than 150,000 students, cross-border families, health care workers, small business owners, and others who daily cross to and from Mexico. Experts say some fronterizas have stopped crossing the border as often, and the loss of foot traffic in the region has resulted in heavy sales losses for small businesses.

“Money we can replace, but time will never come back. Those people are wasting their time in that line,” said Sunil Gakherja, 49, who owns a small perfume store in San Ysidro, a neighborhood in San Diego, close to the border.

U.S. border officials point to the need to shift resources to handle irregular migration — people who come into the United States in places other than official ports of entry, usually to seek asylum. San Diego surpassed Tucson this month as Border Patrol’s busiest sector in the nation.

But border-area residents and business leaders say the federal government should staff the border effectively so that the $741-million expansion of the San Ysidro Port of Entry has its intended impact, to reduce wait times and stimulate the regional economy.

Research published by the Atlantic Council says a 10-minute reduction in wait times could lead to an additional $26 million worth of cargo entering the United States each month and an annual impact of $5.4 million on the U.S. economy from purchases by families and individuals entering the United States from Mexico.

In the San Diego region, regular border crossers say wait times are going up, not down. Waits that used to last 30 minutes to an hour on weekdays can now regularly take three to four hours. On several days last December, pedestrians waited six hours or more. Adding to their frustration, long lines also stretch southbound to enter Mexico.

“Devastating” is how Kenia Zamarripa described the waits on both sides of the border. She is vice president of international and public affairs at the San Diego Regional Chamber of Commerce.

“This is families losing their incomes,” she said. “There are 800 small businesses in San Ysidro that depend on pedestrian crossings and, again, 90% of their customers cross on foot.”

State officials said it’s unclear how much California has missed out on in sales tax revenue because that information can’t be broken down by zip code.

Small border businesses suffering

After opening in 2017, the El Rincon restaurant in San Ysidro faced the same challenges and growing pains many small, family-run businesses contend with, said Andrea Alaniz. Her mom owns the Mexican food restaurant along San Ysidro Boulevard, a few blocks from the border.

“We just opened the doors, and it was just us doing the cooking and waiting tables — hoping that business would increase and keep on a nice trend,” she recalled.

Word quickly spread of her mother’s caseros — homemade family recipes from Guadalajara, Jalisco. Lines would wrap around the tiny restaurant, with some customers even driving from Los Angeles or crossing north from Baja California, for the food.

“You know, the spices … you can find the spices anywhere, but really, it’s the way my mom and my family cooks,” said Alaniz. “My mom’s an amazing cook, and our recipes … they go way back.”

The whole family — five siblings — pitched in to handle the increased volume and their newfound success.

“We all work here,” laughed Alaniz. “It was a Sunday, and I remember we were all here, and the music was blaring, and we were just dancing and having fun and it was a really nice feeling.”

Then the pandemic hit. Federal officials restricted cross-border travel. Business tanked. About 200 businesses closed in San Ysidro, a working-class, mostly immigrant community of about 25,000 people, said Jason Wells, president of the local chamber of commerce.

“Shut their doors forever. Gone,” he said.

Alaniz and her family managed to stay open and even sent some money home to family in Mexico, but it was a daily fight. “We just don’t get the same amount of people coming in, because people aren’t going back and forth anymore,” said Alaniz.

Multiple studies show immigrants like Alaniz’s family were a key economic engine for the United States’ rebound from the pandemic. Some 50% of the labor market’s recent growth came from foreign-born workers between January 2023 and January 2024, according to an Economic Policy Institute analysis of federal data.

Zamarripa says it’s these same border communities that lose about $2 billion yearly because of excessive border wait times. She worries the latest bottlenecks at checkpoints could severely impact those struggling to get back on their feet.

Gakherja, the owner of the perfumery, described a Sunday customer who waited six hours to cross the border.

“He got in the line at 9 in the morning, and he got here at 3:30 p.m. It’s too much. Imagine they have kids who have to go to the restroom. They need food. They’re not thinking about shopping after that,” said Gakherja.

Waiting is the hardest part

It’s not just small businesses that are hurting. Those hardest hit by backlogs at inefficient ports of entry include the region’s hospitality and hospital workers, students, medical patients, and anyone who relies on the interdependence of a cross-border region to offset the skyrocketing costs of living in San Diego, one of the most expensive cities in the nation.

Hector Urquiza, a 19-year-old college student serving in the Army Reserves, lives with his brother in Tijuana because rent is too expensive in San Diego.

“When I had to go to work, there was a two-hour line. It was like a snake, you know, wiggling around. That was kind of painful,” said Urquiza.

Cross-border travelers often turn to Facebook to document their experiences and wait times because the official Customs and Border Protection data is considered inaccurate and unreliable. Cómo está la línea Tijuana (How is the Tijuana line), a Facebook group with 430,000 members, was founded in June 2013 when its creator relied on the official CBP wait times and was extraordinarily late for work, according to his posts.

Urquiza said people who regularly cross the border develop a system. It sometimes includes holding a spot in line for each other to cut down on their day-to-day commute, but Tijuana authorities recently have cracked down on the practice, making it harder to get through the school or work week.

“Like you can tell somebody to save your spot, but when you try to go back to your spot, the police are like, ‘Nah, no amigo’,” he said.

When commuters wait in border traffic for hours, business productivity across Southern California suffers, say local leaders.

“As a business owner, you can’t expect an employee to perform at 100% if he has four hours of sleep and then six hours on foot,” said Joaquín Luken, executive director of the Smart Border Coalition, which aims to streamline border crossings.

Wait times averaged three hours to get back into Mexico in mid-March, he said.

“You have a complete shift of the profile of a crosser,” said Luken.

Before, people would cross to shop, eat, or visit. But now, border crossings are strictly business—people who need to cross for school, work, or care for a family member.

“So, of course, most of the businesses here in the South Bay are struggling, and this impact does trickle up the county,” he said of San Diego County.

Reece Rackley, a 30-year-old who lives in Clairemont, crosses the border to see a doctor in Baja California to save money on medical care. She’s one of roughly 1 million Americans who travel to Mexico yearly to save on health care.

Waiting in long lines to return home can be “very, very frustrating,” she said.

Victor Navarro, 27, a social worker and student at San Diego City College, recently broke down crying when asked about the long waits.

“I’ve lost at least two or three years of my life in that line,” said Navarro, who lives in the La Postal neighborhood of Tijuana.

“Why is that happening? Do they hate us? Do they want us to be standing there in line? Are they humiliating us?” asked Navarro.

Does the U.S.-Mexico border need to be this way?

As President Joe Biden worked to salvage a border deal with Congress in January, he said he would “shut down” the U.S.-Mexico border. His words echoed former President Donald Trump, who threatened in 2019 to close the border if Mexico didn’t step up its immigration enforcement.

People in the Cali-Baja region wish officials in Washington would stop saying that.

“Number one, you can’t close a border,” said Luken. “Especially when you look at Mexico being the U.S.’s number one trading partner.” One in every 29 workers in the United States has a job created or supported by U.S.-Mexico trade, the 2022 Atlantic Council study shows.

On Monday, many commuters woke at 1 a.m. to get into a four-hour line. When they finally arrived at the checkpoint just before dawn, they found less than a third of Customs and Border Protection’s available booths were open. Some wondered aloud whether the traffic nightmare wasn’t just a slow-moving demonstration of Washington’s threats.

Customs and Border Protection has said it shifted resources to handle large groups of migrants who overwhelm border officials to cross into the United States.

“CBP has taken significant steps to surge personnel and resources to impacted sectors and address the challenges we are experiencing across the southwest border,” a Department of Homeland Security official said in January.

Border officials also are trying to make sure fentanyl doesn’t enter the country.

Luken, of the Smart Border Coalition, said when officers take an extra three seconds to open and shut a car door, multiplied by the 150,000 to 160,000 people who cross daily, it’s easy to see how wait times are compounding.

Customs and Border Protection officials recently declined an interview with CalMatters, but Homeland Security officials have acknowledged that frustrated daily commuters and excessively long border lines highlight a need for funding to address what Washington has described as a border crisis.

“CBP will continue to evaluate the situation along the border and make operational changes as necessary,” Homeland Security said in a statement. “Stakeholders will be provided with operational updates as they become available.”

The Homeland Security statement also put some of the blame on people entering the United States irregularly and the people who smuggle them in.

“Encounter numbers continue to fluctuate as smugglers and bad actors continue to spread falsehoods and show complete disregard for the safety and wellbeing of vulnerable migrants,” the agency said. “The fact remains: the United States continues to enforce immigration law, and our borders are not open for those without a legal basis to enter the country.”

SAULT STE. MARIE, Mich. — The idea came to Danielle Boyer in a toy store. The inspiration? It was Tickle Me Elmo.

"Whenever you'd press his belly, he would talk, and he would teach you things," she said. "There are toys that teach us in English, but there aren't toys that teach us Anishinaabemowin. And I wanted that to be different."

Anishinaabemowin includes the Potawatomi, Odawa and Ojibwe languages. Exact estimates vary, but there are fewer than 10,000 people in the U.S. who speak Anishinaabemowin. That number is around 25,000 in Canada. Some Native languages have just a few dozen fluent speakers, while others have none.

Boyer has seen how quickly language loss can happen. Her grandmother speaks Anishinaabemowin, but she is one of the last fluent speakers of their dialect.

"It is devastating to feel like your language could be lost," said Boyer, a member of the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians. "You lose your culture, you lose a way to describe who you are."

U.S. Indian boarding schools played a major role in the loss of Indigenous languages. Children separated from their families were taught, sometimes violently, not to speak their native tongues, and many did not pass them on to their children.

Today, some Native youth are learning their languages in schools. But Boyer said many of them still aren't invested. "They see it as another homework assignment."

Boyer and Hoy work on some last-minute adjustments to his AI-powered SkoBot before presenting at his school's end-of-year showcase, called the STEAM Museum.

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That's why she invented the SkoBot. It's a customizable toy robot designed to get Indigenous children excited to learn their languages.

"I can say 'Hey SkoBot, what is bear?' And it will say, 'Bear is makwa, makwa,' and it'll repeat it, right? So I can say, 'What is crane?' It'll say, 'Crane is ajijaak, ajijaak.'"

SkoBots use a form of artificial intelligence to speak Indigenous languages, and they're small enough to mount on the user's shoulder. They sort of resemble mini R2-D2 droids, from Star Wars, except these robots are designed to look like woodland creatures and decorated in Native American florals.

Through a nonprofit she started when she was 18, Boyer, now 25, has mentored hundreds of Native American children across the country, teaching them to build SkoBots of their own. One of them is 12-year-old Holden Hoy in Michigan's Upper Peninsula.

"I was already a big fan of robotics and how they work, how you can bring inanimate objects to life," he said. "And I'm Ojibwe, and so I've always wanted to save the Ojibwe language."

Hoy, a rising seventh-grader, showed off his design at an end-of-the-year science fair at his school, JKL Bahweting Anishinaabe School in Sault Ste. Marie. Like Boyer, he is a member of the Sault Tribe.

He programmed his SkoBot to answer three questions ahead of his presentation. One of them was, "What's your name," to which the robot would respond in Hoy's voice: "Aaniin, Hello. Sabe indizhinikaaz, Bahweting indoonjibaa. I was built by Holden Hoy. I will not gain sentience and take over the world. Or will I?"

Hoy named his SkoBot Sabe, which means Bigfoot in Anishinaabemowin. In Ojibwe culture, Bigfoot represents honesty, one of seven sacred teachings.

His classmates and their parents stopped by his booth to see Sabe in action. Boyer was there too, helping Hoy with his presentation.

"I'm very happy that people are actually coming to this booth," Hoy said. "I'm happy that they are learning things, and I'm really happy that I'm part of the Ojibwe."

Sabe has one eye, a sensor that detects movement and lets it know to start listening.

Hoy's Sabe, or Bigfoot, SkoBot on display (right), alongside three other SkoBots that Boyer brought with her to show off at the STEAM Museum. Each represents a specific animal: a wolf, turtle and bear. Hoy's SkoBot is 3D printed in light gray, and its face is adorned with a footprint surrounded by floral designs.

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"Basically, when it hears that one trigger word, it then plays a prerecorded audio file. So there isn't synthetic speech, there isn't any generative AI," said Boyer. "It's simply listening to what you're saying, identifying it and playing [audio files] that already exist."

That means the SkoBots will never make things up, often called AI hallucinations. Hoy said it's important not to use generative AI. "AI tends to falsify things a lot, not get things from trustworthy sources."

Boyer's goal isn't to replace interactions with real language speakers. Instead, it's to get kids interested in not only their languages, but in subjects like science, math and engineering as well. That includes getting them to think about how to use AI ethically.

"Artificial intelligence, especially when it's not created by Indigenous people, stands to do a lot of harm to our communities," she said. "When you are putting accurate information into these models … you're giving away sacred information to companies that don't have our best interests at heart."

And as chatbots have become more popular, Boyer said some people have turned to them to help them learn their languages. She's even seen large language models like ChatGPT invent fake words in Anishinaabemowin, which she said is dangerous. "If we're not learning our language correctly, we shouldn't learn it at all."

Jocelyn Hoy is Holden's mom. She's excited that her son is not only exposed to their culture, but he's eager to know more. She said he's even been teaching her new things.

"As someone who, at a time in my life, did not want to be identified as Native American … now as an adult, I cannot wait to learn more, and I think the SkoBots are going to help me and so many kids — so many people in general — learn their heritage and who they are."

Holden Hoy said that heritage and the language are inseparable: "The language is the culture!"

He added, "It is important to protect it, because it's some people's way of life. Generation after generation is based around this culture."

Edited by: Steve Drummond and Lauren Migaki
Visual design and development by: LA Johnson
Copyright 2026 NPR

This story first appeared on The LA Local.

Murals depicting Korean drummers, dancers and historical figures were a large part of Dave Young Kim’s childhood in Koreatown.

At the time, the Korean American artist didn’t know what all of the imagery meant, but it left a lasting impression on him.

“We don’t learn culture via formal education. It’s all gleaned,” Kim said. “It’s just what we sense, and we feel a connection to it without actually knowing anything about it. It belongs to us, and it feels very familiar.”

Many of the murals Kim remembers from his childhood have since disappeared. With his latest mural at the Korean Resource Center, Kim hopes to bring some of that visual imagery back to the neighborhood.

Completed this summer, the mural is Kim’s first in Koreatown.

The mural shows a group of traditional Korean drummers moving beneath sweeping ribbons of color, with plum blossoms blooming across the bottom of the wall. Faint outlines of traditional Korean architecture appear in the background.

At the center of the mural is 풍물놀이 (pungmulnori), a traditional Korean folk performance that combines drumming, dance and acrobatics and has long been part of village festivals and celebrations.

A close-up view of artist Dave Young Kim’s mural at the Korean Resource Center in Koreatown. The work depicts traditional Korean drummers.

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For Kim, the project was a chance to reconnect the neighborhood with the kind of cultural imagery he says shaped his own understanding of identity growing up.

“It was important to me growing up, and for me to see myself through very purposeful art, very intentional art,” he said. “For my own formation and identity, I think it was very important. I’d like to do that for future generations.”

Kim, 46, who was born and raised in Koreatown, said the project felt different from his other murals because it was rooted in the community where he spent his childhood.

“The formative years of my life are here,” he said.

The project grew out of the Abbey Mural Prize, a national grant program that supports community-based public mural projects.

As part of the project, Kim partnered with the Koreatown Storytelling Program, which trains youth to interview community elders. Students interviewed residents at Durae Crenshaw House, an affordable senior housing complex and home to the Korean Resource Center, and shared transcripts with Kim as he developed the mural.

The architecture in the mural reflects the idea of home that emerged repeatedly in interviews with elders, Kim said.

“There were a lot of iterations of the mockups. The very initial ones were very, very, very rooted in the stories, the narratives from the elders,” Kim said.

The interviews also left an impression on Daisy Yeon, 17, one of the students who conducted them. She said participating in the project changed the way she thinks about Koreatown and its history.

Yeon said she believes traditional Korean imagery still has a place in a neighborhood that has changed rapidly in recent years.

“Personally, the way Koreatown has evolved in these few last years from the pandemic and the shift where people move into other Korean enclaves like Buena Park and Torrance, Koreatown is partly becoming a place of pop-up matcha spots, for example,” she said. “So I think it’s important for tradition to still be here.”

Seeing the finished mural was “a full-circle moment,” she said, after spending months interviewing elders whose stories became part of the artwork.

While researching Koreatown’s public art history, Kim learned many of the murals he saw as a kid grew out of cultural initiatives and public funding that no longer exist. He also discovered an earlier generation of Korean American muralists whose work once covered parts of Koreatown.

In 1993, artist Dong-In Park completed a mural of traditional Korean farmers’ dance in the Korean Community Center at 981 S. Western Ave.

He told the Los Angeles Times he hoped “the 1.5- and second-generation Korean kids” would not forget their language and history. Park, along with artists including Sonia Hahn and Kuk Chol Han, helped establish a tradition of public art celebrating Korean culture during the late 1980s and early 1990s.

An undated photo of Dong-In Park’s mural depicting a farmers band playing music and dancing to provide entertainment for Korea’s largely agricultural population. The mural was previously located at 981 Western Avenue in Koreatown.

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Kim wants his mural to carry that tradition forward while also reflecting the history of the community it was created for.

The Korean Resource Center, founded by South Korean democracy activist Yoon Han-bong, has long organized around immigrant rights, workers’ rights and civic engagement. During the project, Kim learned that traditional Korean drumming has long played a role in the organization’s activism.

In the mural, an older drummer who immigrated from Korea leads the group, followed by a middle-aged performer who learned from him and younger drummers wearing sneakers, modeled after college students who continue the tradition today.

“Where we landed was very much to the core of what KRC is,” Kim said. “They are very activist and progressive.”

The Koreatown of today is filled with Korean-owned businesses and Korean-language signs, Kim said, but far fewer public murals reflecting Korean culture.

His latest mural isn’t about recreating the past so much as restoring something he believes has faded from the neighborhood.

As an artist, Kim said, public art has the power to shape how people experience a place.

“There’s something about the everyday landscape that you kind of are forced to take in,” he said, “and then as an artist, having the ability to shape what that might be.”

Lineage Logistics, the company that operates the burned cold-storage warehouse in Boyle Heights, announced yesterday it's removed “nearly half” of the food waste there.

The waste, the company said, has been sealed in deodorized containers and is being transported off-site.

Lineage estimated that demolition and cleanup of the rest of the burned structure should be largely completed in the “coming days.”

Before the weeklong fire that began on June 17, the warehouse stored approximately 44,000 tons, or 88 million pounds, of food.

The company said it has started removing the wall separating the burned and unburned sections of the building this weekend to speed up the cleaning of the unburned structure.

The process includes installing plastic sheeting where the wall used to be to help tamp down odors

That part could take up to three days and may temporarily increase odors. To mitigate the smell, the company said three carbon filters will be added on the Union Pacific side of the warehouse.

The company is trying to meet a 45-day deadline set by L.A. Mayor Karen Bass to complete the cleanup. Lineage has faced citations and warnings from L.A. County and the South Coast Air Quality Management District for "an ongoing odor nuisance" and “unsanitary and nuisance conditions.”

A slate of popular peptide therapies has won the backing of a key advisory panel to the federal government — a step that could eventually open up broader access to the experimental drugs.

In a marathon two-day meeting last week, the panel of doctors, academics and pharmacists recommended the Food and Drug Administration reclassify almost all of the compounds under consideration so that specialized pharmacies in the U.S. could begin offering them.

Seven different peptide therapies — none of which are FDA-approved drugs — were under consideration.

Currently, these peptides can't be made in the U.S., except for research purposes, leading many peptide users to buy unvetted substances sold online, with disclaimers such as "for research use only" and "not for human consumption."

By narrow margins, the panel voted in favor of all but one. The FDA isn't required to follow advisory committee recommendations but typically does.

The outcome represents a win for Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has publicly supported peptide therapies, and the broader wellness and longevity industry, which stands to profit substantially.

These peptides are promoted for a wide range of uses and are often taken together, including for injury recovery, muscle growth and fat loss, improving athletic performance, enhancing metabolism and more.

If the agency takes the panel's recommendations, clinicians could have the ability to prescribe six peptide therapies: BPC-157, MOTS-c, KPV, TB-500, Epitalon and Semax.

A compound called Emideltide, sometimes used for insomnia, was the only one to receive a down vote.

The panel's endorsement of peptides was a striking rejection of the FDA's stance against them.

While the level of evidence for each compound varies, all of them lack the kind of large, well-controlled trials in humans that are necessary to establish safety and effectiveness, which is required for drug approvals. Peptides are strings of amino acids — smaller than a protein — that often act as signaling molecules in our bodies and carry out many critical functions.

They can be synthesized and delivered as drugs, often by injection. Some of those, like insulin, are naturally occurring in the body. Others are modified versions, as with the blockbuster GLP-1 obesity drugs.

Scientists for the agency spoke extensively about the lack of reliable data for any of the seven peptides before the committee. They advised the panel to vote no.

In some cases, they couldn't find any published clinical studies in humans — and there were safety concerns like the potential to encourage cancer growth or to trigger a massive immune response.

A "foundational challenge" was simply defining the substances, because the chemical composition for peptides labeled with the same name varied considerably, explained FDA official Russell Wesdyk.

"You will see many, many different forms," he said. "We can't create quality standards until we actually know what it is."

The divide among the experts on the panel was a study in contrasts.

Ahead of the meeting, eight new members were appointed. Most have ties to the peptide industry and include physicians who work for medical practices and companies that promote them.

In almost all cases, they voted in favor of lifting restrictions.

A spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services pushed back on criticism about potential conflicts of interest and said all underwent the standard ethics and vetting process.

"I think it's about patient access," said Dr. Asare Christian, one of the panel members who runs a Pennsylvania-based clinic that advertises peptide protocols and hormone optimization.

That sentiment was echoed throughout the many hours of public comment.

Compounding pharmacies, large telehealth providers and others from the industry underscored the perils of the unregulated marketplace, with some offering anecdotes of patients obtaining unmarked vials from sketchy suppliers.

"What we are advocating for is not the Wild West," said Brigham Buhler, who runs a telehealth company that offers hormone optimization and peptides and is an ally of Secretary Kennedy.

"What we are advocating for is to slow down or shut down the gray and black market and to allow patients to have a safe and effective manufacturing process," he told the panel.

But some panelists were skeptical of that argument.

"I'm concerned that we are responding to market-induced demand rather than a decision based in solid science," Dr. Elizabeth Rebello, an anaesthesiologist at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, commented after casting a no vote.

The FDA committee was tasked with reviewing data that supports using these peptides to treat a variety of specific conditions, such as BPC-157 for treating ulcerative colitis, an inflammatory bowel disease.

However, if the FDA ultimately reclassifies them and they are produced by compounding pharmacies in the U.S., clinicians would have discretion to write prescriptions outside of those narrow indications.

During the meeting, industry groups — and some on the panel — repeatedly criticized the FDA presentations for not reflecting more recent scientific data on the substances, including results from other human studies that had been submitted ahead of time.

FDA staff said they had considered everything submitted by the meeting deadline and would still take new information into account as they weigh next steps.

The decision to place the products on the FDA's official list for compounding doesn't come close to the standards for drug approval, but some worry that nuance will not be clear to the public, which may not be aware of the limited data for humans.

"I think this endorsement can be potentially harmful and I cannot in good conscience vote yes," said Dr. Brian Lee, a member of the panel and an associate professor at the Keck School of Medicine of USC.

If the FDA moves to reclassify the peptides so that compounding pharmacies can make them, it will be through a formal rulemaking process that could stretch into next year or 2028. There is a possibility that Kennedy could invoke special authority to make them available sooner.

The panel is scheduled to meet again in February to consider additional peptide therapies.
Copyright 2026 NPR