By holding their convention in San Diego, the GOP drew attention to the Mexican border and seized every opportunity to blast the Clinton’s Administration’s record on fighting illegal immigration. However, President Clinton has already done much to fortify the border–he doubled the number of border patrol agents and gave them state of the art equipment. Just months after Operation Gatekeeper was in place, border patrol officials reported that the number of undocumented immigrants had decreased by a third. Now, Operation Gatekeeper is being labeled a fraud. Officials of the union that represents border patrol agents have charged that supervisors in the agency falsified arrest reports to make the program look like a success.

The Republican National Convention was swimming in “liquid assets” The California Public Research Group found that corporate sponsors of the GOP convention are also big-time patrons of candidates in the state. Fernando Igrejas of CALPIRG was at the convention to expose the money connections and to promote Proposition 212, the Anti-Corruption Act, one of two campaign finance initiatives on the November Ballot in California.