TIJUANA -- At first glance, it’s a house under construction on a private, little-traveled street just steps away from the rusting fence that divides Mexico and the United States. But just past the garage is a tunnel 954 feet long, about three feet wide and 32 feet deep, a year in the making.

The tunnel did not yet have an exit but it had already crossed into U.S. territory, said Gen. Alfonso Duarte, the commander of Mexico’s Second Military Region, who announced its discovery on Friday morning and offered media tours of it.

Duarte said an anonymous caller reported the tunnel at a house in the Aeropuerto neighborhood, just steps from the fence of Tijuana’s airport. He said soldiers went to the location at dawn Friday, discovered the tunnel and arrested ten people who were working on it.

They were migrants, mainly from Chiapas and Sonora, who had planned to cross illegally into the United States, he said, adding that it’s not known when they had arrived in Tijuana.

He said they had not succeeded in crossing and had found work constructing the tunnel, receiving 1,200 pesos a week (about $96).

Duarte said the men had worked on the project for approximately a year and were about 320 feet from finishing it.

There were signs that the migrants lived on the property, which covers about 4,280 square feet. There were tattered clothes hanging to dry and two tents fashioned out the cardboard ads that hang on the street. Inside, there were pieces of what once was a sofa.

In a corner of the room where the tunnel entrance was located, there could be seen the image of the Santa Muerte, and beside it was an image of the Virgen de Guadalupe, five candles and a handful of flowers in a vase.

In the two-story house, still under construction, there was a stove, a bowl filled with cereal ready to be eaten, a deck of cards scattered in one corner, and dirt, a lot of dirt, that had been excavated.

The tunnel did not have a complicated structure; it was only the excavation and some spots looked like they were about to collapse. It had a basic system of illumination and ventilation.

It’s the fifth tunnel discovered this year in the border region, one more than the military found all of last year, Duarte said. So far, it had not been determined which criminal organization was building it.

Omar.millan@sandiegored.com