The Brownsville Herald from Brownsville, Texas • 27

BY CHRISTOPHER SHERMAN THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Once, the barren mesas and shrub-covered canyons that extend east of the Pacific Ocean held the most popular routes for illegal immigrants heading into the U.S. Dozens at a time sprinted to waiting cars or a trolley stop in San Diego, passing border agents who were too busy herding others to give pause. Now, 20 years after that onslaught, crossing would mean scaling two fences (one topped with coiled razor wire), passing a phalanx of agents and eluding cameras positioned to capture every incursion. The difference, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said on a recent tour, is like rocket ship and a horse and In pure numbers it is this: Where border agents made some 530,000 arrests in San Diego in fiscal year 1993, they had fewer than 30,000 in 2012. There is no simple yardstick to measure border security.

And yet, as the debate over immigration reform ramps back up, many will try. the border has become not just a popular mantra whenever talk turns to reform but a litmus test for many upon which a broader overhaul is contingent. need a responsible, permanent to illegal immigration, U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio, the Florida Republican who is working to develop a reform plan, said in his State of the Union response this month.

he added, must follow through on the broken promises of the past to secure our borders and enforce our In fact, the border with Mexico is more difficult to breach than ever. San Diego is but one example. Two decades ago, fewer than 4,000 Border Patrol agents manned the entire Southwest border. Today there are 18,500. Some 651 miles of fence have been built, most of that since 2005.

Apprehensions, meantime, have plummeted to levels not seen since the early 1970s with 356,873 in FY2012. Compare that to 1.2 million apprehensions in 1993, when new strategies began bringing officers and technology to border communities in California, Texas, New Mexico and Arizona. Now sensors have been planted, cameras erected, and drones monitor the borderlands from above. But for those who live and work in communities along the international boundary, means different things. In Arizona, ranchers scoff at the idea.

In New Mexico, locals worry about heading south in addition to flowing north. And in Texas, residents firmly believe that reform itself would finally help steady the flow of people and drugs. These places have been transformed. Sealed? No. But as one border mayor asked: secure is In this bicultural region, residents root for reform as the path to Some 800 miles southeast of El Paso is the Rio Grande Valley, where rapid growth has overtaken sugar cane and cotton fields and sleepy hamlets are now thriving cities.

More than 1.2 million people live in the two border counties on the U.S. side of this southernmost tip of Texas, and a similar number are directly across the border anchored by the sprawling cities of Matamoros and Reynosa. Here, undocumented crossers can quickly slip into communities without being forced to trek for days through wide-open spaces. Part of the solution was the border fence, and 400 landowners most of them in this part of Texas had property seized to build it. The fence divided people from swaths of their own land, but also struck many as an offensive gesture in this bicultural, bilingual region that views itself as one community with its Mexican sister cities.

More effective, locals said, has been the influx of Border Patrol agents 2,546 in the Rio Grande Valley today, almost seven times more than 20 years ago. And while some agents still patrol on horseback, others are aided now by night-vision goggles and unmanned Predator drones watching from 19,000 feet overhead with high-powered infrared cameras. Definitions of a secure border vary here, but agreement that the premise should not stand in the way of immigration reform. Tony Garza remembers watching the flow of pedestrian traffic between Brownsville and Matamoros from his filling station just steps from the international bridge. He recalls migrant workers crossing the fairway on the 11th hole of a golf course northbound in the morning, southbound in the afternoon.

And during an annual celebration between the sister cities, no one was asked for their papers at the bridge. People were just expected to go home. Garza, a Republican who served as the U.S. ambassador to Mexico from 2002 to 2009, said easy to become nostalgic for those times, but he reminds himself that he grew up in a border town of fewer than 50,000 people that has grown into a city of more than 200,000. The border here is more secure for the massive investment in recent years but feels less safe because the crime has changed, he said.

Some of that has to do with transnational criminal organizations in Mexico and some of it is just the crime of a larger city. Reform, he said, allow you to focus your resources on those activities that truly make the border less safe Monica Weisberg- Stewart was born and raised an hour upriver in McAllen. Her father ran a store downtown that she runs today, filled with socks, underwear and jewelry. She echoes assessment that things feel less safe now but says that has more to do with the growth than with happening in Mexico. thought that this was definitely the best place to raise my she said, I still believe that to be true Hidalgo County Sheriff Lupe points out that drug, gun and human smuggling is nothing new to the border.

The difference is the attention that the drug- related violence in Mexico has drawn to the region in recent years. He insists his county, which includes McAllen, is safe. The crime rate is falling, and undocumented immigrants account for small numbers in his jail. But asked if the border is hesitate. busting human trafficking stash houses with 60 to 100 people that are stashed in a two, three-bedroom home for weeks at a time, how can you say secured the he said.

view, however, is that those people might not be there if they had a legal path to work in the U.S. reform is the first thing we have to accomplish before we can say that we have secured the he said. EELL Steel bars still up; crossings and crime down Burglar bars still protect many a home in the Chihuahuita neighborhood near downtown El Paso, a reminder of a time when immigrant crossers would break in looking for food or trying to duck the Border Patrol. Carmen Silva recalls those days. At 90, she tells of migrants hiding under cars and in backyards.

Now, she says: comes through Patricia Rayjosa has lived in the same neighborhood as Silva for the past 18 years. Once, she said, migrants crossed 30, 40, 50 at a time to overwhelm agents standing watch. Others swam across the Rio Grande or waded north on tire tubes. morning, as I went out to feed my dogs, I found wire cutters. I see them but I could tell they went across my said Rayjosa, 53.

But she agrees with assessment. Now, not easy to In the early 1990s, El Paso ran second to San Diego in the number of undocumented immigrants coming north. Then, in 1993, the Border Patrol launched Hold the the first of a series of enforcement actions intended to gain of the Southwest border. It was a shift in strategy from apprehending migrants already in the U.S. to preventing entry in the first place, and the effect was almost immediate: Within months, illegal crossings in El Paso went from up to 10,000 a day to 500, according to a Government Accountability Office report in 1994 called CONTROL: Revised Strategy Is Showing Some Positive Burglaries in neighborhoods like Chihuahuita decreased.

Car thefts went down. And, as happened later in San Diego, apprehensions plunged: from nearly 286,000 in 1993 to about 9,700 last fiscal year in the El Paso Border Patrol sector, which encompasses 268 miles from West Texas across New Mexico. (Border Patrol staffing in the sector went from 608 agents in 1993 to more than 2,700 today.) To El Paso Mayor John Cook, hinging reform to continued calls for a seems absurd given the changes in his city. ALLEY TATE SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 24, 2013 PAGEC3 2995 Pleasecallusorvisitour convenientlocationfor completedetails.Thisdoes notobligateyouinanyway. GoodforAt-Need andPre-Planned Funerals 20-GAUGESTEELCASKET WEACCEPTMOSTPRENEEDPLANSFROMOTHERFUNERALHOMES.LETUSREVIEWYOURCURRENTPOLICYATNOCHARGE.

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Thursday, February 28 Students will be dismissed early for day teacher preparation. Charro Days holiday for students and employees. Friday, March 1 What does a border look like? ERIC GAY THE ASSOCIATED PRESS CARLOS LLORCA THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Above: Cotton farmer Teofilo Flores drives his truck along the U.S.-Mexico border fence that passes through his property in Brownsville.The fence along this section of the border divided people from swaths of their own also struck many as an offensive gesture in this bicultural, bilingual region. Right: Patricia Rayjosa holds a pair of wire cutters left by border crossers she found in her backyard years ago at her home in El Paso.Like many residents of neighborhoods along the U.S.-Mexico border, Rayjosa remembers a time when immigrants would cross the border in droves and break into people's backyards and homes trying to hide from the Border Patrol. For the complete Associated Press onto our website at: www.BrownsvilleHerald.com.