Texas border town fears worse security since 9/11
austin.ynn.com
By: Heidi Zhou-Castro
Updated 6:07 PM

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The people of Fort Hancock jokingly call their town "Almost America."

Fifty-five miles east of El Paso and directly across the Rio Grande from what Mexicans call the "Valley of the Beheaded," it's a place where cotton blossoms part for patrol trucks and metal splits the horizon.

Jim Ed Miller calls it home. One hot afternoon he took YNN to the back of his farm and showed off his property's claim to fame, the end of the border fence.

"The only thing I have to say about that, I thought fences had to be contiguous," Miller said.

Miller said not a week goes by without someone skirting the fence to cross illegally into his farm. Over at the same diner where he watched the twin towers fall 10 years ago, he says he's worried.

"It's like, let them in, let's see if we can catch them," he said.



ccording to Miller, the problem is no one knows whether the people coming over are illegal immigrants, drug smugglers or terrorists.

Others in the town of 1,700 share the uncertainty.

You'd find at least 10 guns in the diner's parking lot. School district Superintendent Jose Franco carries three for what he calls “personal protection."

People in Fort Hancock said things just aren't the same as the pre-911, pre-drug war days, days when snow cones would lure a then 8-year-old Gale Carr to the other side. Now, the burning ranches and gun fights keep the grown man away.

"I had no fear whatsoever, on a banana-seated bicycle," Carr said. "We didn't have the worries we do now."

If you ask the government though, now is the safest the U.S.-Mexican border has ever been.

Border Patrol caught 12,000 people trying to cross illegally in the El Paso sector last year. In 2005, it was 122,000.



According to U.S. Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Alan Bersin, it's an obvious success.

"We've actually seen a strengthening of borders in ways that were unimaginable before 9/11," he said.

In El Paso, 55 miles west of Fort Hancock, the number of agents paroling the border has doubled since 9/11.

X-ray machines and fingerprint readers now screen major crossings, but back on the outskirts of Fort Hancock, nothing but surveillance cameras stand between Mexico and George Brenzovich's yard.

"This corridor is a passage for major travels of the drugs throughout the country," Brenzovich said. "Sure, it's terrorism."

The border residents of Fort Hancock said it's not the kind of terrorism that stops you in your tracks as 9/11 did a decade ago, but it's the kind that makes you look over your shoulder.

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