Heads bowed in prayer, we stand at a bucolic spot on the banks of the Rio Grande known by locals as Neely's Crossing. Like most of West Texas, there is nothing here. On the other side, drug wars have turned Mexican border towns in the Valle de Juárez and elsewhere into killing grounds.

As Hudspeth County deputies armed with AR-15 semi-automatic weapons stand guard, we close in around Reverend Jim Garlow. "Lord, we thank you Lord for gathering us here," he says. "We thank you for all you have given us and our great nation. We ask you Lord to protect American exceptionalism, to protect U.S. national sovereignty, and secure our border." Garlow, a prominent evangelical minister, recently had been selected by former House Speaker Newt Gingrich to serve as chairman of Renewing American Leadership (ReAL), a new organization dedicated to promoting the "'otherness' of America's exceptional culture and government [whose] manifest success...has made us a target."

Garlow was speaking to the attendees at a two-day "Border School" sponsored by the Border Sheriff's Posse, an evangelical group that teams up with the Texas Border Sheriff's Coalition (TBSC) and the Southwestern Border Sheriff's Coalition to educate Christians about threats some law-enforcement officials believe loom across the border.

Neely's Crossing became famous for a January 23, 2006 incident that Hudspeth sheriff and TBSC chairman Arvin West contends was a "Mexican military incursion." The day before we visited the site, we viewed blurry footage of heavily armed men scrambling across the river toward the Mexican side. Several loads of marijuana float downriver as the men try to regroup and get a military-like vehicle, a Hummer or possibly Humvee, back onto Mexican soil. The Mexican government vehemently denied Sheriff West's accusation that a Mexican military unit had been escorting drug smugglers. The Border Patrol, which had officers at Neely's Crossing that day, also declined to support West's account.

Claiming that the federal government has abandoned its border-control responsibilities, West, who is a mainstay of the Border School, warns students and residents of U.S. border communities, "Arm yourselves. It's better to be tried by twelve than carried by six."

This secure-the-line-at-all-costs attitude doesn't merely foster right-wing ranting. West and other border sheriffs tout border-security lore like the Neely's Crossing incident in congressional testimony, and FOX News frequently reports their assertions. The complaints that Washington isn't fulfilling its responsibilities echo across border communities, despite the unprecedented increase over the past five years in the number of Border Patrol agents, immigrant-detention beds, and border barriers. Each year, billions of dollars flow to the border from the Departments of Homeland Security (DHS) and Justice (DOJ).

In the absence of coherent national policy, Washington has fed local and state officials who use federal grants to shape the politics and operations of border security.

While there is little validity to complaints about the lack of federal funds for border security, the criticism about federal irresponsibility on border policy conveys an important truth. Since 9/11, the border has become a site of intensive national concern, not only surrounding immigration, but also drug wars and terrorism. In this context of increasing fear, the federal government has failed to assess the threats and address them coherently.

Instead, Washington has fed opportunistic local and state officials who use federal grants to shape the politics and operations of border security. There may be no cogent federal stance on border policy, but there is policy — dictated by alarmist border-area sheriffs and politicians and increasingly supported by the American public, Congress, and the Obama administration. To that end, the federal government is busy resurrecting discredited drug-war programs, deploying the National Guard, and opening new channels of assistance for border security by redirecting stimulus grants that were intended to repair the wider U.S. economy.

The Texas Paradigm

Nowhere has the post-9/11 border-security framework been so enthusiastically adopted — and adapted — as in Texas, where local law enforcement, the state political leadership, and a contingent of the congressional delegation have taken border security into their own hands, albeit largely with federal funding.

The shaping of what Governor Rick Perry calls the "Texas model of border security" began in the spring of 2005, when Zapata County Sheriff Sigifredo "Sigi" Gonzalez, Jr. put out a call to his fellow Texas-border sheriffs to form the Texas Border Sheriff's Coalition, which includes twenty border counties. Over the past five years, the sheriffs of the TBSC have rallied law enforcement to secure the border, played a prominent role in the state's "high-intensity border surges," and launched Border Watch, a remote-surveillance program carried out by volunteer "virtual deputies." In the process, the sheriffs have become the public face of Texas's go-it-alone commitment to border security. We are the "can-do state," Gonzalez says.

In PowerPoint presentations, congressional testimony, and media interviews, Gonzalez warns of al Qaeda terrorists setting up sleeper cells, Mexican drug cartels crisscrossing the border to terrorize U.S. communities, and ominous flyovers by the black helicopters of the Mexican army. He explains that his frustration at the "inadequacy of our federal government to protect our border in preventing a potential terrorist and their weapons of mass destruction from entering our country" spurred him to organize the TBSC in 2005. Two years later he founded the Southwestern Border Sheriff 's Coalition.

As any Texas-border sheriff will tell you, "Operation Linebacker" is the tactical core of the state's model. If a terrorist, criminal alien, drug smuggler, or illegal border crosser makes it through the Border Patrol's frontline, the linebackers — sheriffs and their deputies — are there to make the tackle. In a state where football is a barely secular religion, the analogy captures hearts and minds. It also conveniently complements the federal government's own structure of local-federal cooperation in immigration and border enforcement, thereby facilitating the flow of DHS and DOJ funding. At the same time, though, most border sheriffs insist that their departments actually are ahead of the feds, a posture repeatedly underscored by Governor Perry, who calls the border sheriffs the state's "first line of defense."

Perry quickly allied himself with the TBSC. He gave it funds from the governor's Criminal Justice Division and launched an umbrella border-security program called Operation Border Star. Together, Operations Linebacker and Border Star were integrated into the state's homeland-security apparatus, which Perry and Homeland Security Office Director Steve McCraw began assembling in 2004 with DHS grants. McCraw is a tight-jawed, no-nonsense former FBI officer, who now heads Texas's Department of Public Safety (DPS) while continuing his duties at the Homeland Security Office. "Texas," he boasts, "has created a new paradigm for border security, and the Border Patrol is now adopting parts of it."

Checkpoints functioned as a dragnet for illegal immigrants and led to few arrests of criminals who could be regarded as a threat to community safety.

McCraw and Perry summarize that paradigm with an oft-repeated maxim: "There can be no homeland security without border security." As outlined in the state's Homeland Security Strategic Plan 2010-2015, the model is designed to "prevent terrorists and criminal enterprises from exploiting Texas' international borders, including land, air, and sea."

Border Star, a main vehicle for the Texas paradigm, is more than boots on the ground. Encouraged by DHS's call for locally networked information-gathering — and by infusions of DHS and DOJ dollars — the governor's office directed the creation of intelligence and "fusion" centers that bring together law-enforcement agencies. McCraw has put his stamp on Border Star through such high-tech information-gathering initiatives as the Texas Data Exchange Program and the TxMap crime-mapping project, as well as through the Border Security and Operations Center in Austin and the six Joint Intelligence and Operations Centers, four of which are housed in the headquarters of Border Patrol sectors and work together with the Border Patrol's Border Intelligence Centers. The most recent additions to Border Star's stable are the Unified Commands, which serve as a network for law-enforcement agencies in 45 counties of the borderland region.

In the can-do state, there's a can-do attitude about border security not found elsewhere. "Is it really possible to seal the 1200-mile Texas border?" I ask McCraw. It's a question I often ask, and most border-security practitioners and observers respond that the borderlands are too immense and too remote to control completely. But McCraw doesn't equivocate. "We can secure the border in Texas with enough resources," he answers without hesitation. Sheriff West is equally confident about his ability to secure Hudspeth County: "Just give me 75 more deputies, armed with AR-15s or AK-47s, enough trucks and ATVs, and we can shut the border down," he told me.

Tags: border security, drug wars, investigative journalism, investigative reporting, mexican border towns