This certainly has been the summer of the border crisis. There have been news reports telling stories of children flooding across the Rio Grande and armed militia groups mounting operations to secure the border. Throughout there have been allegations that we have an open border.
But the people who try to cross into the United States have a different view.
The Texas Observer, along with the Guardian newspaper, are jointly publishing a four-part series looking at the deadly southern border. Melissa del Bosque is a reporter for the Texas Observer.
"We (Texas) had 271 deaths in 2012, and almost half those deaths occurred in Brooks County, which is not even on the border, it's actually 70 miles from the border, which is a little unusual. And the reason so many people are dying in this rural county is there is a federal immigration checkpoint there. So what a lot of people do when they are traveling north is they hire smugglers to take them north. What they do is they drop them off 2-3 days hike before the checkpoint. So they have to hike up through this county, which is very rugged terrain with a lot of private ranches, it's very sandy, there's a lot of rattlesnakes and thornbush and mesquite... South Texas is very hot, very humid, and they (groups of migrants) will try and circumvent the checkpoint, which is just south of a little town called Falfurrias in Brooks County."
