Zach Long / AP file

Khalid Ali-M Aldawsari is escorted to his initial court appearance at the Mahon Federal Building in Lubbock, Texas, Feb. 25, 2011.

A former Texas college student from Saudi Arabia was sentenced to life in prison on Tuesday for trying to make a bomb for use in a religious attack, possibly targeting former U.S. President George W. Bush.

Khalid Ali-M Aldawsari was sentenced in Amarillo, Texas, where jurors convicted him in June of attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction. Prosecutors say he had collected bomb-making material in his apartment and researched possible targets, including the Dallas home of Bush. A handwritten journal found in his apartment included notes that he believed it was time for "jihad," a Muslim term for holy war.

The 22-year-old Aldawsari apologized Tuesday for "these bad actions,"  but Judge Donald E. Walter said the evidence against him was overwhelming. Walter acknowledged he was conflicted due to Aldawsari's youth and signs that outside influences had led him astray.

"But the bottom line is that but by the grace of God there would be dead Americans," Walter said. "You would have done it. In every step, it was you all alone."

Aldawsari stood silently in shackles as the sentence was read. The formerly clean-shaven, close-cropped man now had a full beard and long hair, and appeared to have lost a lot of weight.

There is no parole in the federal system.

"Khalid Aldawsari came to this country intent on carrying out an attack," Lisa Monaco, assistant attorney general for national security, said in a statement. "Thanks to the hard work of agents, analysts, and prosecutors, his plot was thwarted before anyone was harmed."

Aldawsari came to the U.S. legally in 2008 to study chemical engineering. He was arrested in Lubbock, Texas, in February 2011, after federal agents searched his apartment and found explosive chemicals, wiring, a hazmat suit and clocks, along with videos showing how to make the chemical explosive TNP.

Investigators say Aldawsari's goal was to carry out jihad. His attorneys claimed he was a harmless failure who never came close to attacking anyone.

FBI bomb experts say the amounts of chemicals he had would have yielded almost 15 pounds of explosives — about the same amount used per bomb in the 2005 London subway attacks. He also tried to order phenol, a chemical that can be used to make explosives.

Court records show that his emails and journal contained the explosive's recipe.

Prosecutors said other targets he researched included nuclear power plants and the homes of three former soldiers who were stationed at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

Potential targets he listed in emails sent to himself included hydroelectric dams, nuclear power plants, reservoirs in Colorado and California, and Bush's home, which he referred to as the "Tyrant's House."

Aldawsari wrote in one journal entry, "And now, after mastering the English language, learning how to build explosives and continuous planning to target the infidel Americans, it is time for Jihad," authorities said.

Prosecutors offered to show the judge a video of the possible damage Aldawsari could have done had he succeeded in assembling explosives. Walter declined.

"I'm fully aware of what 15 pounds of plastic can do," he said.

The FBI said Aldawsari did Internet searches that suggested he was considering concealing explosives in infant dolls or targeting a nightclub with an explosive concealed in a backpack.

He bought other ingredients needed to make an explosive device as well as a soldering kit, glass beakers and flasks and emailed himself instructions for turning a cell phone into a remote detonator, authorities said.

He also wrote in his notebooks about the steps needed to stage a bombing, including renting cars using different driver's licenses, setting up a remote detonation and planning a safe exit, the FBI said.

During his trial, Aldawsari's attorneys acknowledged that their client had intent but argued that he never took the "substantial step" needed to convict him.

Defense attorney Dan Cogdell repeatedly berated Aldawsari as a "failure" and poor student who never came close to threatening anyone. Aldawsari did not testify at trial, but on Tuesday he told Walter he felt lonely and isolated from his family, friends and faith.

"I am sorry for these bad actions, but none of these bad actions did harm to the United States," Aldawsari told Walter.

Aldawsari wrote in his journal that he had been planning a terror attack in the U.S. for years, even before he came to the country on a scholarship," according to court documents. He bemoaned the plight of Muslims and said he was influenced by Osama bin Laden's speeches.

Authorities said Aldawsari purchased bottles of sulfuric and nitric acids — chemicals that can be combined with phenol to create TNP.

Investigators say they were tipped to his online purchases by chemical company Carolina Biological Supply and shipping company Con-way Freight on Feb. 1, 2011. The chemical company reported to the FBI a $435 suspicious purchase, while the shipping company notified Lubbock police and the FBI because it appeared the order wasn't intended for commercial use.

Court records show that Aldawsari had successfully ordered 30 liters of nitric acid and three gallons of concentrated sulfuric acid in December 2010.

At his trial, prosecutors played recordings of a frustrated Aldawsari complaining to the supply company when his order was held up. He had allegedly told the company he wanted the phenol for research to develop a cleaning solution.

Aldawsari had transferred from Texas Tech in early 2011 to nearby South Plains College, where he was studying business. A Saudi industrial company was paying his tuition and living expenses in the U.S.

The judge moved his trial to Amarillo, about 120  milesnorth of Lubbock.

The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.

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MISSION, Texas -- In the freezer of a small funeral home nearly 13 miles from the Texas-Mexico border, 22 bodies are stacked on plywood shelves, one on top of the other. 

The bodies wrapped in white sheets have names, families and official countries of origin -- Honduras, El Salvador, Mexico, sometimes China or Pakistan. The bodies in black shrouds are the remains of the nameless and unclaimed, waiting to be identified.

For the past few years, the family-owned Elizondo Mortuary and Cremation Service in Mission, Texas, has been taking in the remains of undocumented immigrants found dead in nearby counties after crossing the border from Mexico. This year, however, they had to build an extra freezer. It’s become difficult to keep up with the rising tide of dead coming to them from across the Rio Grande Valley.

Crossing the U.S.-Mexico border illegally has always been dangerous, but this year heat and drought have made the journey particularly deadly. According to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, this part of the border has seen a sharp rise in both rescues and deaths of people crossing the border illegally. So far in 2012, agents have rescued more than 310 people, and found nearly 150 dead in the Rio Grande Valley -- an increase of more than 200 percent over the last fiscal year. 

This comes as migration across the U.S.-Mexico border has dropped to historic lows, falling nearly 62 percent over the last five years, according to numbers recently released by CBP. But the proportion of deaths to apprehensions is rising -- suggesting that while fewer are crossing, more are dying.

Ground zero is over 70 miles north of the border, in Brooks County. Last year the remains of about 50 presumed undocumented immigrants were found in the county. This year, the tally has reached about 104, with nearly three months to go.

The rising number of unclaimed corpses marks a growing crisis for this cash-strapped county of fewer than 7,500 residents. Because Brooks has no coroner, it sends the bodies recovered on its vast cattle ranches to Elizondo in neighboring Hidalgo County. It costs, according to county officials, about $1,500 for each body to be processed. 

Hannah Rappleye for NBC News

Ranch land in Brooks County, Texas.

Both the county and Elizondo also make efforts to identify the remains. In most cases, chances are slim. The mortuary uses physical descriptions and accounts of the clothing worn by missing immigrants to attempt to match bodies, but often there are few clues to work with. The elements and animals often destroy corpses and scatter bones across the desert. While DNA testing could help, neither Brooks County nor Elizondo can afford to order the tests for every unidentified body. 

Many of the migrants who are found dead in this part of South Texas end up buried in paupers’ graves, remembered only by their gender, case number and the name of the ranch where they died.

Adaptation
In September, Marta Iraheta traveled from Houston to Falfurrias, Texas, the seat of Brooks County. She came seeking the remains of her nephew and a friend who disappeared in July as they crossed illegally into the United States.  

Twenty-year-old Elmer Esau Barahona left his hometown of San Vicente, El Salvador, on June 10th. On June 27^th -- his is daughter’s second birthday -- he called his mother to say he had arrived in the border city of McAllen, Texas.

He told her he and his friend were staying in a stash house, waiting for the smugglers to take them on the next leg of the journey. From the stories Iraheta has pieced together from survivors, her nephew and his friend left McAllen five days later, on the evening of July 2.

They began the long walk with a group of migrants through desolate private ranch land, skirting the Border Patrol checkpoint in Falfurrias. After a day of walking, his friend, a 17-year-old Salvadoran named Elmer Amilcar Sevallos Martinez, sat down and did not get up again. The rest of the group continued on. 

Just minutes from the highway where the coyotes -- as the smugglers are known -- were to pick them up, Barahona hurt his knee.

“The coyote told them they had to leave him there,” said Iraheta, his aunt, who is a naturalized U.S. citizen. “They said he was bad, really bad. He was faint. He remained there, sprawled on the ground.”

The Rio Grande Valley is one of the most trafficked illegal immigration routes used by people known in Border Patrol parlance as “OTM,” or “other than Mexican.” About 60 percent of those apprehended in this area come from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, as well as countries as distant as China, Afghanistan and Russia.

“When you look at South Texas on a map and draw a straight line to Central and South America, this is your furthest southern point to cross into the U.S.,” said Enrique Mendiola, assistant chief Border Patrol agent for the Rio Grande Valley.

But the recent increase in traffic through this corridor is attributable to more than geography.

Since the mid-1990s, U.S. Customs and Border Protection has clamped down hard on border crossings. The agency has more than doubled in size since 2004, and now has 28,000 agents, nearly half of them in Texas. Fences, sensors, drones, checkpoints and disciplined, coordinated enforcement have choked off routes through urban areas that were once easily crossed.

Smugglers have adapted by moving into sparsely populated areas like the Sonoran desert in Arizona, and the west Rio Grande Valley.

“We’re starting to see these crossings more in these particular areas than we have in the past,” said Mendiola.

With triple-digit temperatures and wide deserts, these uncompromising landscapes are harder to patrol than populous areas on the border’s edge. They are also more dangerous for those crossing into the country.

“There’s no doubt that the increased vigilance has pushed people into these more hostile areas,” said Raquel Rubio-Goldsmith, a professor of Mexican American Studies and coordinator of Arizona State University’s Binational Migration Institute. “Traditionally, people crossed in urban areas. If you cross into an urban area, you can find a way of making it. If you have to cross through these rural areas, you’re taking a big chance.” 

Despite the rising danger and cost, people keep coming. Advocates and families say that with few legal avenues into the U.S., migrants feel this is the only way to make a better life.

“Had they been able to have a good chance of getting a visa, they never would have tried to cross the desert,” she said.

Lucrative cargo
U.S. Customs and Border Protection says that Gulf Cartel out of Mexico controls most of the lucrative smuggling routes through this area of the Rio Grande Valley, and uses them to ferry both humans and drugs into the country.

The Border Patrol has made dismantling these networks a priority. Despite daily apprehensions of individual migrants, Deputy Chief Patrol Agent Woody Lee said the agency’s larger aim is “not focusing on what it is that’s coming across, but how do we take out the infrastructure.”

“How do we take out the people who are moving the product, or the people, on this side of the border? ” he said. “Those people are within our control.”

This means the agency, which has jurisdiction up to 100 miles from the border, does much of its work far from the Mexico line, following the smugglers as they forge new tactics and routes.

Hannah Rappleye for NBC News

Texas Border Volunteer Ed Aldredge, left, and rancher Mike Vickers. The Texas Border Volunteers, a citizen group based in Brooks County, patrols ranch land for undocumented immigrants.

The coyotes hustle people across the border into stash houses in towns and cities like McAllen and Mission. From there, they pile them into vans -- the seats torn out to fit more bodies -- and drop them off along the road south of the Falfurrias border checkpoint in Brooks County, the northernmost patrol point in this area.

Those who pay more walk less, according to the Border Patrol and immigrants who have made the crossing. The going rate varies. A thousand, or a few thousand, just to cross the border. For those from Central America, it may cost more than $5,000 or $7,000. For those from China or Pakistan, some say the cost is as high as $50,000. 

The terrain the immigrants must cross is brutal. The walk can be dozens of miles through the sandy terrain with nothing -- no water, mountains or hills by which to navigate. During the summer, daytime temperatures reached nearly 110 degrees. The brush fools the unaccustomed. One minute they are tired. The next, their bodies begin to give out.

People in Falfurrias know what happens on the journey, often better than the migrants themselves. 

They know how some groups have coyotes as guides across the desert. Others are left on their own, with a cell phone to call the coyote when they arrive. Some use it to call 911 if they are dying. 

Ranchers and Border Patrol agents have seen evidence of brutality. They will tell you that a pair of women’s panties hung in a tree is a sign that a woman was raped there. The coyotes leave them to mark the conquest.

They will tell you how the coyotes tell their charges that the walk around the Falfurrias checkpoint is short, that they should aim for those lights.

“That’s Houston,” some coyotes say to give the migrants hope the trip is nearly done. But that distant glare is merely light over a ranch gate, or the streetlights illuminating Highway 281. Houston is nearly 300 miles away.

‘The depravity of man’
The photos spread across the desk of Brooks County rancher Mike Vickers show corpses in various states of decomposition. From the pile, the sun-bleached skulls of women peer out from beneath the rotting flesh of young men. Others show immigrants who were found near death by the Border Patrol or Vickers himself -- women huddling underneath trees and men leaning against trucks, dazed by thirst and heat exhaustion.

All the images were taken on Vickers’ ranch.

“These bodies are everywhere,” Vickers said. “The bones are everywhere.”

Vickers, who is also a local veterinarian, spoke of the toll the stream of illegal migration has taken on Brooks County ranchers and their families.

Desperate for water, migrants break the pumps that provide water to the cattle. They tear down fences. Men have scared Vickers’ wife, Linda, as she rode her horse. And finding the remains, which sometimes end up right in their backyard, wears on him.

“We see the depravity of man out here,” he added. “It’s altered our way of life.”

Vickers is the chair of a group called the Texas Border Volunteers. At least once a month, members gather in Brooks County to search private ranch lands for migrants and their remains.

When they find either, they contact the Border Patrol.

They carry water, food, cameras and GPS devices on their patrols.

“We do everything we can to try to rescue them and get them out of a bad situation,” Vickers said. “The heat can fool you. It doesn’t have to get that hot to really make someone walking through that sand get dehydrated real quick and suffer heat stroke.”

They also bring weapons in case they encounter coyotes, gang members or people carrying expensive cargo, such as drugs.

On a recent patrol, Vickers and two volunteers wearing military camouflage rolled across deep sand in a four-wheeler, searching for signs of life or death.

Black buzzards drifted above one of the few hills on the land. To ranchers and cowboys, the buzzards have become a sign not of dying cattle, but of a dying human. “Something’s dead up there,” Vickers said.

Hannah Rappleye for NBC News

Texas Border Volunteers Ed Aldredge, left, and Mark Medina patrol a ranch in Brooks County.

On top of the hill, Mark Medina, 45, and Ed Aldredge, 45, both military veterans, picked their way through trees and cacti, searching for a corpse. They found nothing.

“It’s like finding a needle in a haystack,” Medina said.

But evidence of crossers was everywhere. Half-empty water jugs, crushed energy drink cans, socks, and jackets lay discarded under trees or covered in sand.

The Border Patrol has stepped up efforts to rescue immigrants who find themselves lost, dehydrated or sick. They’ve placed rescue beacons on the ranches, where an immigrant can push a button to alert Border Patrol agents. They’ve posted signs with GPS coordinates across the landscape so immigrants with cell phones can call 911 and give their location.

They’ve also produced public service announcements, including some in Spanish, imploring people not to cross.

The message is this: “Don’t put your life in the hands of these ruthless people,” said Border Patrol agent Mendiola. “To them, you’re just a commodity. You’re not a human being. You’re cargo.”

‘Are you going to come or go?’
After 17-year-old Sevallos Martinez fell behind, Barahona continued with the rest of the group to trudge through the private ranch land flanking Highway 281.

In the morning, Barahona stepped into a hole and injured his right leg. In pain, he could barely walk. A friend he made along the journey took off a brown checked shirt and tied it around Barahona’s knee, over his black jeans, then helped him limp along.

They were almost to the road when Barahona gave out. His friend helped him over a fence. They were minutes from the pickup point, near enough to hear the highway. There were just two fences left. The coyote said the truck was waiting. People ran for the road.

“He was yelling. Yelling for people to help him,” Iraheta said. “The coyote told him to stop yelling because people would hear him.”

The friend who helped Barahona told Iraheta her nephew’s lips went white and he fell. The coyote yelled at the friend. “Are you going to come or go?” He ran to the vehicle.

On July 5th, the coyote called Barahona’s mother in El Salvador and told her he left Elmer in the desert.

“And that’s where the tragedy began,” said Iraheta. “I looked for him alive in all of the jails and nothing, so I’ve started to look for him among the dead.”

‘On our own’
Brooks County Chief Deputy Urbino Martinez has a stack of white binders filled with emails, letters, and reports of the missing and the dead. His office, he said, is “overwhelmed” by the deaths.

With a yearly budget of about $585,000 and only one investigator and five deputies on patrol, the county has neither the staff nor the resources to process the remains. Since they’re not technically a “border county,” Martinez said, it’s been impossible to get federal grants to help.

“We’re pretty much on our own out here,” he said.

Brooks County has no medical examiner, so it can’t perform autopsies or extract samples. Instead, deputies send remains first to a funeral home in Falfurrias, and then to Elizondo in Mission, where they can extract samples for DNA testing. 

Hannah Rappleye for NBC News

A photo of a young woman with her child in the missing persons file at the Brooks County Sheriff's Office.

But Brooks County’s responsibility doesn’t end there. The sheriff’s office keeps pages of records. Deputies call consulates. They try to match remains to open missing persons cases.

“At times people wonder why we put all this effort into it,” Martinez said. “Because our administration feels like they’re humans. I know they’re trespassing, I know they shouldn’t be in the United States. But they’re on U.S. soil. We have to protect them and we have to make sure that we do what we have to do on our end, regardless of what we have to go through.”

Martinez said the Sheriff’s Office is deluged by phone calls, emails and in-person visits from desperate families and friends of the missing. But it’s difficult to find and identify someone who has died in the desert, he said, even when the families offer clues.

“It’s a sad thing sometimes because you just can’t help them and they don’t understand that,” he said. “They’ll call you and say, ‘He’s by this tree, they’re telling me he’s by this tree.’ If the animals get to them, they’re not going to be by that tree. The limbs are going to be everywhere. That’s just the way it is.”

Like the files at Vickers’ ranch, the binders deputies have assembled contain photographs both of the living and the dead. In some, the victims are smiling with their children, or clutching their husbands or wives. In others, their bodies are sprawled on the sand, staring up at the sky. Paging through the photographs, Martinez wondered aloud what went through their minds as they lay dying in the desert.

“It’s not worth it,” he said. “They feel like the dream that they hear about, as soon as they get onto U.S. soil, they’re closer to the dream.”

“But a lot of the time when they’re being walked across,” he added, “that dream is empty.”

Searching for answers
In mid-September, Iraheta came to Brooks County carrying photographs of the two Elmers.

She believed she had identified a man in one of the sheriff’s files as her nephew, but wanted to know for sure. She carried a snapshot of the picture in the sheriff’s file, showing a man prone face down in the brush, a brown-checked shirt tied around his knee. But her discovery had come too late -- the body had already been buried. Now, answers would cost money.

Iraheta can recite the figures by heart: $900 to exhume the body; $250 to cut the bone for DNA testing. $3,000 for the DNA test; $100 a day to store the body for nearly four weeks until the results come in; $3,000 to $4,800 to send the body home.

“That means that’s more than $12,000,” said Iraheta. “I can’t afford that. I’m poor.”

But she is trying to raise the money, for her sister crying in El Salvador, and for Barahona’s daughter.

“I want his daughter to have a place to carry a flower to,” she said. “I want her to have a place to say, ‘Here is where my father is buried.’”

Hannah Rappleye for NBC News

An unidentified immigrant's grave at the Sacred Heart Cemetery in Falfurrias, Texas. When the remains of a migrant cannot be identified they are buried with a marker indicating where their body was found.

On this trip, she came with a group assembled by Angeles Del Desierto, or Desert Angels, which has for 15 years conducted rescue mission and searched for the dead along the southern border.

They went to the sheriff’s office, which had nothing more for Iraheta. They spoke to the local funeral home, which could offer little. They went on a mission into the desert, searching for people, alive or dead.

Finally, with little hope, they drove to Elizondo Mortuary in Mission. Iraheta carried her photographs of the Elmers and the little she knew about where they were last seen, what they wore, and the things they carried.

The owner of Elizondo looked at Iraheta’s pictures, and went to her files. She stopped at one file of a man found with no face, no hair, no discernable features -- just bones. But the people who found the remains had recovered personal effects: a white rosary and a pair of pants with two pictures tucked in the pockets -- the same pictures Iraheta had been given by the family of 17-year-old Elmer Amilcar Sevallos Martinez, the boy left in the desert a few hours before her nephew.

“With those two things, we knew that it was him,” said Iraheta.

The discovery came just in time for Sevallos Martinez’s family. His remains were to have been buried the following day.

His family had held out hope the teen would be found alive. They only knew that he had been left in the desert. In some stories, he fell. In others, he was exhausted, and stopped to rest under a tree. But maybe he had recovered and begun to walk again.

Iraheta called a number she had for the boy’s father, a man from El Salvador living in Maryland.

“I think he was in shock,” said Iraheta. “He asked how we knew it was him. And we told him by the photos that were in his pants pocket.”

Sevallos Martinez’s remains are being sent to Maryland by the Salvadoran consulate, so his father can examine the photos and rosary. In some cases, the consulate will help with the cost of sending a body home. Even so, the family, like Iraheta, may want a DNA test to know for sure -- if they can afford it.

Money is the reason the two Elmers risked their lives to make the illegal crossing -- money and a search for a better life. Now it is a seemingly insurmountable obstacle to their families’ efforts to bring them home.

“You have nothing to give to your children, to help your mother, so you have to take the decision to come here to find a….to try to find a job to send money to the family,” said Iratea. “They paid the high price for the American dream.”

“We can’t turn back time,” she added. “But I hope that everyone sees that it’s not worth it, that voyage. To give up your life to that desert.”

NBC News Correspondent Mark Potter contributed to this report.

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By Mark Potter, NBC News correspondent

TUCSON -- On an isolated ranch 10 miles from the Mexican border in southern Arizona, Tangye Beckham worries about what the night will bring.  That's usually when her family's 100-acre ranch begins to crawl with drug and immigrant traffickers from Mexico heading north into the United States. 

"They're belligerent, they carry weapons," she said. "It's a nightly problem with them being on the property. They've already tried to break in." 

Recently, as she was closing one of her gates in the pre-dawn hours, Beckham found herself surrounded by a group of illegal immigrants and feared being attacked.  By running to her car, she said, she was able to get away, badly shaken. 

All three ranchers scoffed at claims from Washington that crime along the U.S. side of the Mexican border has dropped dramatically and that the area is safer than ever. "They don't know what they're talking about," McCuistion replied.

Beckham, a flight paramedic and firefighter, urged Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano to pay a visit to her ranch. 

"I'll show her it's not a secure border," Beckham said.  "I'll have her talk to my kids.  And they can tell her how afraid they are, that they don't wanna go out after dark."

Southwest border among ‘safest areas in the United States,’ Napolitano says

Texas Department of Public Safety

Officers surround a truck loaded with marijuana in South Texas during a drug bust on the U.S.-Mexico border.

Along the Mexican border, an easy way to get into a fierce debate is to ask a simple question:  "How much violence and crime linked to Mexican drug traffickers has spilled over into the United States?" 

As it turns out, the answer varies wildly and depends on who you talk to, especially in a presidential election year when border security and immigration are sensitive topics. The argument is further complicated by the failure of federal and state law enforcement officials to even agree over how to define spillover violence and other related crimes.

"The danger in not having an accurate accounting of spillover violence is that we fail to see that our cities, American cities, are permeated by Mexican drug cartels who are heavily armed, who are criminals involved in multiple different enterprises," said Howard Campbell, an anthropology professor at the University of Texas at El Paso who has studied the drug cartels extensively.

The Obama administration, joined by some local officials and sheriffs, claim that because of a sizeable increase in the federal law enforcement presence along the border, crime there has dropped dramatically and the border is safer than it's ever been. 

“Everything that we are seeing along our nation’s Southwest border point to a much safer border today than it has been over the last 20 years,” said David Aguilar, acting commissioner for U.S. Customs and Border Protection. “It is not a war zone; it is not a border completely out of control.”

Federal officials cite the FBI Uniform Crime Report, which includes data on murder, rape, robbery and aggravated assault, when claiming that border-area crime has actually dropped by more than in other cities far from the border.

"This [Obama] administration has deployed unprecedented resources to the Southwest border," said Napolitano during a news conference last month in McAllen, Texas.  "The violent crime in these areas has gone down significantly.  These are among the safest areas in the United States."

The Homeland Security Secretary said the horrific violence from the Mexican drug war, in which it's estimated that as many as 50,000 people have been killed, is a serious security concern for U.S. authorities.  But she insisted that very little of it has spilled over into the United States. 

"That kind of violence we have not seen," Napolitano said.  "While we may not be able to prevent every murder from occurring, I think we can be ahead of, and will be ahead of, any kind of systemic violence." 

Larry W. Smith / EPA, file

A U.S. Border Patrol agent inspects bundles of marijuana recovered after searching the brush along the Rio Grand river, near McAllen, Texas on Feb. 8, 2012. Smugglers brought the drugs across the river in rafts. The nearly two thousand mile United States-Mexico border is the most frequently crossed international border in the world.

During a speech last year in El Paso, President Obama noted the U.S. Border Patrol now has a record 22,000 agents along the Southwest border. "We have strengthened border security beyond what many believed was possible," he told a cheering crowd.  "We have more boots on the ground on the Southwest border than at any time in our history."

Obama even joked during his speech about Republican critics who call for even tougher security measures along the border.  "Maybe they'll need a moat, maybe they want alligators in the moat.  They'll never be satisfied.  And I understand that, that's politics."

Opposing view: border ‘more dangerous than it’s ever been’

In Cochise County, Ariz., which shares an 84-mile-long border with Mexico, Sheriff Larry Dever was among many border officials who did not laugh at President Obama's joke about moats and alligators.  "I can't tell you how angry it made not only me, but my constituents, to make a mockery of one of the most serious situations we face in our entire lifetime," he said. "I'd say the border is more dangerous than it's ever been."

Dever has lost four friends -- three police officers and a rancher -- to cartel violence, and insists Mexican traffickers crossing into his county are well-armed and much more aggressive now than they were just a few years ago. "We're getting overrun from the south, because the federal government isn't doing its job," he said.

The long-time sheriff argued that the FBI Uniform Crime Report statistics cited by the White House fail to include many of the crimes committed by traffickers, including kidnapping, extortion, public corruption, drug and human smuggling, and trespassing. "I invite them to come down here, come live with us and go camp out at some rancher's house and see what happens at night," he said.   When asked if anyone from Washington had ever agreed to do that, Dever said,   "Heck no, they come for photo ops.”.

Cherry-picking border statistics?

At the Austin headquarters for the Texas Department of Public Safety, director Steve McCraw, a former FBI supervisor and counter-terrorism specialist, studied a chart on the wall filled with red and green dots indicating where drug and money seizures have been made around the state.

"The border's not secure, clearly.  I think by any indication it's not secure," he said.  "We've identified 25 murders that are cartel-related, we've identified 124 kidnappings and extortions that are cartel-related.  We know of 61 instances in which cartel members shot at police officers while they're on the river trying to interdict trucks."

McCraw agreed with Dever that federal officials often use incomplete statistics to defend their arguments about border safety.  "You can't cherry pick your statistics," he said.  "We've got a duty to be very accurate about what's going on now and how we see the current threat."

According to Congressional testimony in 2009 and 2011, the current federal interagency definition of Mexican spillover violence is:  "…deliberate, planned attacks by the cartels on U.S. assets, including civilian, military, or law enforcement officials or physical institutions such as government buildings, consulates or businesses. This definition does not include trafficker on trafficker violence, whether perpetrated in Mexico or the U.S."

Many state officials say trafficker on trafficker violence should not be excluded, because cartel shootouts seen in Texas, Arizona and other states can put civilians in danger and in fear for their lives.  "That's ludicrous," said McCraw.  "Any time there's a murder, an assassination, or the death squads of ‘sicarios’ come over here and try to do a takeover like that, there's always consequences in that neighborhood." 

McCraw, Dever and other regional officials argue that all crimes linked to Mexican traffickers should be gathered to assess the true scope of border threats so that law enforcement needs can more accurately be determined. 

With presidential elections scheduled this year in both the United States and Mexico, the successes and failures of border security efforts have also come under intense scrutiny by the political campaigns.

"I think political assessments of the border have been very slanted, whether it be Democratic or Republican -- Democrats claiming everything is peaceful and quiet, no problem, Republicans arguing that the situation on the border is out of control with spillover violence," said Campbell of the University of Texas at El Paso.

Campbell said even though there have been relatively few homicides in the United States committed by Mexican traffickers, there is definitely a lot of other crime.

"There has been a spillover of crime and drug trafficking culture and a greater amount of violent encounters between Mexican drug traffickers and U.S. Border Patrol agents and other agents of the U.S. government," he said.  "I think claiming the border is safer than ever is absurd."

As for the failure between federal and state officials to agree on how to define the problem, Campbell says it is important to understand the issues in a "scientific, clear way," and to make effective policies based on that.  He also suggested that collecting crime statistics is not the only way to gather this important information.

"I think it would be better to talk to people who actually live on that border that experience this on a day to day basis," he said. 

U.S. Border Patrol agents and Mexican drug traffickers fought a gun battle across the Rio Grande in south Texas, authorities said Friday, the latest of a spate of cross-border shootings.

The Border Patrol said gunfire erupted Wednesday after agents confronted smugglers loading bundles of marijuana into two vehicles on the banks of the Rio Grande west of Roma, Texas, a town about 250 miles south of San Antonio.

The agents opened fire after smugglers fleeing in a vehicle attempted to run them over, the Border Patrol said. Armed traffickers on the Mexican side of the river then shot at the agents, who returned fire into Mexico, the Border Patrol said.

"Our agents had a posed threat," Rosalinda Huey, a spokeswoman with the Border Patrol's Rio Grande sector told Reuters. "They're trained to deal with that situation," she added.

No agents were injured by the gunfire and it is unclear whether any smugglers in Mexico were struck by bullets, she said.

Agents subsequently recovered nearly two tons of marijuana, with a value of more than $3 million. No arrests were made.

The shooting came during one of three raids in the area Wednesday, said NBC Station KZTV.

One investigation in nearby Rio Grande City resulted in the seizure of 2,800 pounds of marijuana worth about $2.2 million when agents followed footprints to the entrance of an underground storage bunker, KZTV said. In another incident Wednesday, agents checking a vehicle driving without headlights ended at a home near Rio Grande City where agents saw several people flee. Three suspects were nabbed and agents found 1,400 pounds, or $1.1 million worth, of marijuana in an underground bunker, KZTV said.

Huey said traffickers opening fire on agents was "just another tactic" as they sought to move drugs across the U.S. border, where additional agents, equipment and infrastructure have contributed to tightening security in recent years.

"Obviously, they've gotten more desperate," she said. "They're going to use more tactics to avoid apprehension or seizure of their narcotics."

The same stretch of the Rio Grande -- Rio Bravo in Mexico -- recorded one other shooting incident involving Border Patrol agents since October 2011, Huey said. No injuries were reported.

Last year agents engaged in gunfire with suspected drug runners near the south Texas town of Abram, according to news reports. In a separate incident, a West Texas road crew in Hudspeth County, east of El Paso, also came under fire from Mexico. And in September 2010, U.S. citizen David Hartley was fatally shot while riding a personal watercraft on Falcon Lake, which straddles the Texas-Mexico border.

This article includes reporting by Reuters.

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The Texas Highway Patrol, which works alongside the U.S. Border Patrol to stop illegal drug smuggling from Mexico, is getting new means to chase down the black hats: six 34-foot gunboats, outfitted with automatic weapons and bulletproof shielding, according to a report by KHOU television in Houston.

The vessels, which are similar to U.S. Navy gunboats used in rivers during the Vietnam War and are capable of operating in as little as 2 feet of water, are scheduled to launch in March.

Officials quoted in the story said that drug cartels increasingly were using the river to smuggle drugs into the United States, or fleeing safely back to Mexico if detected.

"It sends a message," Jose Rodriguez, Texas DPS Regional Commander told the station. "Don't mess with Texas."

The boats -- costing about $3.5 million -- were funded with a combination of Texas legislative money and federal grants, according to DPS spokesman Tom Vinger. They will operate on the Rio Grande and lakes that feed it as well as on the Intercoastal Waterway, a narrow channel between the coast of Texas and South Padre Island.

He said they were in part a response to the "splashdown" strategy that drug traffickers have used in recent years to avoid arrest and confiscation of the drugs. When pursued, some smugglers drive into the river where they are met by boats that take the people and cargo back to the Mexico side of the border river.

"Just like any patrol unit, the (gunboat) patrols give higher visibility to deter and, if necessary, to interdict," said Vinger.

The nonprofit Texas Border Coalition said resources to stop drug smuggling and other illicit activities -- including smuggling of illegal immigrants -- would be more effectively utilized by investing in legal border crossings.

The border checkpoints are "woefully lacking" in technology and personnel, said Julie Hillrichs, spokeswoman for the organization, which studies a range of issues that affect border communities. The result is not only continued smuggling, but hours-long wait times for legitimate commerce, she said.

In a recent report, the coalition said an estimated 90 percent of the cocaine, marijuana, heroin, methamphetamine and MDMA smuggled across the border comes through checkpoints alongside legal commerce.

"We're not suggesting that these vessels would not be needed," said Hillrichs. "We’re just saying that we have identified what we believe to be a weaker link. Drug cartels don’t send drugs through the river; they smuggle it through the border crossings," she said.

The federal government has spent more than $90 billion over the last decade to secure the U.S.-Mexico border — a significant portion of which has funded use of the U.S. military, including the National Guard, to bolster U.S. Border Patrol and Customs and Border Protection forces, the coalition said.

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Retired British businessman Christopher Tappin speaks to waiting media next to his wife Elaine before presenting himself at Heathrow police station in London on Feb. 24, 2012 to be extradited to the U.S. to face a charge of conspiring to sell missile parts to Iran. The 65 year-old denies attempting to sell batteries for surface-to-air missiles which were to be shipped from the U.S. to Tehran via the Netherlands.

A retired British businessman is to appear in a federal court on Tuesday in El Paso after being extradited last week on charges that he tried to sell missile batteries to Iran in 2006.

Christopher Tappin turned himself in Friday after fighting extradition from the United Kingdom for two years. Two other men were sentenced in 2007 to 20 and 24 months in federal prison for their roles in the scheme.

UK suspect in Iran missile plot to be sent to US

The 65-year-old Tappin was denied a final appeal of his extradition last month and delivered to El Paso by federal marshals. His deportation sparked a debate in the U.K. over whether British and American citizens are treated equally under the two countries' extradition treaty.

Tappin faces up to 35 years in jail if convicted in the United States. He denies wrongdoing, saying he was the victim of a sting operation.

Dan Cogdell, Tappin's attorney in Texas, said he plans to aggressively push to have Tappin granted bail.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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