Rogelio V. Solis / AP file

Abortion foe Cal Zastrow, second from left, stands outside Jackson Women's Health Organization Inc., Mississippi's only abortion clinic, with other protesters on January 11.

Forty years after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down many state restrictions on abortion with Roe v. Wade, women who want to terminate a pregnancy face a growing number of roadblocks in many parts of the country.

Last year, 19 states enacted a total of 43 provisions limiting access to abortion, according to the Guttmacher Institute. That was half the number that went into effect the previous year, but still the second-highest number since 1985.

"The laws that have been passed, in the last couple of years especially, really make women walk through a gauntlet to get abortions, throughout the country," said Eric Ferrero, a spokesman for Planned Parenthood.

Eight states now require women seeking abortion to have ultrasounds, after Virginia lawmakers passed a measure in 2012. Three states also enacted laws that require abortion providers to have admitting privileges at a local hospital, which can deny them for a variety of reasons.

Louisiana banned abortions after 20 weeks. Utah tripled its mandatory waiting period to 72 hours. A Montana ballot initiative mandated parent notification for abortions on minors under age 16.

In at least four states -- North Dakota, South Dakota, Arkansas, Mississippi -- there is only one clinic.

"When you're the only provider in a state, you become a target," Tammi Kromenaker, director of the Red River Women's Clinic in Fargo, N.D., recently told MSNBC's Rachel Maddow.

The fate of Mississippi's sole clinic, in Jackson, is up in the air. As of mid-January, it had not been able to comply with a new law requiring providers have hospital admitting privileges. If the clinic is shut down, Mississippi would become the first state where getting an abortion is impossible.

The erosion is happening as the rate of abortions has leveled off at about 15 per 1,000 women after a steady decline, according to the Centers for Disease Control. At the same time, public support for abortion rights appears to be stable or growing.

A new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll found 54 percent of adults think abortion should be legal always or almost all of the time -- the biggest percentage since the question was first asked a decade ago. Seventy percent don't want Roe v. Wade to be overturned, the highest number since 1989.

But abortion opponents say there's another statistic worth noting: Most Americans don't want public funding of the procedure.

"A majority of Americans do not want their tax dollars being used to fund abortions," said Mallory Quigley, a spokeswoman for the Susan B. Anthony List, which is part of an effort to strip $60 million in women's-health funding from Planned Parenthood. 

U.S. law prohibits federal funding of most abortions, and only 17 states fund abortions for low-income women, most of them under court order. But abortion advocates argue that any government funding of Planned Parenthood for other health services -- from family planning to gynecology exams -- essentially frees up money it can use to provide abortions.

A scorecard put out by Quigley's group says officials in Arizona, Indiana, Kansas, New Hampshire, New Jersey, North Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Wisconsin have moved to cut funds for the women's health group. 

Some state efforts are tied up in court; in others, Planned Parenthood was able to obtain direct federal grants to fill the gap. In Texas, the organization lost a court battle to hold onto funding until a trial.

Ultimately, though, Planned Parenthood believes it will prevail against state efforts to slash its programs, either through legal action or public pressure on lawmakers.

"What we've seen over the last two years is the public doesn’t want these preventive health services to be defunded and the courts won’t allow it," Ferrero said.

Related: NBC/WSJ poll: Majority, for first time, want abortion to be legal

Nightly News

Students wear IDs embedded with electronic chips.

SAN ANTONIO, Texas -- Two San Antonio schools have turned to radio frequency identification (RFID) technology to help administrators count and track the whereabouts of students on campus.

Students at Anson Jones Middle School and John Jay High School are required to wear ID cards imbedded with electronic chips, similar to highway toll tags, which allow schools to more accurately record daily attendance.  Public school funding is often tied to the number of students attending class each day. The Northside Independent School District in San Antonio receives about $30 per day in state funding for each student reporting present.

The RFID tracking system can help schools count students who are in the school building, but may have missed the morning roll call.  On a recent morning at Anson Jones Middle School, where 1,200 attend, the traditional roll call counted 71 students absent.  But the RFID system indicated that eight of those 71 were actually in school that day.  A map indicated several students were in the band hall, where practice was running late, while others were near the office.  That’s eight times $30 or $240 the school would have lost that day in funding. 

Pascual Gonzalez, Northside’s communications director, estimates the entire district has been losing about $1.7 million a year because of underreported attendance. He says the RFID system, which costs $261,000, should pay for itself in the first year.

“The revenues that are generated by locating kids who are not in their chairs to answer ‘present,’ but are in the building  –  in the counselor’s office, in the cafeteria, in the hallway, in the gym  –  if we can show they were, in fact, in school, then we can count them present,” he said.

Principal Wendy Reyes says the system has the added benefit of allowing her to find a particular student instantly.  “Sometimes it’s difficult to locate a student in a sea of 1,200 others, so this helps locate them in an emergency,” she said.

The ID tags can only be read on campus, so students cannot be tracked outside the building.

Some parents and students fear the radio ID tags are just too much Big Brother.

Steve Hernandez, whose daughter is a sophomore, objects to the tags on Biblical grounds.  He compared the badges to the “mark of the beast” as described in the Book of Revelations.  “My daughter,” he says, “should not have to compromise (her) religion just because Northside Independent School District wants to get paid.”

The American Civil Liberties Union calls the RFID tags “dehumanizing.”

“What kind of lesson does it teach our children if they’re chipped like cattle and their every movement tracked?” asks Jay Stanley, senior policy analyst with the ACLU’s Washington, D.C. office.  “It doesn’t create the kind of independent, autonomous people that we want in our democratic society.”

Gonzalez, Northside’s spokesman, says school administrators have no intention of spying on students.

“There’s a misconception that somebody’s sitting in a room with a bank full of monitors looking at where 1,200 kids are here at Anson Middle School. That’s not true,” he said. “It’s not even feasible. We’re not staffed nor are we interested in knowing where all the kids are at a particular moment.”

What the RFID system does do, according to Gonzales, is provide an accurate, daily census of students, which helps the district make money. Based on early results, the district may consider expanding the RFID system to its other 109 schools, encompassing nearly 100,000 students.

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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Reporter's notebook by NBC News' Charles Hadlock

The last time I visited the Rio Grande was during a rafting trip 25 years ago.  My friends and I floated on 18-foot raft boats, camped at night along the riverbank and enjoyed the peaceful water that separates Texas and Mexico.

In a scene reminiscent of the movie "Fandango," we even buried a $100 bottle of Dom Perignon in the rocks above the riverbank and swore we’d be back someday to find it and celebrate.

So much has changed along the Rio Grande since then.  Today, you’re more likely to find bales of marijuana floating on the river than tourists in raft boats.  The river is now the thin red line, the watery border that separates Mexico’s drug war from U.S. citizens who live just north of the river.

Drug runners on the Mexico side routinely launch flat-bottomed boats loaded with marijuana or cocaine, hoping to make the 15-second ride across the water to the Texas side with no one noticing.  Or, they’ll put bales of drugs into the water one by one and let the river’s current carry them to the Texas side, where they are scooped up by smugglers, loaded into trucks and hauled to places like Dallas, St. Louis and Chicago.

If the smugglers happen to be spotted and are chased by police, their favorite escape route is back to the river, where they drive the vehicles, which are often stolen, right into the water.  But the smugglers don’t just swim to get away, they try to take as much of the drug haul back with them or else the cartels will punish them or their families.  Long stretches of the river are not a safe place to be anymore.

Police on the U.S. side can only stand on the riverbank and watch.  Texas does not have boats big enough or fast enough to stop and capture the drug runners.

Until now.

This summer, I rode along with a group of state troopers from the Texas Department of Public Safety on one of their brand new boats. It’s 34 feet long, bristling with six .30-calibur machine guns that can each fire 900 rounds a minute.  The boat is powered by three 300 horsepower engines and can reach speeds of 50 m.p.h.  Texas is buying six of them to patrol the Rio Grande.  Each of the boats, equipped with armor plating, night vision equipment and sophisticated communications gear, costs about $580,000 in state and federal funds. They look like gunboats in a war. 

The Texas DPS used to rely on Texas Parks and Wildlife boats, or Border Patrol. Now they own the largest, fastest boats on the river. Currently, crews are being trained and four of the new boats will be deployed permanently later this summer. By the end of the year, all six boats will be in use. 

Texas police hope it’s enough to keep the Mexican drug war from spreading north of the border.

The river has changed a lot in 25 years.  I think I’ll let that bottle of Dom Perignon stay where it is.

iPhones, Nintendos and Kindles — devices synonymous with "fun" — are taking a new role in the classroom, thanks to a new trend in education called Bring Your Own Technology – or BYOT.

BYOT programs — like the one at Georgia’s Coal Mountain Elementary School — encourage students to bring in their own personal mobile technology — including iPads, Kindle Fires, netbooks — even gaming devices — to use during class.

“It’s really a simple thing,” says Tim Clark, District Technology Specialist for Forsyth County School District. “Kids have technology in their pockets and [are] taking them to school, but trying to hide them from teachers and from their parents. What we’re trying to do is have the kids take them out of their pockets and use [them] for instruction.”

Technology can be incorporated into lessons in various ways — serving as a research tool, providing access to educational games and allowing students to create multimedia presentations. Clark says students who don’t have their own devices, or opt not to bring them, can use district-owned laptops and electronic resources.

He says the program encourages participation and interaction because “it’s not a solitary type of activity where every child is buried in their device … it increases collaboration. It increases communication with the teacher. The teacher sees immediate feedback from the student’s work and the students are able to overcome other difficulties.”

Tracey Abercrombie, a fifth grade teacher at Coal Mountain, has been impressed with the program in general and praises the difference it has made with her special education students. “I’ve got one [student] who has trouble getting [information],” Abercrombie says. “He can get the ideas formed but there’s a bit of difficulty getting them out verbally. There’s something about typing it, having it come up on that screen. All of a sudden the barrier is gone.”

Clark says incorporating students’ personal devices in the classroom not only enhances learning, but teaches responsibility. “All of this is putting the responsibility on the shoulders of the students and [we’re] also trying to teach them and guide them to use their devices more effectively…not only taking care of their device and being careful not to drop it, but also wanting to make sure they know where it is at all times so it’s not stolen. [Using] it appropriately so they don’t post inappropriate pictures, so they don’t text inappropriate message to each other.”

Those involved with the program say students aren’t the only ones with something to gain from BYOT. For example, Clark says teachers “can learn alongside their students instead of having to determine all of the ways that their students should learn … they get to ask questions and discover all these new uses of the devices themselves."

Abercrombie agrees and has seen her teaching style change since the program began.

“I thought my role was give them all the knowledge that I’ve got about something and use that textbook and my knowledge together," Abercrombie said. "Now I realize that’s not my job at all. My job is to facilitate them. My job is to point them in the right direction, give them the tools they need and — wow — they can do so much more.”

Before launching BYOT in Forsyth County Schools, teachers and administrators explained the program’s structure and ground rules to parents and students. At first, Kara Laurie, who has two children at Coal Mountain Elementary, was apprehensive about allowing her kids to bring their devices to school. She says her initial reaction was that it “was a horrible idea … I had the normal parent concerns, you know, are things going to get broken? Are they going to get lost or stolen? And what about those kids that don’t have technology that they could take to school?”

But as the program got underway, she saw “how much the kids were able to do with it in the classroom. I found that it was a phenomenal idea.”

“We had to sit down as a class, as a team, and really define our rules because [the students are] used to using it any way at home,” Abercrombie says. “They’re used to … putting everything on Facebook, so we had to have a little talk about … different ways to use these devices in school.”

Amy Anderson, another parent of two, was comforted by the district’s approach to the program. Her fourth grader uses a netbook in class, while her first grader has a Nintendo 3DS. “The administration "set some very clear ground rules at the beginning and we had to sign an agreement as parents and they had to sign an agreement as students that they would only stay on,” Anderson recalls. The students "have to be on the school network which has all of the filters. If they don’t abide by those, if they use them when they are not supposed to, if they use them incorrectly, then they lose that privilege of being able to bring it in.”

In 2010, seven schools in Forsyth County School District began BYOT programs. This year, all 35 of the district’s schools are participating. While it is a relatively new idea, BYOT already exists in schools across the country, in states like Texas, Minnesota and Ohio.

Clark says the district has received positive feedback, along with interest in the program.

“I’m receiving messages from other districts that would like to come and see the implementation of bring your own technology in their schools … we recently held a tour of BYOT in our district … we had over 100 visitors on that tour. They were not only other districts, but also vendors wanting to understand how it’s impacting [the students].”

As far as student reaction, Clark says “the students love it…[they] have their devices, they’re learning how to use them in a more responsible way, and they’re being critical thinkers and very creative with their devices in ways that they never would have used them on their own.”

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.