Martha Mendoza
Columbus Dispatch
June 27, 2011
Perched 20 feet above a cabbage field in southern Texas in a telephone-booth-sized capsule, a National Guardsman passes a moonlit Sunday night peering through heat- detector lenses into an orange grove.
Deployment of 1,200 National Guard soldiers for one year: $110 million.
This same night, a train groans to a stop halfway across a Rio Grande bridge. In a nightly ritual, a Customs and Border Protection agent and a railroad police officer wave a flashlight under, over and in between loads of cars, electronics and produce before they roll through an X-ray machine searching for hidden people or drugs.
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One rail cargo X-ray screening machine: $1.75 million.
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