Border town violence: as illegal immigrants flood the United States, a wave of crimes committed by illegals is crashing into border towns and threatening to engulf our entire nation.

Octogenarian Theresa Murray was forced to move. Drug smugglers fired 30 rounds from an AK-47 at Richard Kozak's ranch house. Other ranchers live in virtual prisons. Their problem? Illegal immigrants and drug gangs raiding their ranches along the U.S.-Mexican border in Arizona.

Murray's story was particularly poignant when presidential contender Pat Buchanan told it to a wide audience. Buchanan, who visited her ranch during his presidential campaign in 2000, described Murray's travails this way:

   Her house [near Douglas, Arizona] is
   surrounded by chain-link fence on the
   top of which are masses of razor wire.
   Every door and window has bars on
   it. She sleeps with a gun on her bed
   table because she has been burglarized
   30 times. Her two pet guard dogs
   are dead, their stomachs torn open by
   shards of glass in packets of meat that
   were thrown over the fence.

In interviews with reporters, Murray pleaded for help: "It used to be fun to live here," she told one writer. "Now, it's hell. It's plain old hell."

"Something has to be done," she said on another occasion, "and soon."

Yes, something needs to be done, and soon, if not because we love our country and kin, then because we want to survive. As the number of illegal immigrants in the United States grows, so does the number of their crimes. To date, Americans have merely glimpsed an incomplete picture of what life will be like in 20 years if illegal immigration isn't stopped. But an ugly, fuller, and largely unseen painting has emerged on the border with Mexico, where small towns on the Mexican side are ruled by brutal smugglers who profit from pumping not only drugs but also illegal aliens into the United States. Their diabolical crimes and connections across the globe are so extensive they are nearly impossible to catalogue.

Reports from three of these towns, Nuevo Laredo, Tijuana, and Ciudad Juarez, as well those from American ranchers and the Border Patrol, and even more from random victims in the heartland, should be a clear warning to the Texan in the White House: America is under siege.

"City of Lead"

Perhaps the most notorious of the border towns is Nuevo Laredo, Mexico. Just a few weeks ago, 11 criminals escaped from the Cereso II prison. Three inmates were killed in the attempt, along with a woman they used as a human shield.

But that incident pales next to the city's seemingly unstoppable crime wave. Ineffective local and national authorities can't stop the war between two drug gangs trying to establish control of the city, a major locale for smuggling dope and illegal aliens into the United States. A 53-page, detailed report from the Library of Congress depicts a border out of control and drug gangs in open, bloody warfare.

Last summer, the United States issued a travel warning to tourists and closed its consulate in Nuevo Laredo on August 1 because the violence was uncontrolled. According to the Associated Press, desperados had "attacked two Nuevo Laredo homes with weapons including assault rifles, grenades and a rocket launcher." So brazen have the drug lords become that they openly murder police. One of them, Alejandro Dominguez, the police chief, was slaughtered on June 1, just seven hours after he took office. Drug lords traveling in SUVs riddled him with 50 bullets. Enrique Cardenas, another police officer, was also murdered.

According to Reuters, the American ambassador said 18 policemen in Nuevo Laredo had been killed that year, eight of them in July. As well, 70 people were killed between January and June, "many of them bound and shot in the head."

Many of the town's police are employed by drug lords. Town police attacked Mexican federal agents sent from the capital to replace them on June 11. The federales arrested 41 corrupt cops.

Quoting the Mexican paper Reforma, the VDare.com website reported that by June 12, someone had been murdered every 60 hours, a rate that increased to one victim every 28 hours, most of them connected to the drug wars. Appropriately, the site said, Nuevo Laredo is called "The City of Lead."

In August 2005, Fox News reported that 400 people, including dozens of Americans, had been kidnapped over the past year. One-hundred-seventy people were killed in 2004, ABC news reported.

As expected, the violence spilled over the border. In Laredo, Texas, directly across the border from Nuevo Laredo, insurance companies were quietly selling policies covering kidnapping and ransom, the Chicago Tribune reported.

"We're seeing home invasions, kidnappings, ransom demands," Webb County Sheriff Rick Flores told the Tribune. "It's getting to the point now where it's really affecting our side." The sheriff painted an even more distressing picture for ABC News: "It's a war zone. We've got level three body armor. They've got level four. We've got cell phones. They've got satellite cell phones that we can't tap into."

"We're being outgunned," Flores added. "And that's the reason why we're concerned on this side."

Mayor Elizabeth Flores desperately asked the governor for help.

Tijuana Tunnels and Rapist Cops

Things aren't much better in Tijuana, but for sheer ingenuity, the criminals merit an award. Illegal immigrants build tunnels under the border that surface in San Diego.

In January, authorities uncovered a 2,400-foot tunnel, containing 2 tons of marijuana, running from about 100-yards south of the border into a warehouse in San Diego. Apparently, the AP reported, the 5-foot-wide tunnel branched off from one found in 2003. It was "high enough for an adult to stand inside, had a cement floor, and lights mounted on one of the hard soil walls. It was equipped with a pulley system on the Mexican side."

This and other tunnels, likely a project of the Mexican government, are so numerous that the Immigration and Customs Enforcement bureau has created a "Tunnel Task Force." Federal authorities have discovered nearly two-dozen of the subterranean passageways, typically insulated and powered with electricity, since the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001.

More disturbingly, Tijuana police have abducted and raped American women, one of whom required 16 stitches in her rectum, news reports say. Tijuana's crime problem, Mexican officials complain with a straight face, is exacerbated by Mexican criminals deported from the United States. In 2004, the San Diego Union-Tribune reported, the United States deported 26 criminals per day to Mexico, and about 200 gang members from Los Angeles had set up shop in seven neighborhoods.

Alien Smugglers

Again, the crime along the border is so ferocious, coordinated, and wide-ranging it is inconceivable. Over the last decade or so, for instance, more than 400 women have been brutally murdered in Ciudad Juarez.

But more threatening to Americans long-term are the illegal aliens who commit crime here. Their crimes begin with crossing the border, and they often receive help from a menacing global network of smugglers. As many as 100 smuggling rings, the report from the Library of Congress says, are operating; they are planetary in scope and even work with the Russian mob and Chinese counterparts. The $300 million-a-year business is second only to drugs for money earned in illegal enterprises.

These mobs, the report says, smuggle aliens from anywhere in the world across the border and use high technology such as cellphones, document forgers, and digital equipment. One rents rooms in the United States to shelter the smuggled aliens.

Documents created by one organization alone were found in 55 American cities and 32 states; in 1998, federal authorities seized 2 million of its forged documents. Yet another organization moves illegals from the Middle East via Brazil and over the border from Mexico, an even graver concern, given the war on terror, that news reports bears out.

In March, the Denver Post reported "that Border Patrol agents over the past five months caught 46,058 non-Mexican migrants along the 2,000-mile U.S.-Mexico border, up 12 percent from the 40,953 caught during the same period last year." Apprehensions, the paper reported, have increased five-fold since 2002. Between 2002 and 2004, authorities nabbed 113 Pakistanis, 22 Iraqis, 15 Yemenis and 13 Saudis at the border with Mexico.

T.J. Bonner, president of the National Border Patrol Council, put the figure into perspective for a congressional subcommittee. Last year, his agency collared 155,000 illegal aliens who were not from Mexico.

But the story gets even worse. Quoting Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, the New York Times reported in February that illegals "have typically been released because of shortages of beds." Frighteningly, "18,207 illegal immigrants from countries other than Mexico, nearly 60 percent of the total apprehended, were released on their own recognizance in the first three months of this fiscal year."

How long before Americans witness "9/11: The Sequel"?

The Crime Coming Here

Unsurprisingly, American citizens and officials are under attack. Sheriff Flores says the drug cartels evict families from their homes on the Texas side of the Rio Grande so they can conduct their nefarious business. And consider the stories told on The Ranch Rescue website. One woman recounts the morning she found an illegal alien standing over her bed, about to grab her throat. She pulled a gun, yet he refused to leave and demanded that she cook a meal for him. He fled, but not before laughing that the Border Patrol would never catch him.

Roger Barnett, owner of the 22,000-acre Cross Rail spread, has apprehended 2,000 "criminal trespassers," the website reports. He always carries a weapon, and sees dozens of trespassers every day. Then there's Richard Kozak, who lives a few miles away from Douglas, Arizona. Two years ago, yet another truck hauling drugs was crossing his property, he told the Arizona Daily Star, so he put three rifle rounds in the hood. The bandits retaliated with a full-scale AK-47 assault on his house, and burned a trailer to the ground.

A more unusual case is that of Casey Nethercott. A judge gave his ranch to two illegal immigrants, represented in a lawsuit by the leftist Southern Poverty Law Center, because he supposedly pistol-whipped one of them.

Yet the drug and alien smugglers, and the aliens themselves, don't merely attack average Americans. They impudently target the authorities as well. Last July, for instance, two agents were shot near Nogales as they patrolled a smugglers' trail. Attacks on Border Patrol agents have increased dramatically. In fiscal 2005, the New York Times reported, the number of attacks doubled from 2004, from 374 to 778.

In fiscal 2005, the Arizona Republic reported, an agent was attacked every day in the Tucson and Yuma border sectors, which doubled the number of attacks in 2004. "From Oct. 1, 2004, to Sept. 30," the paper reported, "the Border Patrol registered 687 assaults on its agents, up from 349 during the same period along the Southwest and Canadian borders. All but one of the attacks occurred on the Southwest border, officials said."

The attacks against agents are mounting quickly. By May of fiscal 2005, MSNBC reported, the number of attacks, many of which are "rockings," the throwing of grapefruit-sized rocks at Border Patrol vehicles, had surpassed the total for fiscal 2004. The number of shootings alone more than doubled from 9 to 20. In 2005, agents recorded 45 shootings in the Tucson and Yuma sectors of the border, the paper reported, triple the figure in 2004.

Violence is increasing, the Arizona Republic reported, because of the highly competitive smuggling gangs, which charge as much as $2,000 a trip.

In the Heartland

As we could have expected, even away from the border states and major cities where they teem like termites in a colony, illegals have spattered the country with blood. And many of the crimes don't receive the media attention they richly deserve.

The recently executed "Railroad Killer," Angel Maturino Resendiz, was an illegal immigrant. Between 1986 and 1999, he butchered at least 15 people across six states, eight in Texas and others in Kentucky and Georgia. He murdered a pastor and his wife with a sledgehammer in 1999, pulverizing the woman's face before he raped her.

Last year in New York, an illegal Guatemalan handyman raped and murdered Mary Nagle, a 42-year-old wife and mother of two children, in the bedroom of her home in New City, New York. He bit the poor woman on her back, beat her to a pulp with a lamp, and slashed her with a razor, nearly amputating one of her fingers in the attack. Investigators found a piece of her ear lobe and clumps of hair on the floor. After he finished raping, sodomizing, and mutilating Mrs. Nagle, he used her cellphone to call her sisters and friends and describe his unspeakable deed in pornographic detail. Other unfathomable crimes committed by illegal aliens abound, and now, the drug gangs have arrived in small town America.

In 2003, at Woodstock, Virginia, in the heart of Virginia's Shenandoah Valley, police found the body of Brenda La Paz. Fellow members of the notorious MS-13, an El Salvadoran gang, killed her.

Maybe Theresa Murray and Casey Nethercott were lucky. Illegal aliens merely took their homes.

R. Cort Kirkwood is the author of the soon-to-be-published book Real Men: Ten Courageous Americans to Know and Admire (see the excerpt from the book on page 34).