BROOKS COUNTY - Farm Road 755 is a dusty ranch road connecting Highway 281 with Starr County. From your car window, it looks like quiet brush country.
But people who live and work here will tell you otherwise.
"We thought we were moving to a really peaceful place and to live life in the country and it's just not like that," says Elizabeth Burns. "There's a lot of really bad things that go on here."
"You have to be careful," warns Ruben Caballero, a gate guard for a ranch along FM 755.
Ranch owners hire guards like him to prevent unwanted traffic and to keep smugglers from damaging their gates.
Caballero explains armed smugglers can be dangerous and recalls one guard who found out the hard way.
"He was assaulted, beaten up, and robbed," says Caballero, who now carries a gun.
A Border Patrol checkpoint is just a few miles down the road. But all a smuggler has to do to avoid the checkpoint is smash through a gate and drive down the backroads.
Ranchers have lost so much money they're welding fence posts to the gate, so when a truck rams it, the grill gets stuck.
One ranch had so much illegal activity it set up surveillance cameras. The video caught dozens of illegal immigrants at a time hiking through the brush at all hours of the day and night.
They walked right through the ranch where Elizabeth Burns and her 10-year-old son Finn Burns live.
The 10-year-old tells us he's scared at times.
"Sometimes there are drug dealers on the ranch and they have machine guns," he says, "Sometimes you can just hear machine gun fire."
An electric fence surrounds their home. It doesn't keep everyone out.
Finn Burns points to the spot where he saw a man, just a few feet from his bedroom window.
"He was laying right here," he says. "Border Patrol came and said that if we hadn't seen him, he probably would have gotten up and robbed the house."
Elizabeth Burns used a home video camera to record one man who showed up at their home asking for help.
He told her he'd paid $3,000 and was headed to New York, but he would rather return to his country.
On the video tape, the man says, "I've suffered enough. It's been two months… They had me in Mexico, trapped in a house. They wouldn't let me leave until I paid."
He adds, "There's lots of people there and they're suffering. They don't feed you, only once a day… The smuggler dropped me off here, and I was hungry…. It's very dangerous out here. People die out here. I'm all out of water. I have very little."
Shattered dreams are as common on FM 755 as the oil rigs that dot the landscape.
"When they get out there on that road, they done gave up," says Robert Maxwell, another gate guard.
He tells us at night, from a distance, the oil rig lights can look like cities.
"Somebody points. 'See them lights?' 'Yeah.' 'That's Houston. Take off.' What would you do? You'd take off to the lights, and you get there… a big fence and nothing. And this guy's got all your money. He's driving down the highway," explains Maxwell.
Border Patrol agents chase smugglers constantly on FM 755.
Tire tracks show where a smuggler ran his truck off the road. Everyone inside jumped out and made a run for it across a field. But they left their food and water behind.
With temperatures climbing to 100 degrees, they'll need water.
"You're fighting for your life," explains Maxwell.
It's also easy for people to get lost in the thick, especially when a smuggler just drops them off and tells them to start walking.
"It's very sad that they die or they are found very sick," says Caballero.
Maxwell tells us, "I feel sorry for them… They're trying to get a better life."
"Some make it, some don't," he says.
In the last ten months, Border Patrol agents found 20 bodies in brush along FM 755.
Nobody knows how many others are never found.
