LA JOYA — Self-described conservative Jesus Cantu sees his family home, buffered by a wooden fence and high barbed wire, as ground zero of the Texas border battles. But unlike fellow conservative Gov. Rick Perry, he doesn't believe that it's a battle the National Guard can fight.

Cantu's doubts echo those of county judges, sheriffs and other officials along the Rio Grande who say the crisis with thousands of unaccompanied immigrant children has not brought with it a spike in crime, as Perry asserted when he announced the guard deployment last week.

The federal government is so overwhelmed by the complex task of processing, transporting and housing nearly 60,000 children, Perry argues, that it cannot deal with border crime. But Perry acknowledged last week that the guardsmen can't make arrests.

The narrative of Texas rushing to provide security in the presence of a federal vacuum doesn't fit with other, more likely explanations for recent decreases in apprehensions of people who entered illegally, according to criminologists, former immigration and Border Patrol officials, and data analysis.

Cantu's home sits directly across from dense brush separating this town of about 4,000 people from the winding Rio Grande just a quarter of a mile away.

Last month, the body of a 15-year-old Guatemalan immigrant was found just two blocks away from the home Cantu's family has fortified to dull the glare of Border Patrol flashlights and to muffle the nightly noise of pursuits. The boy was shirtless, having likely suffered heatstroke, but was still wearing a rosary.

A few nights ago, family members of Cantu, who carries a firearm for protection, discovered two young Honduran women hiding beneath their truck. They gave them water and tacos, and they alerted a Department of Public Safety trooper parked across the street.

The family of gun enthusiasts walks around fully armed at home. But Cantu, a 27-year-old paramedic, doesn't understand Perry's decision to send 1,000 National Guard troops to help with the border crisis.

“It's pointless,” he said. “What are they doing to do? It's not going to make any difference.”

Perry credits a 36 percent drop in apprehensions of people entering illegally with his decision last month to send in a surge of DPS officers at a cost of $5.2 million a month. The National Guard, to be mobilized in the next month, will cost $12 million a month.

But top officials in Hidalgo County, which has dealt with the lion's share of the immigrant influx, say crime isn't up. Meanwhile, federal statistics show that the Border Patrol presence in the Rio Grande Valley is larger than it has ever been and that apprehensions are nowhere near the highs of the 1990s.

Instead, experts say seasonal immigration patterns and widespread publicity over the issue, rather than added law enforcement, are most likely the major cause of drops in illegal entries over the past two months.

“This is a good media event, but it's not practical, it's not going to work,” Hidalgo County Judge Ramon Garcia said. “It's creating the perception that we're in a violent crime zone of some kind, and we're not.”

Interim Sheriff Eddie Guerra said the $12 million could be better used to shore up local law enforcement agencies that know the terrain and the communities and have developed informants.

“To give 1,000 National Guard troops who have absolutely no authority to enforce any law, not even immigration law — they're just extra eyes and ears — to give them a weapon just to play scarecrow, I just don't agree with that,” Guerra said.

McAllen Mayor Jim Darling said his city hasn't seen any increase in crime since the influx of children began and noted that, historically, the border metroplex is much safer than Dallas, Houston and even Austin.

Driving along a stretch of the 316 miles on the border he oversees, from the mouth of the Rio Grande to Zapata County, Rio Grande Chief Border Patrol Agent Kevin W. Oaks pointed out the difficult terrain as the river widens, narrows and curves, making it tough at many points to know if one is in Mexico or Texas.

“There's no physical way you can ever secure the entire Southwest border. It will just never happen,” he said.

Still, in a recent tour with reporters, it was almost impossible to go 10 minutes, even in the desolate brush, without seeing agents from the Border Patrol, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service or DPS, or at least a sophisticated camera with vision stretching at least 30 feet.

Oaks said his sector has 3,234 agents and 191 support staff. In the past 18 months, the sector has added 500 new agents, and it will add roughly 300 more through the end of this year. At the same time, the sector relies on an array of sophisticated surveillance equipment, including remote video surveillance equipment that was reassigned here over the past year from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The Border Patrol has deferred to the Homeland Security Department to comment on the National Guard deployment, saying it's not aware of the logistics. But when asked whether the DPS surge contributed to the drop in apprehensions, Oaks said, “It's going to be part of it, but it's not going to be a major part, as there's really not one single factor. But DPS has certainly played a part in our success.”

From a historical perspective, Border Patrol agents in the Valley aren't nearly as busy apprehending people as in the past, though the agency has quadrupled its ranks throughout the past 16 years. When migration peaked in 1997, the agency apprehended nearly 244,000 people, 58 percent more than in 2013. It did so with less than a quarter of the number of agents, 768, than it has today.

Still, Oaks noted, “the border environment has changed.” In the 1990s, it was mostly Mexicans crossing the border, and they could be voluntarily and easily deported back to their homeland. Today, agents are dealing with an influx of people who are not from contiguous countries to the United States and require a more complex legal procedure.

“I don't think there's a crisis of border enforcement going on here, although that's the way it's being portrayed,” said Doris Meissner, director of the U.S. immigration policy program at the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank. “The emergency here is an emergency of judges and hearings.”

More than 375,370 immigration cases are pending across the country, and it's an average 578-day wait to hear a case, according to the Justice Department. In Texas, the average backlog is 439 days. That means many immigrants who are caught illegally and given a notice to appear in court have more than a year before they have to do so.

Meissner, a former commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service in the 1990s, said maintaining patrols has been a problem for Valley agents because of the time and resources it takes to process, transport and care for thousands of children.

Still, the phenomenon has been relatively short-lived.

Apprehensions of unaccompanied children in the Valley dropped from 1,985 in the last week of June to 672 in mid-July, according to Customs and Border Protection officials. That mirrors the overall seasonal drop in apprehensions from Texas to California in 2014.

State officials have said the National Guard will act as a “force multiplier,” providing tactical support from the ground and the air to supplement DPS' Operation Strong Safety. That surge, which involves land, air and maritime resources to deter border crimes, is modeled on a previous surge last fall that DPS Director Steven McCraw said led to dramatic decreases in drug seizures, compared with the three weeks before the operation.

But if declining seizures are a sign of success, then Border Patrol agents in the Valley did well on their own for years. They seized more than 1 million pounds of marijuana in the 2011 fiscal year, and the total declined 22 percent to about 800,000 pounds in 2013. Cocaine seizures were down 43 percent by weight for the same period. By that measure, the Border Patrol's steady staffing increases in the Valley are working.

Victor Manjarrez Jr., a former chief patrol agent of the Border Patrol's Tucson sector and currently associate director of the National Center for Border Security and Immigration in El Paso, said he was dismayed to hear that the National Guard would provide tactical support.

He would rather see the guard perform duties that would free up Border Patrol agents to spend more time on patrols, such as transporting detainees and supervising them at detention areas — tasks that are much more complex and time-consuming with unaccompanied children.

During Operation Jump Start in 2006, President George W. Bush sent 6,000 guardsmen to the border to beef up operations while the Border Patrol worked to recruit more agents. Guardsmen helped with mechanical work, transportation and analysis, freeing up agents in the field.

“That was probably the best utilization of the guard I've seen in my 20-plus years in Border Patrol,” Manjarrez said.

Back in La Joya, Cantu represents the complicated portrait of life on the border. A legalized Mexican immigrant himself — he came here as an infant — most of his fiancee's family is employed by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, and soon he will be, too. He's shot a Mexican immigrant in the back when he caught him stealing wood from his ranch in Palmview. He said he would do so again.

“Eighty percent of the ones that come over are good, but there's the 20 percent that give us a bad name,” he said.