By numbers alone, the border region appears, as Department of Homeland Security Secretary and former Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano put it, is as "secure now as it has ever been."
More than 646 miles of the border are protected by fence, according to Customs and Border Protection.
More than 20,000 border patrol agents serve on the front lines -- an 80 percent increase over 2004 and the largest number in history.
The number of illegal immigrants apprehended along the border, which CBP uses to gauge the flow of migrants, is down nearly 55 percent from 2005. The agency captured 540,865 last year.
Meanwhile, Immigration and Customs Enforcement detained and deported a record 387,790 unauthorized immigrants across the U.S. in 2009, and is on pace to set a new record in 2010.
And the growing number of deportations comes as the overall size of the U.S. illegall immigrant population -- 62 percent of which hails from Mexico -- continues to decline. The U.S. unauthorized population in 2009 was 10.8 million, down from a peak of 11.8 million in 2007.
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