FLEEING DRUG VIOLENCE, MEXICANS POUR INTO U.S.

FORT HANCOCK, Tex. - The giant rusty fence of metal bars along the
border here, built in recent years to keep illegal immigrants from
crossing into the United States, has a new nickname among local
residents: Jurassic Park Gate, a nod to the barrier in a 1993 movie
that kept dangerous dinosaurs at bay in a theme park.

On the other side, a brutal war between drug gangs has forced dozens
of fearful families from the Mexican town of El Porvenir to come to
the border seeking political asylum, and scores of other Mexicans
have used special visas known as border-crossing cards to flee into
the United States. They say drug gangs have laid waste to their town,
burning down houses and killing people in the street.

Americans are taking in their Mexican relatives, and the local
schools have swelled with traumatized children, many of whom have
witnessed gangland violence, school officials say.

"It's very hard over there," said Vicente Burciaga, 23, who fled El
Porvenir a month ago with his wife, Mayra, and their infant son after
gang members burned down five homes in their neighborhood and killed
a neighbor. "They are killing people over there who have nothing to
do with drug trafficking," he said. "They kill you just for having
seen what they are doing."

The story of Fort Hancock, 57 miles southeast of El Paso on the Rio
Grande, is echoed along the Texas border with Mexico, from
Brownsville to El Paso. As the violence among drug gangs continues to
spiral out of control in Mexico, more Mexican citizens are seeking
refuge in the United States.

The influx of people fleeing the violence, some of whom were involved
in drug dealing in Mexico, has disrupted Fort Hancock's peaceful
rhythms. These days, there are more police cars prowling the dusty
streets, and fear runs high among residents.

The town has only a few paved streets, one restaurant near Interstate
10, a feed store, a small grocery, a gas station and a couple of
general stores. Irrigation canals carry water from the Rio Grande to
alfalfa and chili fields, set amid the cactus, sand and mesquite of
the Chihuahuan Desert.

About 2,000 people live here, in ramshackle trailer homes,
weather-battered recreational vehicles and well-kept brick houses.
The water tower boasts of the high school's six-man football team
having won the state championship five times between 1986 and 1991.

A few children among the refugees belong to families involved in the
drug trade, and rival gang members have threatened them, bringing the
specter of gangland killings to the high school, law enforcement and
school officials say.

"Some of the families who are fleeing from Mexico are doing it
because they were somehow participating in these acts," said Jose G.
Franco, the school superintendent, "and if you want to get at
somebody, you get at their children."

The Hudspeth County Sheriff's Department and the state police are
keeping a close eye on unknown vehicles parked near the schools. The
school district has for the first time hired a law enforcement
officer to patrol its three campuses and has installed security
cameras. Spectators are now barred from football and basketball practices.

"The kids are a little bit on edge, you know," said Constable Jose
Sierra, who patrols the schools. "When we see a different car, we
start to get phone calls."

Not everyone coming from El Porvenir is seeking asylum. Many Mexicans
in towns along the river have special border-crossing cards, which
let them cross for up to 30 days to do business and shop near the
border. But some have used the visas to relocate their families
temporarily to Fort Hancock and other small towns on the Texas side.

Those who have temporary tourist visas or who can obtain business
visas because they have enough money to start businesses in the
United States are also moving their families across the border.
(Cities like El Paso and San Antonio have had real estate booms and a
flourishing of small businesses and Mexican restaurants as a result.)

Other Mexicans who were once happy living in Mexico are taking
advantage of whatever means they have to obtain a visa and get out.
Some were born in a hospital on the United States side and are
American citizens, for instance, or have married citizens but have
never applied for residency.

In El Paso alone, the police estimate that at least 30,000 Mexicans
have moved across the border in the past two years because of the
violence in Juarez and the river towns to the southeast. So many
people have left El Porvenir and nearby Guadalupe Bravos that the two
resemble ghost towns, former residents say.

People without access to visas, however, have been seeking asylum,
even at the risk of being detained for months. In the early days of
the conflict, the asylum-seekers were mostly journalists, police
officers and officials who had been threatened by organized crime.
But now people with ordinary jobs are showing up at the border and
saying they fear for their lives.

"This is an emergency situation, a war," said Jorge Luis Aguirre, a
journalist who himself has asked for asylum after his life was
threatened in 2008 in Ciudad Juarez. "It's a question of life and
death for these people."

But few Mexicans are granted asylum. Over the last three federal
fiscal years, immigration judges heard 9,317 requests across the
country, and granted only 183.

Fort Hancock has had a surge in applications in March and April,
officials said. All told the number of people asking for asylum at
ports of entry along the border alone has climbed steadily, to 338
for the federal fiscal year ended last October, from 179 two years before.

In Fort Hancock, the influx grew after one of the warring drug gangs
placed a banner in El Porvenir's central square recently threatening
death for anyone left in the town on Easter. In response, the Mexican
authorities flooded the town with federal police officers, and the
promised mayhem was averted.

A 23-year-old woman with five children, who asked to be identified
only as Noemi because she feared reprisals, was one of the people who
crossed the two-lane bridge over the Rio Grande the Thursday before
Easter. The night before, drug cartel thugs had set fire to four
houses, and she and her husband were afraid there would a blood bath
that weekend, as the banner warned.

The United States customs officers sent the family to El Paso, where,
after a night in a jail, Noemi and her children were allowed to enter
the country pending an asylum hearing. Her husband, a farm worker,
has remained locked up while officials weigh his claim to be in
danger. Noemi is staying with her mother-in-law, who has legal
residency, in a squalid trailer home on one of Fort Hancock's unpaved streets.

Her oldest son, a wide-eyed boy of 8, clung to her sleeve and refused
to speak. Three girls, ages 4, 2 and 1, played in the desert dust at
her feet or climbed on a rusted pickup. She held an infant boy of 7 months.

"All the children, the only thing they know how to play is sicarios,"
she said, using the Spanish word for hired killers.

She and her children are sleeping well for the first time in months,
she said, and she does not know if her family will ever be able to
return to their small house on the other side of the river. They did
not even bring a change of clothes with them, she said.

Mr. Franco, the school superintendent, said the schools have absorbed
about 50 new students from Mexico since last year, a 10 percent
increase in enrollment. Many of the new students speak no English and
are dealing with the trauma of having had family members killed.

One Mexican boy in the high school, for instance, is so deeply
affected by what he has seen that he is being tutored apart from
other students, Mr. Franco said. Several members of the boy's family
- - his mother, his grandfather, an aunt and an uncle - were tortured
with ice picks in El Porvenir in March, the police said.

Reports of the atrocities on the other side of the border are passed
from neighbor to neighbor. Almost every family in Fort Hancock has
been touched in some way by the violence.

People who have fled El Porvenir say gruesome killings are occurring
daily, though newspaper reporters have been unable to enter the town
to confirm them. Last month, a man and his pregnant wife were
murdered outside a primary school in El Porvenir, according to
residents; the man was shot but the killers were said to have cut
open the woman and taken her baby, leaving her to die. In another
account, gunmen were said to have killed a beggar in a wheelchair.

It was stories like these that persuaded Porfirio Flores to seek
asylum for his estranged wife and their two children, who still live
in El Porvenir. On the day before Easter, Mr. Flores, a 60-year-old
oil worker with legal residency who lives in a cramped RV in Fort
Hancock, crossed over to Mexico and escorted his wife and children to
the border so they could ask for asylum. But the United States
customs officers turned them down without an explanation, he said.

"What can I do? I need a lawyer," he said, his eyebrows knit together
in worry. "They are killing children over there. They are killing
people who just try to make a living."

Other families have had more success bringing their loved ones over
the border. Imelda Montoya, a legal resident in the United States,
brought in her grandparents on the Monday after Easter after the taco
stand the family runs was burned to the ground by arsonists the night before.

The fire was the last straw, Ms. Montoya said. Two of her uncles -
one worked at a carwash and another cleaned streets for the city -
had been shot to death in the last year by gunmen.

At the border that Monday, the authorities let Ms. Montoya's
grandmother, Beatrice Diaz, 66, enter because she had a visa allowing
her to cross on errands. But her grandfather, Lorenzo Saldana, 77,
was detained pending a hearing, she said.

A day later, Mrs. Diaz sat primly in her granddaughter's house. She
seemed out of place and out of time in her peasant's skirt and
blouse. She had spent her entire life in El Porvenir, she said in a
bewildered tone, and had never imagined she would live in the United States.

But then she had never imagined the streets of her town would echo at
night with car engines roaring and gunfire. "It's very ugly now," she
said. "One cannot sleep in peace."