“We see a lot of things, but we keep our mouths shut about it,” the farmer whose identity was concealed says in one video clip. “We just don’t want to be in anybody’s hit list.” The Web site behind these videos — ProtectYourTexasBorder.com — is run by neither a Minuteman-style border patrol group nor a tech-savvy rancher. It is a product of Texas state government, created and operated by the Department of Agriculture, as a way to publicize the assertions by farmers and others that violence from Mexico’s drug war has spilled over the border. But it has a more political mission as well: to publicly challenge the Obama administration, which has called the belief that the border is overrun by violence from Mexican drug cartels “a widespread misperception.” Begun in March, ProtectYourTexasBorder.com steers a Texas agency typically concerned with detecting plant diseases and regulating grain-storage warehouses into the more controversial realm of domestic security. It paints a frightening portrait of life along the 1,254-mile border that Texas shares with Mexico. One man talks about quitting the farming business out of fear for his family’s safety. There are police reports and news accounts of a ranch foreman getting injured by shattered glass after drug-smuggling suspects shot at his truck, vehicles being pursued by law enforcement crashing through farm fences and workers clearing trees being told to stop what they were doing or else. “I would have 80-year-old ranchers meet with me, tears in their eyes, and say, ‘My family settled this land, I’ve been here my entire life and I’m scared to go on my own property,’ ” said the state’s agriculture commissioner, Todd Staples, who came up with the idea for the Web site. “That’s how I got involved, because landowners came to me.” Mr. Staples’s focus on the border echoes the views of one of his predecessors, Gov. Rick Perry, who served as agriculture commissioner in the 1990s and who struck some of the same themes in his campaign for president. One month after starting the Web site, Mr. Staples announced that he was running for the Republican nomination for lieutenant governor in 2014. The Web site has raised his public profile and helped draw attention to farmers’ safety concerns. But its larger impact remains unclear. In its first roughly nine months, from last March through November, the Web site had only about 7,500 visitors a month. Though it seeks to put pressure on the federal government to protect farmers better, it has not drawn a federal response, and some federal officials say they have not even seen it. The Web site has also been accused of exaggerating the level of violence and fueling anti-immigrant hostility. Last year on the site’s message board, someone suggested land mines and tiger traps as border-security methods. Another commenter wrote: “Killem all!!!! They are destroying or great country.” Agriculture officials deleted those posts, and a message-board disclaimer states that the views expressed did not reflect those of the department or Mr. Staples. No one who appears on the Web site’s video clips makes threatening remarks. But several portray the rural areas along the border as nothing less than a war zone. In one video, Arthur Barrera, a staff lieutenant with the Texas Rangers, says the Mexican cartels and their scouts come across the border daily. “We are in a war,” he says. “We are in a war, and I’m not going to sugarcoat it by any means.” Though the Web site provides few crime statistics to make its case, relying instead on people telling their stories in their own words, ProtectYourTexasBorder.com underscores the widespread fear in rural border counties. The threat of cartel-related crime, whether the smuggling of drugs or illegal immigrants, has caused people to arm themselves to an extraordinary degree and take other precautions. In the Rio Grande Valley in South Texas, at a ranch outside Sullivan City about 11 miles from the border, Craig J. Teplicek carries a .380-caliber pistol in the back pocket of his jeans. In his truck he keeps a .357-caliber handgun, a .45-caliber pistol and a .222-caliber rifle. Last year, he chased and tackled a coyote — someone who guides and smuggles people across the border — after the man drove through a fence and abandoned a truck carrying illegal immigrants in one of his fields. Mr. Teplicek ran after the man, carrying his .357.
