Hi everybody Cheryl Ackison here. Welcome to a special extra edition of

full measure after hours. Today the full measure team is on the road near the US-Mexico border in Texas

as the border has become the number one most important issue in the minds of many voters in campaign 2024.

We are here in Texas close to the southern border.

I'm with photographer Brian Barr and producer Daniel Steinberger and I thought we would

Before this story airs on full measure talk a little bit about our times on the border. I think we've been here for this TV program, at least

10, 14 times, because sometimes more than once a year. And we've seen the border go through so many changes I kind of like to refer to it as a living border because it does respond a lot to the rules that are coming down from the top and who's dictating the priorities.

We saw some big changes a couple years ago.

Under President Trump, there really was a decline in the

crossings of the border particularly right before he left office when we took an

air ride with Border Patrol and they showed us fencing that was fast and furiously

going up in those final months after President Trump had won a favorable

Supreme Court decision about it and was trying to build as much wall or fencing as he could before the election

and before leaving office. Whoa. It's windy here and trucks are blown around

the highway.

And then I think we were among the first national journalists,

if not the first, to be visiting when it just so happened after President Biden was elected

and took office in those early days and he had ordered a halt to the wall construction,

even materials that had been purchased and were already in use, everything stopped.

We saw that there was this abandoned places along the border where there had been construction sites literally just a day or so before.

And so again, we were sort of ahead of seeing that trend where the border was about to become

what many would consider pretty wide open as it has

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