We came through the IH10 checkpoint Tuesday Noon... Long line, 20+, of cars with some delays (and one car pulled over for a search). The light & scanner set up seems likely to be directed at some sort of scan of truck trailers. When our turn came, we would have been quickly through (only a single question, "US citizens?") but our pair of jack Russell's took great offense to the drug dog's walk around. he was well-behaved, but mine were anxious to meet and greet (loudly, aggressively wanting to play as Jack Russell's do), so we were delayed for a brief encounter session and some conversation with the handler (who admitted that he suspected that a good smuggler ought to carry along Jack Russells with their capacity to divert his dog from the principal mission). He wouldn't tell me if his was the dog that had caught Willie Nelson's bus and the MJ aboard.
The Sierra Blanca check point has been there for years, stuck out in the boonies (some of the harshest landscape in the US with no opportunity or roads upon which to circumvent it), where IH10 is no longer within easy walking distance from the Rio Grande/Bravo, a bottleneck for coyotes hauling illegals and the mules who move drogas. For those of us who spend or have spent much time in "Far West Texas" it's a familiar impedance/annoyance/occasional convenience. I worry more about the 110 miles from Fort Stockton to Ozona, only a couple of old "filling stations" a few miles from Fort Stockton, then nearly 100 miles, no gas, nothing but a few gas/oil facilities and ranch gates, no noticeable habitations, a bad place to run out of gas or breakdown, broken only by the tumbled canyons of the Pecos Crossing, crumbling old Fort Lancaster, and the few inhabitants of Sheffield, a few miles off the Interstate.
After the bright lights of El Paso, Sierra Blanca's about the only respite until you get to Fort Stockton, "Motel City", parking lots filled with the heavy duty company pickups of the oil & gas professionals. The site of a mesa top filled with big wind generators looming above dry canyons lined with pump jacks, Christmas trees (gas well heads) and rusting oil collection tanks makes an interesting illustration of the energy business. Nobody minds a few windmills and oil/gas wells in that desolate back yard. There's few to hear the sound of windmills windmilling (and not many birds to go 'splat" against their blades) or pump jacks pumping, only the occasional dead deer or critter, the victims of rash attempts to cross the Interstate.