Senator Eliot Shapleigh - El Paso, Texas

EL PASO -- The day after Gov. Rick Perry announced plans to deploy Texas Ranger teams to the border, local law enforcement officials said they were skeptical about whether the initiative would do any good.

A handful of recent organized-crime cases suggest to some that Perry's Ranger plan comes as cartel violence increasingly spills over into the United States, but law enforcement officials insist that border crime hasn't really escalated on the U.S. side.

"There's always going to be incidents, but to say we're starting to see an increase of these types of cases, we have not," said El Paso police spokes man Javier Sambrano. "Unfortunately, we have always had crimes related to that, but they are very rare."

On Thursday, Perry announced the deployment of "Ranger recon" teams, which, along with National Guard soldiers, are being sent to what the governor calls high-crime areas along the border that do not have adequate federal resources.

"This is the latest in a series of aggressive actions we've taken to fill the gap left by the federal government's ongoing failure to adequately secure our international border," the governor said in a statement.

Officials in Perry's office, citing security, would not disclose the number of Guard members or Rangers, their locations or exactly when they'd be deployed. But Perry in his announcement Thursday did mention the increased violence in Juárez and the 1,500 homicides there so far this year.

Perry said that nearly 73 percent of 1,254-mile Texas-Mexico border is privately owned and that border landowners often face extortion and threats from violent criminal organizations.

Katherine Cesinger, a spokeswoman for Perry, said the evidence should be clear.

"I think there are a number of incidents that indicate there is spillover on this side of the border," she said.

On Tuesday, police in Mexico found the body of Sergio Saucedo, who had been kidnapped from his home in Horizon City and taken to Juárez. His hands had been chopped off and placed on his chest.

El Paso authorities believe Saucedo, who might have been regarded as a thief, had connections to one of the Mexican cartels.

Last weekend, the University of Texas at Brownsville and Texas Southmost College closed early after bullets from shooting on the Mexican side of the Rio Grande struck the wall of a recreation center and a car.

No one was injured, but the campus remained closed during the weekend.

And in May, a hit squad shot and killed a reputed Juárez drug cartel member, Jose Daniel Gonzalez-Galeana,at his East El Paso home in retaliation for the arrest of Pedro Sanchez, an alleged high-ranking cartel leader caught by the Mexican army last year, detectives said.

Since January, the governor has been urging the federal government -- first Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and then President Barack Obama -- to authorize and pay for the deployment of 1,000 National Guard soldiers at the border.

Cesinger said the federal government hasn't responded one way or another, so Perry used his own authority to use the Rangers and National Guard.

At this point, instead of the federal government paying to cost of deploying the Guard soldiers, the state will use appropriations from more than $110 million committed to border security during the past legislative session.

"We have not received official confirmation from Washington that we will or will not receive these resources," Cesinger said. "We remain hopeful, but we're not waiting around necessarily."