The U.S. government quickly dropped the policy. Caught between the contrary demands of globalization and the war on drugs, the agencies handling San Ysidro compromise. They keep the flow of traffic quick by requiring agents to get 90 to 120 cars through every hour, giving agents just 30 to 45 seconds to size up a vehicle and its driver and decide whether they should do a more thorough search. To help keep up this frantic pace, San Ysidro expanded its workforce from 48 inspectors 14 years ago to 370 now. They also have sniffer dogs, x-ray machines, a national database and other bits of technological wizardry to help.
Raw numbers suggest that the agents have great success in stopping smugglers.
I think our record is 27 drug loads in a 24-hour period. Most of those are marijuana, but we also get cocaine, heroin and precursors for methamphetamines. Last year at the California crossings alone, almost 10,000 pounds of cocaine were seized, along with 225 pounds of heroin and 1,100 pounds of methamphetamines. But these numbers mean little in isolation. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the war on drugs caused American seizures of all drugs to rocket up.