I'm genuinely surprised by your experience. Maybe I was simply lucky enough to only talk about border issues with more educated than average people. I guess it's because I was in college when I lived there, and mostly hung out with Latino college students.

We drove past a border patrol depot, and there were literally hundreds of vehicles. "Wow, the border patrol must have a huge number of staff to keep most of those active at once" > "No, those are just for the TV cameras - border patrol doesn't have anywhere near that number of staff"

Other oddities that stuck out for me in the area were that the border ingress to Mexico was literally just a turnstile, and that the distance markers about 20km short of the border on the US side were, indeed, in km instead of miles.

Yes, that's the point. For a country whose first words were "all men are created equal" we've built up a mindboggling apparatus for demonstrating that that's not true.

I agree on law and order, but again, isn't it a little crazy that in one state you have one set of laws and then once you cross an imaginary line you get an entirely new set of laws?