FRESNO, Calif. (KGPE) – Nogales is just one hour south of Tucson down Interstate 19 - a border town that some 20,000 people call home. The road leads you to a port of entry led by U.S. Customs and Border Protection's Port Director Michael Humphries.  Humphries and his team of nearly 500 U.S. Customs and Border Protection Officers are responsible for what moves in and out of the port. "We're bringing in millions and millions of food a day, produce, fish that 20,000 people aren't going to eat here a day. It's going across the U.S. Everything we do here in Nogales, Arizona means something to people on the West Coast, East Coast, the breadbasket of America," Humphries said. Commercial drivers are lined up for as far as the eye can see. Humphries says most products in Americans' homes that do not say made in the U.S. came through a southern port on one of their trucks. These vehicles are scanned through large X-ray machines. The screening process is similar to the TSA screening process one experiences at the airport.  Using the latest technology, border protection is looking for anything that does not look right. From October 2023 to May of this year, nearly 300,000 commercial vehicles were inspected at this port alone.  A similar process plays out on the other side of this campus where cars cross the border. Contact is made with the drivers, some vehicles are scanned, and k-9 officers are put to work to sniff out illegal drugs. Humphries says it is important for people to know the majority of the people, commercial and personal, coming through here are good. "Most folks come through are coming through for legitimate reasons. We have to find that small needle in a haystack, or a needle in a stack of needles," Humphries said. Humphries uses social media to spread the word about the vast amount of illegal drugs that have been confiscated. In early May of this year, nearly one million fentanyl pills and nearly five pounds of fentanyl powder were found hidden in doors and floor panels.  Another 24 pounds of fentanyl powder was found by a k-9 team hidden in a modified headlight. Over nine pounds of fentanyl powder was discovered hidden inside a modified tabletop, nearly 233,000 fentanyl pills were concealed throughout a car, and 700,000 fentanyl pills were found in food cans and cartons.    Nitazenes more powerful than fentanyl? What you need to know The smugglers are getting more creative in their efforts to get fentanyl across the border; it is a lucrative business for them and worth the risk. "At the border, we don't open the trunk and say, 'Wow! There's a bag of fentanyl sitting there.' It's deeply concealed," Humphries said. "Gas tanks, bumpers, drive shafts, airbags, airbag compartments, sophisticated departments in the floor where you have to take the vehicle in reverse and turn the air conditioner on the third setting and hit the left blinker for a trap door to pop open to reveal cocaine, meth, fentanyl pills. Really hard work being done here and it's deeply concealed." In mid-May, another 265,000 fentanyl pills were discovered shoved inside this spare tire. Another man was found with more than 22,000 fentanyl pills strapped to his legs.  The next day, nearly 50,000 fentanyl pills were found inside a car battery. The largest recent catch was on May 31. More than three million fentanyl pills were found by officers in these steel beams that made up the floor of a trailer.   And it is not just fentanyl making its way north; meth, cocaine, heroin, guns, and ammunition have also been seized at the border.   "We're doing everything we can with the resources we have. It's up to our congressional people to get more funding for equipment, personnel, or any other things they have," Humphries said. Pete Flores, acting deputy commissioner of customs and border protection, flew in from Washington D.C. to talk about the ongoing battle. He says getting fentanyl off the street means saving lives. “The reality is that one pill can kill," Flores said. "It’s not with the risk.” At least 70% of counterfeit street drugs across the United States are laced with fentanyl. Most of it crosses the border through ports in Arizona and California. The politics of immigration play differently along the US-Mexico border Mexican cartels control the drug pipeline; they still rely on China and India for their raw supply but are growing sophisticated enough to press their own fentanyl pills. "All counterfeit right? Counterfeit to resemble oxycodone pills. The M30's it's kinda what that manufacturing looks like from a counterfeit perspective. "So every one of these pills could potentially mean a death on the street by themselves. So as we talk about our enforcement and what we're doing we talk about personnel, we talk about technology, we talk about data collection, we talk about our ability to use multi-layer enforcement strategies to ensure that we don't have any one single point of failure," Flores said. However; Flores says no matter what is being taken off the streets when it comes to our children education is key.  "We have a lot of children out there who are potentially being exposed to pills and other items that they have no idea could contain fentanyl," Flores said "We can't curb that by seizing it at the border. That is one part of the solution, the other part of the solution is education. Parents being involved, understanding the threat, and educating their children on the potential threat that this is to them."