In response to a listing of questions, an Anduril spokesperson replied that after a tower is delivered, it’s operated by CBP, and directed questions on particular incidents to the company. The response famous that an incident occurring close by doesn’t imply the tower missed a detection and mentioned precise surveillance ranges range relying on terrain, bodily obstructions, and the boundaries CBP units for the place the tower ought to look (CBP is ready to set digital boundaries on towers’ views for privateness and different causes). The Anduril spokesperson additionally alleged inaccuracies in our reporting, given these boundaries and obstructions, however didn’t reply to follow-up questions on what was inaccurate.
Essentially the most urgent query in any demise close to the digital wall is whether or not authorities knew somebody was there and failed to achieve them or weren’t conscious anybody was crossing in any respect. Both is a system failure. And the deaths we discovered seize solely the failures that left a hint—we don’t understand how many individuals cross by undetected, or what number of our bodies stay undiscovered.
Interviews with greater than 45 individuals—together with present and former White Home advisors and presidential appointees, Border Patrol brokers, medical experts, sheriffs, humanitarian volunteers, and workers of tech firms—confirmed that each sorts of failures are occurring: The know-how is failing to detect, and brokers are failing to reply. Each present the bounds of throwing know-how at a fancy downside.
The findings reveal beforehand unreported points with the digital wall, even because it continues to get pleasure from broad political help and a surge in federal spending. Border safety hardliners have lengthy seen it as one other instrument for stopping smugglers transferring medicine or individuals, whereas others tout it as a less expensive different to a bodily wall. In 2023, the federal government estimated that its plans for utilizing the towers, which now quantity 803, would price $6.2 billion over their lifespan. With the historic ranges of funding it was awarded in 2025, CBP plans to spend $1 billion for 1,497 extra towers by 2034.
However our reporting exhibits that CBP has achieved little to evaluate how its towers are working or how many individuals have died the place they hold watch.
Officers who oversaw border safety throughout the final 4 presidential administrations informed us they believed deaths close to the so-called digital wall had been both exceedingly uncommon or nonexistent. However our reporting exhibits that’s not the case. None might level to any comparable evaluation the federal government had ever carried out by itself. Former brokers and officers additionally informed us that when somebody’s physique is discovered, CBP doesn’t formally examine whether or not surveillance ought to have detected them or, in the event that they had been detected, why brokers didn’t attain them earlier than they died.
In response to almost 30 questions on our findings, which lined a number of generations of know-how, Hilton Beckham, CBP’s assistant commissioner for public affairs, mentioned, “Autonomous surveillance towers use synthetic intelligence to detect and classify individuals, automobiles, and animals and alert Border Patrol brokers to exercise in monitored areas … ASTs complement bodily obstacles and different border safety infrastructure by enhancing detection and situational consciousness between ports of entry. CBP evaluates the know-how based mostly on its impression on detection, response coordination, agent security, and mission outcomes.”
“I’m certain that the cameras and different surveillance property do ship … helpful intelligence and improve operational efficacy in some locations, beneath some situations, in sure circumstances,” says Geoff Boyce, an assistant professor of geography at College School Dublin who has studied surveillance know-how used on the US southern border. “I’m additionally completely optimistic—as a result of this has been the monitor file—it’s not delivering the extent of operational help, info, or efficacy that both the businesses delivering these infrastructures or the Border Patrol and Division of Homeland Safety declare.”
We additionally reached out to a number of lawmakers from each events with a abstract of our findings. In response, Delia Ramirez, a Democrat representing Illinois’s third district who sits on the Home Homeland Safety Committee, mentioned, “AI-powered surveillance applied sciences do not make us safer. But DHS continues to spend hundreds of thousands of taxpayer {dollars} on these ineffective, negligent applied sciences, with no dedication to oversight or transparency … It’s clear we should terminate CBP’s built-in surveillance tower program and dismantle DHS.”
Constructing the digital wall
Since its earliest efforts to police the border with Mexico, the US authorities has confronted the identical primary problem: How do you successfully safe almost 2,000 miles of distant and rugged terrain? It has more and more turned to know-how for solutions.
Gerardo Galvan joined Border Patrol in 1995, as the federal government was enterprise an unprecedented growth of border enforcement. In 1993, President Clinton’s first 12 months in workplace, the company mobilized enormous numbers of brokers to protect the nation’s city borders, beginning in El Paso, Texas. That pushed extra crossings to rural, unpopulated areas—which shortly proved to be way more lethal due to the rugged desert terrain, excessive temperatures, shortage of water and the lengthy, oblique routes usually utilized by smugglers.
Stopping these distant crossings was a brand new legislation enforcement problem for the company, particularly given the restricted know-how obtainable on the time. “We had radios,” says Galvan, who would go on to be the pinnacle of operations for the El Paso sector—not the cell telephones or GPS techniques brokers have as we speak. They relied on underground sensors left over from the Vietnam Warfare to alert them to motion.
The most important know-how rollout of Galvan’s early profession began round 1998. That was when Border Patrol started putting in its first video cameras that brokers might remotely pan and zoom. They had been mounted on metallic buildings much like cell-phone towers, 60 to 80 toes tall, or on buildings in city areas.
“For the primary time, any individual sitting in a room someplace was capable of surveil giant swaths of space with out being depending on getting an agent on the market with binoculars,” says Matthew Hudak, a former deputy chief of Border Patrol who was working as a frontline agent on the time. “That was a really important sport changer, and for probably the most half, it was an enormous, enormous advance.”
This early iteration of the digital wall was an enormous deal: In its first eight years, 200 towers had been put in alongside the southern border at a price of greater than $429 million. However the system’s flaws had been apparent to anybody who used it.
“There may very well be … 30 screens on a wall,” says Mark Borkowski, who managed CBP contracting, together with the surveillance tower program. Every digital camera is likely to be able to seeing three or 5 miles in any course. The agent was anticipated to maintain eyes on all that area—upwards of 850 sq. miles.
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“Properly, what are the probabilities after 20 minutes that these Border Patrol brokers would see an explosion on a type of screens?” Borkowski says. “About zero.”
When these cameras had been first being put up, the plan was to pair them ultimately with a system that might robotically direct them towards locations the place sensors picked up exercise, so brokers would know the place to look. However by 2005, the DHS inspector common mentioned that also hadn’t materialized, and that criminality may “go unnoticed” except brokers had been actively watching the cameras. Nonetheless, extra towers had been put in, forming what’s as we speak often called the Distant Video Surveillance System (RVSS). In 2013, the protection large Basic Dynamics gained a contract value as much as $103 million to overtake and develop RVSS alongside the border, changing into the first contractor behind the system that is still in use as we speak. (That contract ultimately grew to a ceiling of $216 million, and the corporate obtained one other award in 2023 value as much as $135 million.)
Basic Dynamics would set up extra cameras, higher sensors, and extra towers. However the issue recognized almost 15 years earlier than remained unsolved. It was info overload: One agent informed MIT Know-how Evaluate about an incident in San Diego by which cameras captured a bunch of 30 crossing the border and getting picked up in a van, all unnoticed by the agent monitoring these cameras. Brokers mentioned the digital wall was bringing extra of the border into view than they may fairly listen or reply to.
The digital camera room was additionally the job no one needed. New Border Patrol brokers, usually of their early 20s, need to be exterior in vans and ATVs, not sitting in a darkish room watching screens—though the increasing digital wall more and more required somebody to do precisely that. “Somebody that’s injured and might’t exit into the sphere—we’ll ship them to the digital camera room,” says Rafael Reyes, who was in control of the Border Patrol station in Deming, New Mexico, till 2024.
Reyes says it was additionally a job his brokers had been usually too busy to do correctly. His station space had about 30 cameras, and the brokers liable for them additionally needed to monitor sensor alerts and radio visitors, run data checks, and coordinate with different brokers. “Then if they’ve a while, they’ll monitor the cameras,” he says.
Not solely that, however many cameras didn’t work. At Reyes’s station in New Mexico, 5 of the 30 cameras had been damaged on any given day, he says. Others had restricted performance; they is likely to be able to trying in only one course or seeing solely within the daytime. Jaime Fierro, a former agent who labored within the Laredo sector in Texas till 2025, mentioned the damaged towers had been tanking morale amongst brokers and that they introduced it up at each workers assembly. “That was like principally having an eye fixed shut for us on the border,” he says.
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They weren’t alone: In 2024, members of the Home Committee on Homeland Safety wrote that greater than 66% of Border Patrol’s first-generation towers had been unusable, regardless of working budgets of $50 million to $100 million annually. In January 2026, 30% remained damaged, one congressional staffer informed MIT Know-how Evaluate. The RVSS program was estimated in 2020 to have a complete price of $3.7 billion.
Border Patrol has nonetheless publicly credited these cameras with serving to to avoid wasting lives. The company has revealed dozens of press releases, relationship way back to 2016, about cases when brokers responded to individuals seen in misery on the distant video cameras. Regardless of these publicized wins, the our bodies started to pile up, undetected, beneath these techniques’ watchful gaze.
Close to El Cenizo, Texas, there’s a roughly 13-square-mile expanse of mesquite bushes and grasses described by the Webb County Sheriff’s Workplace as containing sections of Hachar Ranch and Espejo Ranch. It’s surrounded by seven RVSS techniques. It was nonetheless a sizzling spot for fatalities: MIT Know-how Evaluate discovered that 19 individuals died there, together with one man who died lower than 500 toes from the highway bordering the ranches and half a mile from two faculties. In every of those circumstances, narratives that we obtained by way of public data requests describe officers’ studying of those individuals solely after their our bodies had been found or by 911 calls reporting them lacking, not on account of the border surveillance know-how put in throughout Hachar Ranch.
In response to a listing of questions on its towers and these particular incidents, Basic Dynamics referred us to CBP. CBP didn’t handle any of our questions on RVSS towers.
Tales of a number of the those who died close to RVSS towers
Many deaths close to RVSS towers occurred in Texas, within the closely surveilled corridors between the Rio Grande and the close by highways, the place paid smugglers usually arrange pickups after crossings. Cameras watch most of the spots the place individuals are recognized to cross, usually trying throughout the river into Mexico to identify them earlier than they attain the water. Drownings are frequent; we discovered a number of circumstances by which native fishermen hooked the our bodies of people that had died making an attempt the crossing.
In a single occasion, a household of three from Brazil tried to cross the Rio Grande close to Del Rio, Texas, in 2022. The daddy, Daniel Lenda, was carrying his two-year-old daughter, Eloah, on his shoulder when he fell within the water. The mom, 23-year-old Thais Natali Montenegro Lenda, lifted Eloah out of the water as she watched her husband disappear.
She positioned the lady, now unresponsive, on a rock and went for assist. She was simply 100 toes from one digital camera system and a 3rd of a mile from two others, arrange exactly to allow sooner apprehensions at a preferred crossing level. Our topographical evaluation exhibits that each one three cameras had a transparent view of the place the place the household crossed and exited the water. Nonetheless, Thais Natali was not noticed till she waved down an agent on the Del Rio-Acuña bridge. The agent offered CPR to the toddler, who didn’t survive. Daniel’s physique was discovered days later.
Val Verde County sheriff Joe Frank Martínez responded to that case (although Border Patrol may uncover our bodies, native legislation enforcement is liable for investigating the deaths). He grew up within the space together with his 9 siblings and has been sheriff since 2009. Driving with MIT Know-how Evaluate by Del Rio in his patrol automobile, he rattled off the deaths that his workplace has responded to since he turned sheriff.
He retains a three-inch-thick binder of those circumstances in his workplace. However this case with the toddler nonetheless stands out in his reminiscence. He informed MIT Know-how Evaluate that when he arrived on scene, he heard from Border Patrol that the tower operator monitoring the digital camera had seen the daddy and daughter fall within the river. He by no means obtained a solution as to why brokers weren’t despatched sooner. Martínez requested for the footage from the surveillance cameras to assist in his investigation of what occurred. Border Patrol by no means offered it. (Basic Dynamics didn’t reply to our questions on this incident, as a substitute directing us to CBP. The company didn’t handle questions on this incident both.)
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Establishing how many individuals have died in vary of the digital wall is difficult, however it’s particularly so within the case of the RVSS towers. There are completely different fashions, some with a shorter vary of sight—one to 3 miles—and others with an extended vary of as much as 7.5 miles. Former brokers and officers informed us most towers ought to see a minimum of 5 miles, however since no public data exist to substantiate the mannequin sort of any given tower, we used a number of doable viewing distances to calculate the variety of deaths thought-about in vary.
One other complication is that many stays are by no means discovered in any respect. For these which are, MIT Know-how Evaluate might analyze solely deaths that had been logged with GPS coordinates or sufficiently exact location descriptions. Many data lack this stage of element, together with almost a fifth of the greater than 1,500 circumstances we obtained from 14 Texas counties. We additionally wanted to find out when somebody died, fairly than merely when their stays had been discovered, to substantiate {that a} tower was current on the time of demise. When official sources didn’t present an estimate, we consulted a number of medical experts on make that dedication from the obtainable particulars. And satellite tv for pc imagery offers solely intermittent proof to counsel when towers arose, not precise proof of once they had been functioning. For these causes, as detailed in our methodology, we tried to be conservative in our evaluation.
Even so, the variety of deaths estimated to have occurred close to a minimum of considered one of these towers is staggering: someplace between 500 and 700 since 2015. Even when we glance solely at towers in rural areas, the place their views are far much less prone to be blocked by buildings, we nonetheless estimate greater than 300 individuals have died in locations the place the cameras had a line of sight, most lower than three miles from a tower. Of the almost 300 RVSS towers we included in our evaluation, greater than 250 had been inside vary of a location the place somebody died. Greater than 150 individuals died inside a half-mile of 1, usually throughout open, empty plains, shut sufficient to see the cameras themselves perched atop towers as much as 200 toes tall.
The following watchers
When Borkowski was overseeing the rollout of these first-generation towers at CBP, he turned more and more sure that merely having extra distant video cameras was not going to result in sooner responses. The data overload meant the federal government might watch a big space of the border however not meaningfully see, a lot much less act on, all the pieces inside it. The company’s focus then turned fixing that overload downside.
What if, as a substitute of counting on somebody to scan 30 screens, the towers might use radar to detect movement, after which level the digital camera to it robotically?
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In 2011, Border Patrol requested the business for a brand new technology of know-how that would just do that—initially specializing in Arizona, the place the border was busiest. The contract finally went to the Israeli protection contractor Elbit, whose tower techniques watch Israel’s borders. In 2015, the corporate began putting in variations of those—known as built-in fastened towers, or IFTs—that would every see greater than 5 miles.
The IFTs had been nonetheless being put in when President Trump first took workplace, in 2017. They didn’t command the identical consideration as Trump’s marketing campaign promise of a bodily wall, however there was nonetheless help. Trump’s deputy CBP commissioner, Ronald Vitiello, informed Congress in 2018 that the IFT towers robotically detect individuals with radar after which monitor them, including that such surveillance know-how is “important in defending border areas with brief vanishing occasions, the place illicit crossers can shortly evade legislation enforcement by ‘vanishing’ into border communities.”
There have been 55 IFTs inbuilt Arizona beneath an preliminary $145 million contract with Elbit and different contracts that adopted. The towers collectively watch greater than 7,000 sq. miles of terrain, from the mountainous areas exterior Nogales to the plains of the Tohono O’odham Nation Reservation. Arizona is in some ways effectively fitted to these tall towers as a result of a lot of its panorama is flatter than, say, Southern California.
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However even right here, being inside a tower’s marketed vary doesn’t essentially imply being inside view. There may very well be terrain, brush, or buildings that block the road of sight.
MIT Know-how Evaluate carried out a topographical evaluation to estimate whether or not every tower had a transparent or obstructed view of the place the place somebody’s stays had been discovered. We estimated the peak of every tower and used US elevation maps to mannequin the terrain between it and the stays. The evaluation doesn’t account for buildings or vegetation, although all of the towers we analyzed use some type of thermal imaging that’s designed to see by gentle brush.
A lot of the cases by which somebody died in vary of a tower occurred the place we estimate that the digital camera’s views weren’t blocked by terrain—a discovering that held in each rural and concrete areas. And even when somebody died in a blind spot, it doesn’t imply they didn’t cross by a tower’s line of sight. Moreover, these quite a few blind spots point out points with the tower’s supposedly complete protection.
We discovered that almost 350 individuals have died in vary of Elbit’s towers since 2015. There have been 40 individuals who died inside vary of 4 or extra IFTs, with some close to as many as six completely different towers. In Might 2024, a 19-year-old man died the place three IFTs had a transparent view, and a 12 months later, in Might 2025, a 38-year-old lady died the place two IFTs had a equally clear view. Elbit didn’t reply to an in depth listing of questions on its towers or deaths we discovered to have occurred close to them.
There’s been a demise inside vary of 52 out of the 53 IFTs we analyzed, however some had been notably notable. There’s a tower positioned a few hours from Tucson on the Tohono O’odham reservation that we estimate has upwards of 80% visibility of the encompassing space. Nonetheless, 27 individuals, ages 19 to 64, have died in its surveillance space simply since 2021, together with a number of others whose stays haven’t been recognized. In 25 of those circumstances, we estimated that the tower had a transparent line of sight to the situation the place the individual died.
Tales of a number of the individuals who died close to IFTs
The age of autonomy
Round 2018, officers inside Border Patrol had been once more discussing the bounds of the towers. The brand new radar techniques had been higher, however they may solely detect motion, not what was transferring. This generated false alerts from cattle, tumbleweeds, and different innocent exercise. The now decades-old dream of the digital wall remained unfulfilled. Underneath stress from Congress, which was demanding to know what $33 billion in proposed funding for border safety over the following decade was going to realize, Border Patrol as soon as once more hoped a brand new technology of know-how might clear up its issues.
That 12 months the pinnacle of CBP, Kevin McAleenan, created a unit known as the Innovation Workforce. “He gave them some seed cash to go after type of Silicon Valley revolutionary applied sciences and run pilots,” Borkowski says.
One firm they landed on was Anduril, the protection tech startup based by Oculus VR founder Palmer Luckey. The corporate was and not using a product however had funding from Peter Thiel, recruits from the safety tech large Palantir, and a objective of bringing Silicon Valley experimentation to protection and nationwide safety know-how.
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With grants from the Small Enterprise Innovation Analysis program, Anduril’s product began taking form: a 33-foot-tall solar-powered construction with cameras to see and radar to detect motion, all sitting atop a modular metallic pole, with photo voltaic panels arrayed beneath.
Extra necessary was the element you may not see: laptop imaginative and prescient that promised to robotically classify, monitor, and generate alerts for what got here throughout the system’s view. Anduril’s normal tower couldn’t see so far as the Elbit and Basic Dynamics fashions—about 1.75 miles as a substitute of greater than 5—however, the corporate argued, it didn’t have to: By robotically figuring out and monitoring individuals, the towers might give brokers sufficient warning to reply. (Its newer, extended-range towers, then again, stand 80 toes tall and are marketed as capable of detect and monitor “objects of curiosity” as much as 7.5 miles away.)
When President Trump left workplace in 2021, Anduril continued to seek out help from his successor. Joe Biden had campaigned on the promise of shutting down the mission to develop the bodily wall, however he noticed political causes to maintain funding in tower know-how on the desk. “It’s much less seen—it’s unobtrusive,” a former immigration advisor to Biden remembers, including that regardless of some privateness issues, the towers had been principally uncontroversial.
When Border Patrol deployed Anduril towers to the Santa Teresa station in New Mexico in 2021, a press launch acknowledged, “Due to its accuracy with detection, in lots of circumstances this kind of know-how can and can save migrant lives.” In a allowing request filed in 2024 for towers in California, the federal government was much more specific: “If anybody throughout the viewshed of the towers seems to be in misery, EMTs or first responders can be despatched to assist.”
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Anduril echoed these claims. The software program constructed into the surveillance towers, the corporate wrote in a 2021 press launch, will get brokers “out of communications operations facilities and into the sphere the place they will effectuate safety and humanitarian responses.”
It wasn’t the primary time CBP had mentioned a humanitarian facet to its duties; in 1998 the company created BORSTAR, a search and rescue unit, and by August 2023, it had put in some 170 rescue beacons throughout the border that folks making an attempt a crossing might theoretically use to name for assist. However they weren’t efficient, says Mario Agundez, a retired Border Patrol supervisor from Arizona who had labored on varied rescue efforts; individuals both keep away from them or “die subsequent to them, as a result of there was no approach [for Border Patrol] to get to them in time.” (They don’t at all times work, both; one which MIT Know-how Evaluate handed, simply subsequent to a mud highway within the Otay Mountain wilderness space in Southern California, had its outstanding solar-powered blue gentle, meant to be seen for miles to individuals in misery, turned off on a latest evening in August. A CBP spokesperson didn’t touch upon why it was off however mentioned, “The solar-powered beacons are maintained and monitored by the accountable Border Patrol station that patrols that space.”)
Anduril soared by a pilot part in simply two years earlier than its Sentry towers—then the one autonomous surveillance towers CBP was utilizing—moved into an official program of file with the federal government in 2020. That’s gentle velocity on this planet of presidency procurement, particularly because it was Anduril’s first {hardware} product. By June 2021, CBP had already spent over $98 million (Anduril’s contract for these towers is now value as much as $1.1 billion).
Gerardo Galvan was in control of the Santa Teresa Border Patrol station—which patrols the world in New Mexico the place Morales’s physique was later discovered—when it obtained its first batch of Anduril surveillance towers in 2021. His brokers had been worn out; the El Paso sector, residence to his station, had seen encounters tick up every month since April 2020. Galvan says the brokers had been stunned however desirous to get the AI towers, and he started planning the place to put them. The websites he was contemplating sat the place one type of panorama abruptly offers technique to one other.
To the east of the station is Cristo Rey, a mountain that obscures the view of the town of El Paso. Working north from Cristo Rey is the state’s border with Texas, the place the banks of the Rio Grande are flanked on both facet by pecan orchards. And west of these orchards are the cities of Sunland Park and Santa Teresa. The final homes in these neighborhoods butt proper up towards the desert, which sprawls westward and not using a single fuel station for almost 100 miles.
It’s on this stretch—between the US-Mexico border to the south and Freeway 9 to the north—the place brokers from his station aimed to cease migrants. And when Galvan was planning the tower areas, there have been numerous crossings; Santa Teresa was changing into the busiest station within the 125,500-square-mile El Paso sector, as heightened border enforcement in Texas drove individuals west. Alongside this new route, extra individuals had been dying than in earlier years. (The traces of that interval are nonetheless seen years later; MIT Know-how Evaluate visited the world with the humanitarian group Battalion Search and Rescue and noticed jawbones bleached white by the solar, alongside frayed backpacks and garments.)
Galvan’s goal was to make use of the brand new towers as a stopgap the place there was little different border infrastructure. That included a spot close to the foot of Mount Cristo Rey, the place there was a break within the border fence and other people usually tried to cross. Galvan checked out information on earlier apprehensions with an eye fixed towards serving to brokers spot individuals earlier than they arrived in additional residential neighborhoods. Border Patrol struck agreements with non-public landowners, who typically didn’t thoughts having Anduril’s low-profile towers on their land (and had been compensated by way of lease agreements).
When the towers had been first arrange close to the Santa Teresa station in 2021, engineers from Anduril got here to fine-tune the algorithms meant to autonomously classify whether or not what it had detected was a automobile or a doable border crosser, amongst different issues. A former engineer for Anduril, who spoke on the situation of anonymity to debate his earlier employer, says these algorithms had been the primary focus of the tower program; Anduril didn’t manufacture the cameras or radar techniques itself, so the algorithms had been its predominant worth proposition to Border Patrol.
Galvan says the towers would flag individuals crossing earlier than brokers noticed them. However he additionally noticed issues from the beginning. Brokers would apprehend a big group close to one of many towers, for instance, and verify to see if the footage revealed anybody who obtained away, solely to seek out that the incident hadn’t been captured in any respect. Anduril’s towers always pan round, lingering solely on an object of curiosity. However in these circumstances, Galvan says, they panned elsewhere, failing to seize the border crossers they had been purported to robotically monitor.
Reyes says algorithm errors had been rare however problematic at his station. A gaggle of individuals was typically labeled as cattle, for instance, and brokers wouldn’t obtain an alert. The issue obtained worse the farther teams had been from the digital camera.
Anduril has touted its know-how’s capability to scale back false positives, like circumstances by which wildlife is mistaken for individuals. However the firm has mentioned little about these false negatives: individuals the techniques fail to detect.
Jaime Fierro, the previous agent within the Laredo sector in Texas, describes one incident that shocked him: Brokers pursued a automotive believed to be carrying migrants who had simply crossed the border. The automotive rotated, drove towards the banks of the Rio Grande lower than 100 toes from an Anduril tower, and crashed proper into the river. A number of occupants obtained out and swam to Mexico whereas the automotive floated within the water. Again on the station, Fierro hurried to see what the digital camera had picked up. Solely it by no means detected the incident in any respect. There was no footage. “That was an enormous, enormous subject,” Fierro says. He remembers Anduril popping out to analyze and the issue being despatched all the best way as much as Washington management. However Fierro by no means obtained a proof of why the crash was missed. (An Anduril spokesperson didn’t reply to a query about this incident however mentioned the vary of the towers we requested about was restricted by bodily obstructions and by boundaries established by CBP. )
A number of brokers estimate that the towers initially missed 10% to fifteen% of what they need to in concept have caught. “To us, 10-15% on a system we spent hundreds of thousands on that was purported to work—that was alarming,” Fierro says.
Philip Sullivan labored as an agent within the Laredo sector too. When the Anduril program began, he says, he put his hand as much as be concerned and even went to an Anduril check website for coaching. When new towers went up, he labored instantly with the corporate on enhancing its algorithms. He loved the work. However he describes one recurring subject they couldn’t resolve.
Smugglers would put as much as a dozen individuals on a rubber raft, cowl them with a tarp, and cross the Rio Grande whereas utilizing submersible motors to propel it ahead. The tarp fooled the algorithm, which detected the movement however attributed it solely to an “unidentified object.” That meant no audible alert—the very characteristic brokers relied on, as a result of the Anduril system was purported to do the expecting them.
The smugglers repeated the tactic dozens of occasions. Different smugglers would cowl teams with netting or blankets so they’d stay undetected whereas strolling by the comb. Solely afterwards, having seen the group farther inland and seen clues about the place the individuals had crossed, would Sullivan overview the footage and see the crossings that had been missed. He labored with Anduril, sending engineers movies of the crossings to retrain the agency’s algorithms. However the state of affairs had not improved by the point he obtained promoted to a sector-level job someday in 2022, he says.
“The entire function of their system,” Sullivan says, was the concept “the cameras are transferring round, figuring out robotically and monitoring and recording and flagging.” Having cameras that would pan on their very own labored wonders, he says. However the algorithm had its limits. “You have a look at it on the display your self, and also you see the blob and the raft transferring throughout—effectively, you recognize that’s individuals. However to get an AI to determine that could be a problem.”
Do you may have expertise with border surveillance know-how? We need to hear from you. Attain the reporters securely on Sign at jamesodonnell.22 and eileenguo.15 or ideas@technologyreview.com.
When the towers had been first being rolled out on the Santa Teresa station in 2021 and 2022, Galvan says, comparable points led to a adverse suggestions loop: An agent would see a tower miss one thing important and are available to mistrust the algorithm. When that agent’s flip got here to function the towers and handle the alerts, they may override the AI altogether and use the digital camera manually. That may result in extra missed alerts, extra mistrust.
Regardless of these shortcomings, the El Paso sector’s comparatively flat panorama meant that the system’s cameras had about 80% to 90% visibility, in line with our topographical evaluation. That was higher than in hillier or extra mountainous areas, just like the Otay Mountain Wilderness to the east of San Diego, the place we estimate Anduril’s towers might see simply 15% to 25% of their promised protection space.
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It was on this wilderness, in reality, that a number of the first our bodies began showing close to Anduril’s towers. Throughout one week in August 2021, two ladies of their 20s, from the identical metropolis in Mexico, died miles aside. Their our bodies had been discovered close to three completely different towers that had been first noticed on satellite tv for pc imagery between March and July that 12 months.
One in all them, 26-year-old Sarahi Hernández Alfonso, started her journey to cross into the US on August 5, and medical investigators notice that she reportedly fainted the following day close to the Otay Mountain Wilderness and was left behind. It could be one other 4 days earlier than the Mexican authorities reported her lacking to Border Patrol on August 10, supplying a set of coordinates. Brokers went to these coordinates and located her decomposing physique. She’d died 1.3 miles from two completely different Anduril towers, considered one of which our evaluation discovered had a transparent line of sight.
Simply the day earlier than, 25-year-old Karina López Antonio was discovered lifeless close to a 3rd Anduril tower. She had crossed the earlier evening together with her cousin and nephew. That morning, she felt sick, and her nephew appeared for a Border Patrol agent to assist. When brokers returned, she was lifeless.
The next October in New Mexico, the place the brand new Anduril towers had been rolled out, brokers had been patrolling on ATVs once they got here throughout footprints. They adopted them till they discovered the physique of 31-year-old César Perea Itzincab. The presence of maggots and the extent of decomposition indicated that he had died a minimum of every week earlier, and medical experts on the scene imagine he had dragged himself to the spot the place his stays had been discovered. He was 1.5 miles away from an autonomous tower—inside Anduril’s marketed vary—and may have been seen to the digital camera, in line with our topographical evaluation.
We will’t know what these cameras noticed as these individuals died. Footage and information from Anduril’s towers are overwritten each 30 days, and a former official with inner affairs at CBP informed us the data wouldn’t be saved for longer except it was a part of an energetic investigation—which begins provided that somebody dies in custody. CBP didn’t reply to questions on particular incidents like this one, and the Sunland Park Police Division closes circumstances like this when it determines that no crime has been dedicated.
The shortage of documentation is a missed alternative, says Amerika Garcia Grewal, co-director of the Frontera Federation, which goals to assist rescue migrants in misery—or discover and determine their stays. “The surveillance towers alongside the border might be extremely helpful,” she informed us. For instance, they may in precept be used to carry Border Patrol brokers accountable for no matter actions they did or didn’t take to find somebody in misery. “What the instrument seems [to do] will depend on the one that is holding it,” she says, including, “I don’t belief the oldsters which are utilizing them.”
“If I might get that footage,” she says, “then we might undergo that, and hopefully carry some solutions” to relations and “documented proof of what occurred” of their family members’ closing moments.
When requested about deaths close to Anduril towers, brokers usually level to faults within the know-how. Galvan, for instance, says the towers don’t seize how teams transfer: A big group of 20 individuals may splinter into smaller teams, particularly if brokers are pursuing them, and the tower doesn’t hold monitor of everybody. If somebody’s missed, he says, “that individual stays behind within the brush, out of sight.” Then they may cross out—which may very well be a demise sentence within the desert.
And although Border Patrol says the towers can “hand off” surveillance of individuals from one tower to a different, brokers on the bottom say that individuals are usually missed throughout these handoffs. On prime of that, the algorithms stay imperfect, in line with Jason Owens, the chief of Border Patrol from June 2023 to March 2025. “We by no means actually obtained to the purpose of ‘Set it and overlook it,’” he says.
Brokers additionally say they had been simply stretched too skinny to reply successfully. Round 2022 and 2023, the border noticed traditionally excessive ranges of migration. Title 42, a coverage that started beneath Trump and continued beneath Biden till Might 2023, cited a public well being emergency to expel migrants earlier than they may apply for asylum. However the fast expulsions carried fewer of the repercussions that would usually observe a fear, and many individuals merely tried to cross once more.
In the meantime, asylum claims had been rising for years, whereas shifts in US immigration coverage and within the locations migrants the place originating from meant extra individuals required prolonged processing fairly than being shortly returned throughout the border or to their residence nations. That more and more tied up brokers with individuals who had already been apprehended, they mentioned, leaving fewer obtainable to answer surveillance alerts.
In different phrases, from the brokers’ perspective, the effectiveness of Anduril’s towers was restricted by the identical subject that had at all times induced bother: There simply weren’t sufficient brokers.
PHILIP CHEUNG/THE NEW YORK TIMES VIA REDUX
However the overwhelming calls for on brokers can’t clarify all of the deaths our investigation discovered. In 2024, the border began to get quiet once more. By July of that 12 months, the variety of Border Patrol encounters nationwide had plummeted from their highs in December 2022. Encounters within the El Paso sector, the place the Anduril towers in New Mexico had been positioned, had fallen to almost one-tenth of their peak. Brokers had been much less tied up than they’d been in years. The know-how was supposedly enhancing, too.
Galvan had left for a promotion by this time, however he says brokers had come to belief the towers extra, they usually helped prepare the algorithm by giving a thumbs up or thumbs down if the system recognized one thing appropriately or incorrectly. There was additionally a brand new smartphone program: Each agent on the station was given an Android gadget with a map of the place different brokers had been, and it despatched alerts from the station about what an Anduril tower detected.
Regardless of all this, the deaths close to towers continued. There was Morales in April, whose physique Border Patrol discovered about solely from the landfill staff, although it had lain for hours within reach of an Anduril tower.
Others had been found by luck.
On June 20, Border Patrol brokers had been mistakenly monitoring a bunch of individuals they thought is likely to be migrants, although they had been in reality workers of the identical landfill. These workers informed the brokers that they had come throughout a physique, which turned out to be partially mummified stays of a person in his 40s who died inside vary of two Anduril towers.
Three days later, on the twenty third, one other: the physique of a 21-year-old Guatemalan man found by brokers whereas on patrol, 1.3 miles from a tower throughout clear and open desert. Two days after that, one other: An agent was on the lookout for a misplaced individual when he got here throughout the stays of a 56-year-old man—only a soccer subject’s distance from the earlier one, with a equally clear and unobstructed view to a tower.
So if Santa Teresa had gotten quieter—and grow to be one thing of a showcase for Border Patrol’s latest know-how efforts—what was happening?
“Brokers overview the data and decide the suitable response—the know-how doesn’t make legislation enforcement choices,” Beckham, CBP’s assistant commissioner, mentioned. In the meantime, particular person brokers described eventualities the place they won’t prioritize responding to alerts.
Typically “hanging again” was a technique: Brokers may observe a bunch to see what route they’d take, or brokers may not reply to a small group, in case these individuals had been despatched by smugglers to distract from a bigger group coming behind them. Different occasions, brokers may deem the situation the place a bunch of migrants had first been noticed to be impractical for a fear, and as a substitute wait to intercept them at one other location.
Realizing somebody’s location didn’t at all times result in quick motion. Volunteers describe offering Border Patrol with the coordinates of somebody who was misplaced however alive after which ready, “typically [for] every week,” for brokers to achieve the situation, says Garcia Grewal, from Eagle Go, Texas. They is likely to be informed “Oh, so-and-so went on the market they usually discovered stays,” she remembers. “Properly, they weren’t stays after we known as you. They had been alive.”
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Mireya Morales, the youthful sister of José Morales Bernal, who died by the landfill on the day earlier than his birthday in April 2024, wasn’t conscious her brother died close to a number of surveillance towers, or that the federal government mentioned these towers might save lives. “Properly that is good,” she mentioned of that promise, “however on this case, it did not assist my brother. And there isn’t any technique to know precisely how issues performed out.”
“Border Patrol ought to have discovered him shortly,” she says, “they usually might have achieved one thing.” In the event that they did, this journey into the USA—his fourth journey—doubtless would have ended together with his apprehension, detention, and deportation to Mexico. However he would have seen the birthday texts that his sister despatched the following day. Not less than he would have made it residence to rejoice his eldest daughter’s quinceañera, which passed off earlier this 12 months.
Tales like this are why Iván Chaar López, an assistant professor of American research on the College of Texas at Austin who leads its Border Tech Lab, says he’d “fairly speak about harms” than about “the failure of an algorithm.” He provides, “A system could fail, however people undergo.”
Tales of a number of the those who died close to Anduril’s autonomous surveillance towers
What occurs subsequent
In the end, any try to grasp the place issues are going flawed is hampered by an institutional reluctance to measure the issue.
A whole audit of this digital wall can solely come from Border Patrol. The company is, in some methods, more and more geared up to tackle that process: Brokers informed us that every time they apprehend somebody, the situation is logged with GPS coordinates, as are cases when Border Patrol sees proof that somebody crossed however can’t discover them. It additionally has exact information on when every surveillance tower went up, which alerts got here in, and the way they had been resolved. Having that info is the one technique to measure whether or not the most recent towers are actually lacking fewer individuals than the earlier generations.
However researchers and outdoors oversight companies say this ocean of knowledge hasn’t translated right into a dependable system for measuring the effectiveness of the digital wall. For instance, CBP data the individuals it misses by logging “gotaways,” a tally of what number of occasions brokers see indicators of somebody who evaded apprehension—footprints, appearances on digital camera, reviews from different individuals who had been apprehended. It’s imperfect. And that creates room for interpretation.
“The targets with border enforcement have at all times been a transferring goal,” says Jeremy Slack, a researcher of migration and border points on the College of Texas at El Paso. “They’re at all times arrange in order that it’s a win-win.” If apprehensions go up, for instance, CBP says it means brokers have gotten more practical at catching individuals. If apprehensions go down, it means the border is quiet as a result of individuals are too scared to cross.
JERRY GLASER/U.S. CUSTOMS AND BORDER PROTECTION
That’s to not point out the conflicting concepts throughout the company about what the digital wall was supposed to perform. Borkowski says higher-ups would ask what number of fewer brokers they may get by with in the event that they constructed extra towers. However supervisors receiving new towers informed us they’d usually ask for extra brokers, not fewer, as a result of they now had extra exercise to answer that had beforehand gone unseen.
And if the objective was for the sight of the towers to discourage individuals from crossing to start with, an exterior research from RAND in 2020 was ambiguous: It discovered that deploying IFTs resulted in decrease apprehension ranges close by however mentioned this didn’t imply the towers had been truly deterring crossings. (Analysis by Boyce and colleagues discovered that earlier surveillance towers in southern Arizona pushed individuals to hunt tougher terrain out of view.) It results in a query: Do the deaths close to the digital wall represent unacceptable surveillance failures, or are they throughout the vary of effectiveness the federal government deems acceptable? (CBP’s response didn’t handle our questions on the way it explains these deaths.)
Towards this backdrop, the Authorities Accountability Workplace and DHS’s Workplace of the Inspector Basic have tried to deal with a narrower query: Is the digital wall rising the chance of apprehensions?
The reply has been incomplete since 2014. That is when the GAO first recommended that at any time when brokers log their exercise in Border Patrol’s database, they need to embody details about whether or not or not a chunk of know-how helped of their apprehension. This might a minimum of do one thing to point out Congress whether or not the know-how is working. Border Patrol started accumulating that info, however years of incremental enhancements have been adopted by repeated findings that the ensuing information is unreliable or inadequate to find out how effectively the know-how works. The fact, a number of individuals from Border Patrol informed MIT Know-how Evaluate, is that brokers see it as a chore demanded solely by bureaucrats who don’t perceive the realities of the border.
It’s “spitting within the wind, to be sincere,” a former high-ranking official at DHS throughout the Biden administration informed MIT Know-how Evaluate on background. “If now we have 10,000 individuals a day crossing in between the ports of entry, do you suppose an agent is fearful about telling them how they freaking apprehended these individuals?” A number of different officers mentioned that the logging of know-how assists had improved, however not persistently sufficient to assist a lot with evaluation.
And there’s no process—on the native or nationwide stage—to look at particular person deaths close to the towers or analyze them collectively for surveillance failures. “We by no means considered plotting [migrant deaths] to see if the towers had been lacking issues or brokers had been lacking individuals,” mentioned a former CBP official who evaluated how personnel dealt with deaths in custody.
“No person ever raised the problem,” the official mentioned, including that doing so might reveal necessary gaps within the company’s method: “If I nonetheless labored for CBP, and also you introduced it up, I might in all probability ship some individuals to look.”
In response to questions from MIT Know-how Evaluate, CBP mentioned that autonomous surveillance towers complement bodily obstacles by enhancing detection and situational consciousness. Its assertion didn’t handle questions on its different applied sciences, or broader criticisms about the way it evaluates the digital wall.
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This lack of measurement has not slowed the keenness for extra know-how funding. The federal government spending invoice handed in July 2025 awarded $2.7 billion for border safety know-how alone, and CBP was fast to sign to business that the cash would quickly begin flowing. “We’ve obtained an historic funding in infrastructure and know-how arising,” a CBP director informed tech firms in an business webinar that month. In a December 2025 interview, when he was director of homeland safety and immigration on the America First Coverage Institute, Cooper Smith described the know-how investments as “fortifying” the border towards a future president who is likely to be, in his estimation, weaker on the border than Trump. (In response to LegiStorm, a analysis group that focuses on political staffers, Smith now serves in a policy-focused position with CBP.) The variety of Border Patrol brokers has climbed too, to almost 21,500 brokers as of June 2026—the very best within the company’s historical past.
Within the Large Bend area of Texas, surveillance towers have gotten a spotlight of native politics: Officers and residents throughout get together strains, together with the sheriff of Terrell County, are asking for Anduril towers as a substitute of a controversial new border barrier mission that’s lately been halted.
CBP has introduced a want to spend $1 billion on almost 1,500 extra towers by 2034. The legislation now requires all these towers to be geared up with AI. In December 2025, Anduril’s Palmer Luckey mentioned the towers remained the corporate’s best-selling product, one that offers “principally good situational consciousness of what’s happening within the space.” Anduril’s towers have been offered overseas—to implement the UK’s borders, defend US Marine Corps bases in Japan and elsewhere, and function drone defenses for an Australian Air Drive base.
However as for CBP, Anduril will not be the one sport on the town; Basic Dynamics has now launched AI towers of its personal and obtained an order for them in June from CBP value as much as $115 million. The Digital Frontier Basis—which has tracked surveillance towers since 2022—says some have already been noticed on the border.
This time round, the company can be spending this cash with even much less oversight than it had simply a few years in the past. In October 2025, the Division of Homeland Safety, which oversees CBP, dissolved its department-level workplace that oversaw main spending applications.
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A lot of the data on human stays that MIT Know-how Evaluate collected had been present solely by the autumn of 2025 or, in a handful of circumstances, early 2026. Even these dates include a caveat: Many stays are by no means discovered, and others are discovered months after somebody died. The reviews can then take months to be launched by way of public file requests. That makes it almost unattainable to maintain monitor of how many individuals have died close to surveillance towers in something near actual time.
Nonetheless, the border as we speak is considerably quieter. The most recent figures from DHS present simply 128,009 “enforcement encounters” from January to August 2026, in contrast with greater than 2.4 million throughout the identical interval in 2024 (“encounters” depend every of Border Patrol’s interactions, not particular person individuals).
Whilst border crossing charges lower and DHS speeds forward with its tower acquisition plans, individuals are nonetheless dying inside vary of the surveillance towers.
On September 14 2025, a 30-year-old Mexican lady named Graciela Gómez Hernández died simply over 350 yards away from the bodily border wall that separated Southern California from Tijuana—and inside one mile of an RVSS tower. Earlier that afternoon, she had informed her household that she couldn’t stroll any additional, and her voice notes abruptly stopped.
Her skeletonized stays had been recovered almost three weeks later, on October 4. A few of her bones had been lacking, and there was “obvious animal exercise … to the ribs,” because the medical expert’s report learn.
Sara Stroud, an organizer with the Borderlands Reduction Collective, a volunteer humanitarian group that leaves water and provides in a wilderness space frequented by individuals crossing the border, went to the location of her demise a number of days later to place up a memorial cross. A Border Patrol helicopter confirmed up virtually instantly, flying low circles above the volunteers.
Between the helicopter and the RVSS tower that was seen within the background, “I used to be astounded about how we had been being surveilled the entire time,” Stroud says, including that this was particularly stark in distinction to the company’s usually sluggish—or absent—responses to individuals who’d died on digital camera.
“Are you telling me you didn’t see it otherwise you did see it?” she asks. “As a result of for those who did see it, that’s horrible. And if they will’t, then how do you clarify that?”
Extra reporting by Lillian Perlmutter.
This work was supported by a grant from the Tarbell Middle for AI Journalism.
