The US spent billions on border surveillance. Why can’t it catch people before they die?

以下正文同步自 MIT Technology Review，版权归原站所有，已转换为易读排版。

When José Morales Bernal crossed the border into the United States on April 8, 2024, the day before his 32nd birthday, it should have triggered a chain of technological alerts and human responses.

As he walked through the desert in southern New Mexico that morning, he was within range of three surveillance towers. Newly installed by US Customs and Border Protection (CBP), they were built by the defense tech company Anduril and equipped with cameras and AI to automatically detect and track people. They transmit live video to nearby control rooms and can send alerts to the government-issued smartphones held by agents in the area, prompting the closest available to respond.

This story is part of Dying on Camera, a collaboration between MIT Technology Review and Times of San Diego. Journalists in both newsrooms spent the past year examining the failures of border surveillance technology and uncovering the stories of the people who die in the borderlands.

These AI-enabled towers are meant to give greater visibility across the 1,951-mile southern border, freeing up border agents from having to spend hours staring into video monitors. They were installed in this particular place to spot border crossers before they reached the nearby town of Sunland Park.

If the system worked as intended, Morales should have been apprehended. If he needed medical help, agents were trained to provide it.

The view from where José Morales Bernal’s body was found toward a Customs and Border Protection surveillance tower made by Anduril, along the southern US border in Sunland Park, New Mexico.CENGIZ YAR FOR MITTR

That didn’t happen. Despite the nearby surveillance towers, it was employees of the local landfill, rather than Border Patrol, who first spotted Morales that morning. At 1 p.m. the workers saw him again, now lying in the sand. At 4 p.m. the landfill workers saw that he had not moved and called Border Patrol. Agents arrived 45 minutes later. He was dead. When an agent then called 911 to report the body, he said it was “probably one of the migrants crossing through there,” seemingly unaware that Morales had been moving near the agency’s surveillance systems earlier that day.

The agent can be heard sounding unsure of Morales’ location despite the proximity of an AI-powered surveillance camera. The call has been edited for length.

Morales had died just 360 feet from the closest surveillance tower. Two more towers stood watch to the east and the west. An autopsy later concluded that he had died of “environmental exposure.”

The towers surrounding Morales were only the latest addition to the “virtual wall” the government has spent 25 years and billions of dollars building along the entire border, which also includes earlier generations of towers with more basic features, as well as blimps, drones, seismic sensors, and even tunnel-sensing robots. Together, all this technology provides “persistent surveillance” and “situational awareness” to help the Border Patrol quickly and accurately detect people crossing and, crucially, make sure agents are sent to intercept them. CBP has also credited it with saving lives.

But a first-of-its-kind investigation by MIT Technology Review reveals that deaths like Morales’s are startlingly common. We cross-referenced nearly 4,000 locations where human remains were found—drawn from records collected by nonprofit groups like No More Deaths and Humane Borders, as well as hundreds of records we obtained in Texas—with information on nearly 600 towers identified by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. We considered when towers were installed and when each person is estimated to have died, and combined this information with field reporting from the border. The result is the first comprehensive map and analysis of deaths near CBP surveillance towers.

Our investigation shows that a humanitarian crisis at the border has unfolded in view of the government’s own cameras.

José Morales Bernal died the day before his 32nd birthday. PHOTO COURTESY MIREYA MORALES

We found more than 1,050 people who died within range of border surveillance towers between 2015 and early 2026. These deaths are not failures of a few towers or technologies: We found deaths within the advertised range of nearly two-thirds of all the towers we analyzed. Our topographical analysis—which assessed the degree to which terrain might block a tower’s view of a particular death and its surveillance area in general—found that some have sight of as little as 10% of their advertised surveillance area, and yet we also found most deaths did not occur in towers’ blind spots. These deaths are not the result of legacy systems, as our estimate found more than 110 people have died within range of modern autonomous towers from Anduril, among the most advanced systems CBP has deployed, since 2021.

The overall picture reveals repeated failures of one of the virtual wall’s basic security functions, as CBP has described it in press releases: to effectively identify and locate migrants entering illegally into the United States.

The year that Morales died, 18 other people died in that same stretch of desert in range of the three Anduril towers. Five were visible from the same surveillance tower closest to where his body was discovered.

One man, after walking a mile past the border and in range of two AI towers, dragged his 30-year-old brother into the shade when he began having trouble breathing, according to records we obtained from the medical examiner. The two were spotted by Border Patrol only when the man waved down a helicopter for help; by the time agents arrived, his brother was already dead. A 24-year-old woman died near another Anduril tower, where our terrain analysis showed it should have had clear sight of her location. Her body lay unnoticed for weeks; it was decomposed, and blistered by the summer heat, when it was spotted by agents patrolling the area.

A few miles west, and a short drive from a Border Patrol station, four other AI towers stood watch. Near them, 10 more bodies were found that year, all in locations where at least one tower had a clear view.

In response to a list of questions, an Anduril spokesperson replied that once a tower is delivered, it is operated by CBP, and directed questions about specific incidents to the agency. The response noted that an incident occurring nearby does not mean the tower missed a detection and said actual surveillance ranges vary depending on terrain, physical obstructions, and the boundaries CBP sets for where the tower should look (CBP is able to set virtual boundaries on towers’ views for privacy and other reasons). The Anduril spokesperson also alleged inaccuracies in our reporting, given those boundaries and obstructions, but did not respond to follow-up questions on what was inaccurate.

The most pressing question in any death near the virtual wall is whether authorities knew someone was there and failed to reach them or weren’t aware anyone was crossing at all. Either is a system failure. And the deaths we found capture only the failures that left a trace—we don’t know how many people pass through undetected, or how many bodies remain undiscovered.

Interviews with more than 45 people—including current and former White House advisors and presidential appointees, Border Patrol agents, medical examiners, sheriffs, humanitarian volunteers, and employees of tech companies—showed that both types of failures are occurring: The technology is failing to detect, and agents are failing to respond. Both show the limits of throwing technology at a complex problem.

The findings reveal previously unreported issues with the virtual wall, even as it continues to enjoy broad political support and a surge in federal spending. Border security hardliners have long seen it as another tool for stopping smugglers moving drugs or people, while others tout it as a cheaper alternative to a physical wall. In 2023, the government estimated that its plans for using the towers, which now number 803, would cost $6.2 billion over their lifespan. With the historic levels of funding it was awarded in 2025, CBP plans to spend $1 billion for 1,497 more towers by 2034.

But our reporting shows that CBP has done little to assess how its towers are working or how many people have died where they keep watch.

Officials who oversaw border security across the last four presidential administrations told us they believed deaths near the so-called virtual wall were either exceedingly rare or nonexistent. But our reporting shows that is not the case. None could point to any comparable analysis the government had ever conducted on its own. Former agents and officials also told us that when someone’s body is found, CBP does not formally investigate whether surveillance should have detected them or, if they were detected, why agents didn’t reach them before they died.

In response to nearly 30 questions about our findings, which covered multiple generations of technology, Hilton Beckham, CBP’s assistant commissioner for public affairs, said, “Autonomous surveillance towers use artificial intelligence to detect and classify people, vehicles, and animals and alert Border Patrol agents to activity in monitored areas … ASTs complement physical barriers and other border security infrastructure by improving detection and situational awareness between ports of entry. CBP evaluates the technology based on its impact on detection, response coordination, agent safety, and mission outcomes.”

“I’m sure that the cameras and other surveillance assets do deliver … useful intelligence and enhance operational efficacy in some places, under some conditions, in certain circumstances,” says Geoff Boyce, an assistant professor of geography at University College Dublin who has studied surveillance technology used at the US southern border. “I’m also absolutely positive—because this has been the track record—it is not delivering the level of operational support, information, or efficacy that either the companies delivering these infrastructures or the Border Patrol and Department of Homeland Security claim.”

We also reached out to multiple lawmakers from both parties with a summary of our findings. In response, Delia Ramirez, a Democrat representing Illinois’s 3rd district who sits on the House Homeland Security Committee, said, “AI-powered surveillance technologies are not making us safer. Yet DHS continues to spend millions of taxpayer dollars on these ineffective, negligent technologies, with no commitment to oversight or transparency … It is clear we must terminate CBP’s integrated surveillance tower program and dismantle DHS.”

Building the virtual wall

Since its earliest efforts to police the border with Mexico, the US government has faced the same basic challenge: How do you effectively secure nearly 2,000 miles of remote and rugged terrain? It has increasingly turned to technology for answers.

Gerardo Galvan joined Border Patrol in 1995, as the government was undertaking an unprecedented expansion of border enforcement. In 1993, President Clinton’s first year in office, the agency mobilized huge numbers of agents to guard the country’s urban borders, starting in El Paso, Texas. That pushed more crossings to rural, unpopulated areas—which quickly proved to be far more deadly because of the rugged desert terrain, extreme temperatures, scarcity of water and the long, indirect routes often used by smugglers.

Stopping these remote crossings was a new law enforcement challenge for the agency, especially given the limited technology available at the time. “We had radios,” says Galvan, who would go on to be the head of operations for the El Paso sector—not the cell phones or GPS systems agents have today. They relied on underground sensors left over from the Vietnam War to alert them to movement.

The biggest technology rollout of Galvan’s early career started around 1998. That was when Border Patrol began installing its first video cameras

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