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\u2019 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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019t aware anyone was crossing at all. Either is a system failure. And the deaths we found capture only the failures that left a trace\u2014we don\u2019t know how many people pass through undetected, or how many bodies remain undiscovered.<\/p>\n
Interviews with more than 45 people\u2014including current and former White House advisors and presidential appointees, Border Patrol agents, medical examiners, sheriffs, humanitarian volunteers, and employees of tech companies\u2014showed 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s body is found, CBP does not formally investigate whether surveillance should have detected them or, if they were detected, why agents didn\u2019t reach them before they died.\u00a0<\/p>\n
In response to nearly 30 questions about our findings, which covered multiple generations of technology, Hilton Beckham, CBP\u2019s assistant commissioner for public affairs,\u00a0said, \u201cAutonomous surveillance towers use artificial intelligence to detect and classify people, vehicles, and animals and alert Border Patrol agents to activity in monitored areas \u2026 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m sure that the cameras and other surveillance assets do<\/em> deliver \u2026 useful intelligence and enhance operational efficacy in some<\/em> places, under some<\/em> conditions, in certain<\/em> circumstances,\u201d says Geoff Boyce, an assistant professor of geography at University College Dublin who has studied surveillance technology used at the US southern border. \u201cI\u2019m also absolutely positive\u2014because this has been the track record\u2014it 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.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n We also reached out to multiple lawmakers from both parties with a summary of our findings. In response, Delia Ramirez, a Democrat representing Illinois\u2019s 3rd district who sits on the House Homeland Security Committee, said, \u201cAI-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\u2019s integrated surveillance tower program and dismantle DHS.”<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Gerardo Galvan joined Border Patrol in 1995, as the government was undertaking an unprecedented expansion of border enforcement. In 1993, President Clinton\u2019s first year in office, the agency mobilized huge numbers of agents to guard the country\u2019s urban borders, starting in El Paso, Texas. That pushed more crossings to rural, unpopulated areas\u2014which 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.<\/p>\n Stopping these remote crossings was a new law enforcement challenge for the agency, especially given the limited technology available at the time. \u201cWe had radios,\u201d says Galvan, who would go on to be the head of operations for the El Paso sector\u2014not 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.<\/p>\n The biggest technology rollout of Galvan\u2019s early career started around 1998. That was when Border Patrol began installing its first video cameras that agents could remotely pan and zoom. They were mounted on metal structures similar to cell-phone towers, 60 to 80 feet tall, or on buildings in urban areas.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cFor the first time, somebody sitting in a room somewhere was able to surveil large swaths of area without being dependent on getting an agent out there with binoculars,\u201d says Matthew Hudak, a former deputy chief of Border Patrol who was working as a frontline agent at the time. \u201cThat was a very significant game changer, and for the most part, it was a huge, huge advance.\u201d<\/p>\n This early iteration of the virtual wall was a big deal: In its first eight years, 200 towers were installed along the southern border at a cost of more than $429 million. But the system\u2019s flaws were obvious to anyone who used it.<\/p>\n \u201cThere could be \u2026 30 screens on a wall,\u201d says Mark Borkowski, who managed CBP contracting, including the surveillance tower program. Each camera might be capable of seeing three or five miles in any direction. The agent was expected to keep eyes on all that space\u2014upwards of 850 square miles.<\/p>\n CEDAR ATTANASIO\/AP PHOTO<\/p>\n<\/figure><\/div>\n \u201cWell, what are the chances after 20 minutes that those Border Patrol agents would see an explosion on one of those screens?\u201d Borkowski says. \u201cAbout zero.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n When these cameras were first being put up, the plan was to pair them eventually with a system that would automatically direct them toward places where sensors picked up activity, so agents would know where to look. But by 2005, the DHS inspector general said that still hadn\u2019t materialized, and that illegal activity might \u201cgo unnoticed\u201d unless agents were actively watching the cameras. Nonetheless, more towers were installed, forming what is today known as the Remote Video Surveillance System (RVSS). In 2013, the defense giant General Dynamics won a contract worth up to $103 million to overhaul and expand RVSS along the border, becoming the primary contractor behind the system that remains in use today. (That contract eventually grew to a ceiling of $216 million, and the company received another award in 2023 worth up to $135 million.)<\/p>\n General Dynamics would install more cameras, better sensors, and additional towers. But the problem identified nearly 15 years before remained unsolved. It was information overload: One agent told MIT Technology Review<\/em> about an incident in San Diego in which cameras captured a group of 30 crossing the border and getting picked up in a van, all unnoticed by the agent monitoring those cameras. Agents said the virtual wall was bringing more of the border into view than they could reasonably pay attention or respond to.\u00a0<\/p>\n The camera room was also the job nobody wanted. New Border Patrol agents, often in their early 20s, want to be outside in trucks and ATVs, not sitting in a dark room watching screens\u2014even though the expanding virtual wall increasingly required someone to do exactly that. \u201cSomeone that\u2019s injured and can\u2019t go out into the field\u2014we\u2019ll send them to the camera room,\u201d says Rafael Reyes, who was in charge of the Border Patrol station in Deming, New Mexico, until 2024.\u00a0<\/p>\n Reyes says it was also a job his agents were often too busy to do properly. His station area had about 30 cameras, and the agents responsible for them also had to monitor sensor alerts and radio traffic, run records checks, and coordinate with other agents. \u201cThen if they have some time, they\u2019ll monitor the cameras,\u201d he says.\u00a0<\/p>\n Not only that, but many cameras didn\u2019t work. At Reyes\u2019s station in New Mexico, five of the 30 cameras were broken on any given day, he says. Others had limited functionality; they might be capable of looking in just one direction or seeing only in the daytime. Jaime Fierro, a former agent who worked in the Laredo sector in Texas until 2025, said the broken towers were tanking morale among agents and that they brought it up at every staff meeting. \u201cThat was like basically having an eye shut for us on the border,\u201d he says.\u00a0<\/p>\n CENGIZ YAR FOR MITTR<\/p>\n<\/figure><\/div>\n They weren\u2019t alone: In 2024, members of the House Committee on Homeland Security wrote that more than 66% of Border Patrol\u2019s first-generation towers were unusable, despite operating budgets of $50 million to $100 million each year. In January 2026, 30% remained broken, one congressional staffer told MIT Technology Review.<\/em> The RVSS program was estimated in 2020 to have a total cost of $3.7 billion.<\/p>\n Border Patrol has nonetheless publicly credited these cameras with helping to save lives. The agency has published dozens of press releases, dating as far back as 2016, about instances when agents responded to people seen in distress on the remote video cameras. Despite these publicized wins, the bodies began to pile up, undetected, beneath these systems\u2019 watchful gaze.<\/p>\n Near El Cenizo, Texas, there\u2019s a roughly 13-square-mile expanse of mesquite bushes and grasses described by the Webb County Sheriff\u2019s Office as containing sections of Hachar Ranch and Espejo Ranch. It\u2019s surrounded by seven RVSS systems. It was nonetheless a hot spot for fatalities: MIT Technology Review<\/em> found that 19 people died there, including one man who died less than 500 feet from the road bordering the ranches and half a mile from two schools. In each of these cases, narratives that we obtained via public records requests describe officers\u2019 learning of these people only after their bodies were discovered or through 911 calls reporting them missing, not as a result of the border surveillance technology installed across Hachar Ranch.\u00a0<\/p>\n In response to a list of questions about its towers and these specific incidents, General Dynamics referred us to CBP. CBP did not address any of our questions about RVSS towers.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Many deaths near RVSS towers happened in Texas, in the heavily surveilled corridors between the Rio Grande and the nearby highways, where paid smugglers often organize pickups after crossings. Cameras watch many of the spots where people are known to cross, often looking across the river into Mexico to spot them before they reach the water. Drownings are common; we found multiple cases in which local fishermen hooked the bodies of people who had died attempting the crossing.<\/p>\n In one instance, a family of three from Brazil attempted to cross the Rio Grande near Del Rio, Texas, in 2022. The father, Daniel Lenda, was carrying his two-year-old daughter, Eloah, on his shoulder when he fell in the water. The mother, 23-year-old Thais Natali Montenegro Lenda, lifted Eloah out of the water as she watched her husband disappear.\u00a0<\/p>\n She placed the girl, now unresponsive, on a rock and went for help. She was just 100 feet from one camera system and a third of a mile from two others, set up precisely to enable faster apprehensions at a popular crossing point. Our topographical analysis shows that all three cameras had a clear view of the place where the family crossed and exited the water. Nonetheless, Thais Natali was not spotted until she waved down an agent on the Del Rio-Acu\u00f1a bridge. The agent provided CPR to the toddler, who did not survive. Daniel\u2019s body was found days later.\u00a0<\/p>\n Val Verde County sheriff Joe Frank Mart\u00ednez responded to that case (though Border Patrol might discover bodies, local law enforcement is responsible for investigating the deaths). He grew up in the area with his nine siblings and has been sheriff since 2009. Riding with MIT Technology Review <\/em>through Del Rio in his patrol vehicle, he rattled off the deaths that his office has responded to since he became sheriff.\u00a0<\/p>\n He keeps a three-inch-thick binder of these cases in his office. But this case with the toddler still sticks out in his memory. He told MIT Technology Review<\/em> that when he arrived on scene, he heard from Border Patrol that the tower operator monitoring the camera had seen the father and daughter fall in the river. He never received an answer as to why agents weren\u2019t sent sooner. Mart\u00ednez asked for the footage from the surveillance cameras to aid in his investigation of what happened. Border Patrol never provided it. (General Dynamics did not respond to our questions about this incident, instead directing us to CBP. The agency did not address questions about this incident either.)<\/p>\n JAMES O’DONNELL\/MITTR<\/p>\n<\/figure><\/div>\n Establishing how many people have died in range of the virtual wall is challenging, but it\u2019s especially so in the case of the RVSS towers. There are different models, some with a shorter range of sight\u2014one to three miles\u2014and others with a longer range of up to 7.5 miles. Former agents and officials told us most towers should see at least five miles, but since no public records exist to confirm the model type of any given tower, we used several possible viewing distances to calculate the number of deaths considered in range.<\/p>\n Another complication is that many remains are never found at all. For those that are, MIT Technology Review<\/em> could analyze only deaths that had been logged with GPS coordinates or sufficiently precise location descriptions. Many records lack this level of detail, including nearly a fifth of the more than 1,500 cases we obtained from 14 Texas counties. We also needed to determine when someone died<\/em>, rather than simply when their remains were found, to confirm that a tower was present at the time of death. When official sources did not provide an estimate, we consulted multiple medical examiners on how to make that determination from the available details. And satellite imagery provides only intermittent evidence to suggest when towers arose, not exact proof of when they were functioning. For these reasons, as detailed in our methodology, we tried to be conservative in our analysis.<\/p>\n Even so, the number of deaths estimated to have occurred near at least one of these towers is staggering: somewhere between 500 and 700 since 2015. Even if we look only at towers in rural areas, where their views are far less likely to be blocked by buildings, we still estimate more than 300 people have died in places where the cameras had a line of sight, most less than three miles from a tower. Of the nearly 300 RVSS towers we included in our analysis, more than 250 were within range of a location where someone died. More than 150 people died within a half-mile of one, often across open, empty plains, close enough to see the cameras themselves perched atop towers up to 200 feet tall.<\/p>\n When Borkowski was overseeing the rollout of those first-generation towers at CBP, he became increasingly certain that simply having more remote video cameras was not going to lead to faster responses. The information overload meant the government could watch a large area of the border but not meaningfully see, much less act on, everything within it. The agency\u2019s focus then became solving that overload problem.\u00a0<\/p>\n What if, instead of relying on someone to scan 30 screens, the towers could use radar to detect motion, and then point the camera to it automatically?\u00a0<\/p>\n MATT YORK\/AP PHOTO<\/p>\n<\/figure><\/div>\n In 2011, Border Patrol asked the industry for a new generation of technology that could do just that\u2014initially focusing on Arizona, where the border was busiest. The contract ultimately went to the Israeli defense contractor Elbit, whose tower systems watch Israel\u2019s borders. In 2015, the company started installing versions of these\u2014called integrated fixed towers, or IFTs\u2014that could each see more than five miles.<\/p>\n The IFTs were still being installed when President Trump first took office, in 2017. They didn\u2019t command the same attention as Trump\u2019s campaign promise of a physical wall, but there was still support. Trump\u2019s deputy CBP commissioner, Ronald Vitiello, told Congress in 2018 that the IFT towers automatically detect people with radar and then track them, adding that such surveillance technology is \u201ccritical in protecting border areas with short vanishing times, where illicit crossers can quickly evade law enforcement by \u2018vanishing\u2019 into border communities.\u201d<\/p>\n There were 55 IFTs built in Arizona under an initial $145 million contract with Elbit and other contracts that followed. The towers collectively watch more than 7,000 square miles of terrain, from the mountainous areas outside Nogales to the plains of the Tohono O\u2019odham Nation Reservation. Arizona is in many ways well suited for these tall towers because much of its landscape is flatter than, say, Southern California.\u00a0<\/p>\n CREATIVE COMMONS<\/p>\n<\/figure><\/div>\n But even here, being within a tower\u2019s advertised range does not necessarily mean being within view. There could be terrain, brush, or buildings that block the line of sight.\u00a0<\/p>\n MIT Technology Review<\/em> conducted a topographical analysis to estimate whether each tower had a clear or obstructed view of the place where someone\u2019s remains were found. We estimated the height of each tower and used US elevation maps to model the terrain between it and the remains. The analysis does not account for buildings or vegetation, though all the towers we analyzed use some form of thermal imaging that is designed to see through light brush.<\/p>\n Most of the instances in which someone died in range of a tower happened where we estimate that the camera\u2019s views were not blocked by terrain\u2014a finding that held in both rural and urban areas. And even when someone died in a blind spot, it does not mean they did not pass through a tower\u2019s line of sight. Additionally, these numerous blind spots indicate issues with the tower\u2019s supposedly comprehensive coverage.<\/p>\n We found that nearly 350 people have died in range of Elbit\u2019s towers since 2015.\u00a0There were 40 people who died within range of four or more IFTs, with some near as many as six different towers. In May 2024, a 19-year-old man died where three IFTs had a clear view, and a year later, in May 2025, a 38-year-old woman died where two IFTs had a similarly clear view. Elbit did not respond to a detailed list of questions about its towers or deaths we found to have occurred near them.\u00a0<\/p>\n There\u2019s been a death within range of 52 out of the 53 IFTs we analyzed, but some were particularly notable. There\u2019s a tower located a couple of hours from Tucson on the Tohono O\u2019odham reservation that we estimate has upwards of 80% visibility of the surrounding area. Still, 27 people, ages 19 to 64, have died in its surveillance area just since 2021, along with several others whose remains have not been identified. In 25 of these cases, we estimated that the tower had a clear line of sight to the location where the person died.<\/p>\n Around 2018, officials within Border Patrol were again discussing the limits of the towers. The new radar systems were better, but they could only detect movement, not what<\/em> was moving. This generated false alerts from cattle, tumbleweeds, and other harmless activity. The now decades-old dream of the virtual wall remained unfulfilled. Under pressure from Congress, which was demanding to know what $33 billion in proposed funding for border security over the next decade was going to achieve, Border Patrol once again was hoping a new generation of technology could solve its problems.<\/p>\n That year the head of CBP, Kevin McAleenan, created a unit called the Innovation Team. \u201cHe gave them some seed money to go after kind of Silicon Valley innovative technologies and run pilots,\u201d Borkowski says.\u00a0<\/p>\n One company they landed on was Anduril, the defense tech startup founded by Oculus VR founder Palmer Luckey. The company was without a product but had funding from Peter Thiel, recruits from the security tech giant Palantir, and a goal of bringing Silicon Valley experimentation to defense and national security technology.\u00a0<\/p>\n CENGIZ YAR FOR MITTR<\/p>\n<\/figure><\/div>\n With grants from the Small Business Innovation Research program, Anduril\u2019s product started taking shape: a 33-foot-tall solar-powered structure with cameras to see and radar to detect movement, all sitting atop a modular metal pole, with solar panels arrayed beneath.\u00a0<\/p>\n More important was the component you could not see: computer vision that promised to automatically classify, track, and generate alerts for what came within the system\u2019s view. Anduril\u2019s standard tower couldn\u2019t see as far as the Elbit and General Dynamics models\u2014about 1.75 miles instead of more than five\u2014but, the company argued, it didn\u2019t need to: By automatically identifying and tracking people, the towers could give agents enough warning to respond. (Its newer, extended-range towers, on the other hand, stand 80 feet tall and are advertised as able to detect and track \u201cobjects of interest\u201d up to 7.5 miles away.)\u00a0<\/p>\n When President Trump left office in 2021, Anduril continued to find support from his successor. Joe Biden had campaigned on the promise of shutting down the project to expand the physical wall, but he saw political reasons to keep investment in tower technology on the table. \u201cIt\u2019s less visible\u2014it\u2019s unobtrusive,\u201d a former immigration advisor to Biden recalls, adding that despite some privacy concerns, the towers were mostly uncontroversial.\u00a0<\/p>\n When Border Patrol deployed Anduril towers to the Santa Teresa station in New Mexico in 2021, a press release stated, \u201cBecause of its accuracy with detection, in many cases this type of technology can and will save migrant lives.\u201d In a permitting request filed in 2024 for towers in California, the government was even more explicit: \u201cIf anyone within the viewshed of the towers appears to be in distress, EMTs or first responders will be sent to help.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n CBP IMAGES<\/p>\n<\/figure><\/div>\n Anduril echoed those claims. The software built into the surveillance towers, the company wrote in a 2021 press release, gets agents \u201cout of communications operations centers and into the field where they can effectuate security and humanitarian responses.\u201d<\/p>\n It wasn\u2019t the first time CBP had discussed a humanitarian side to its duties; in 1998 the agency created BORSTAR, a search and rescue unit, and by August 2023, it had installed some 170 rescue beacons across the border that people attempting a crossing could theoretically use to call for help. But they weren\u2019t effective, says Mario Agundez, a retired Border Patrol supervisor from Arizona who had worked on various rescue efforts; people either avoid them or \u201cdie next to them, because there was no way [for Border Patrol] to get to them in time.\u201d (They don\u2019t always work, either; one that MIT Technology Review <\/em>passed, just next to a dirt road in the Otay Mountain wilderness area in Southern California, had its prominent solar-powered blue light, meant to be visible for miles to people in distress, turned off on a recent night in August. The San Diego Border Patrol station did not comment on why it was off but said, \u201cThe solar-powered beacons are maintained and monitored by the responsible Border Patrol station that patrols that area.\u201d)\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Anduril soared through a pilot phase in just two years before its Sentry towers\u2014then the only autonomous surveillance towers CBP was using\u2014moved into an official program of record with the government in 2020. That\u2019s light speed in the world of government procurement, especially since it was Anduril\u2019s first hardware product. By June 2021, CBP had already spent over $98 million (Anduril\u2019s contract for these towers is now worth up to $1.1 billion).\u00a0<\/p>\n Gerardo Galvan was in charge of the Santa Teresa Border Patrol station\u2014which patrols the area in New Mexico where Morales\u2019s body was later found\u2014when it received its first batch of Anduril surveillance towers in 2021. His agents were worn out; the El Paso sector, home to his station, had seen encounters tick up each month since April 2020. Galvan says the agents were surprised but eager to get the AI towers, and he began planning where to place them. The sites he was considering sat where one kind of landscape abruptly gives way to another.\u00a0<\/p>\n To the east of the station is Cristo Rey, a mountain that obscures the view of the city of El Paso. Running north from Cristo Rey is the state\u2019s border with Texas, where the banks of the Rio Grande are flanked on either side by pecan orchards. And west of those orchards are the towns of Sunland Park and Santa Teresa. The last houses in these neighborhoods butt right up against the desert, which sprawls westward without a single gas station for nearly 100 miles.<\/p>\n It is in this stretch\u2014between the US-Mexico border to the south and Highway 9 to the north\u2014where agents from his station aimed to stop migrants. And when Galvan was planning the tower locations, there were lots of crossings; Santa Teresa was becoming the busiest station in the 125,500-square-mile El Paso sector, as heightened border enforcement in Texas drove people west. Along this new route, more people were dying than in previous years. (The traces of that period are still visible years later; MIT Technology Review<\/em> visited the area with the humanitarian group Battalion Search and Rescue and saw jawbones bleached white by the sun, alongside frayed backpacks and clothes.)<\/p>\n Galvan\u2019s aim was to use the new towers as a stopgap where there was little other border infrastructure. That included a spot near the foot of Mount Cristo Rey, where there was a break in the border fence and people often attempted to cross. Galvan looked at data on previous apprehensions with an eye toward helping agents spot people before they arrived in more residential neighborhoods. Border Patrol struck agreements with private landowners, who generally didn\u2019t mind having Anduril\u2019s low-profile towers on their land (and were compensated via lease agreements).\u00a0<\/p>\n When the towers were first set up near the Santa Teresa station in 2021, engineers from Anduril came to fine-tune the algorithms meant to autonomously classify whether what it had detected was a vehicle or a possible border crosser, among other things. A former engineer for Anduril, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss his previous employer, says these algorithms were the main focus of the tower program; Anduril didn\u2019t manufacture the cameras or radar systems itself, so the algorithms were its main value proposition to Border Patrol.\u00a0<\/p>\n Galvan says the towers would flag people crossing before agents saw them. But he also saw problems from the start. Agents would apprehend a large group near one of the towers, for example, and check to see if the footage revealed anyone who got away, only to find that the incident hadn\u2019t been captured at all. Anduril\u2019s towers constantly pan around, lingering only on an object of interest. But in these cases, Galvan says, they panned elsewhere, failing to capture the border crossers they were supposed to automatically track.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Reyes says algorithm mistakes were infrequent but problematic at his station. A group of people was sometimes labeled as cattle, for example, and agents wouldn\u2019t receive an alert. The problem got worse the farther groups were from the camera.<\/p>\n Anduril has touted its technology\u2019s ability to reduce false positives, like cases in which wildlife is mistaken for people. But the company has said little about these false negatives: people the systems fail to detect.<\/p>\n Jaime Fierro, the former agent in the Laredo sector in Texas, describes one incident that shocked him: Agents pursued a car believed to be carrying migrants who had just crossed the border. The car turned around, drove toward the banks of the Rio Grande less than 100 feet from an Anduril tower, and crashed right into the river. Several occupants got out and swam to Mexico while the car floated in the water. Back at the station, Fierro hurried to see what the camera had picked up. Only it never detected the incident at all. There was no footage. \u201cThat was a huge, huge issue,\u201d Fierro says. He remembers Anduril coming out to investigate and the problem being sent all the way up to Washington leadership. But Fierro never got an explanation of why the crash was missed. (An Anduril spokesperson did not respond to a question about this incident but said the range of the towers we asked about was limited by physical obstructions and by boundaries established by CBP. )<\/p>\n Several agents estimate that the towers initially missed 10% to 15% of what they should in theory have caught. \u201cTo us, 10-15% on a system we spent millions on that was supposed to work\u2014that was alarming,\u201d Fierro says.<\/p>\n Philip Sullivan worked as an agent in the Laredo sector too. When the Anduril program started, he says, he put his hand up to be involved and even went to an Anduril test site for training. When new towers went up, he worked directly with the company on improving its algorithms. He enjoyed the work. But he describes one recurring issue they couldn\u2019t resolve.<\/p>\n Smugglers would put up to a dozen people on a rubber raft, cover them with a tarp, and cross the Rio Grande while using submersible motors to propel it forward. The tarp fooled the algorithm, which detected the motion but attributed it only to an \u201cunidentified object.\u201d That meant no audible alert\u2014the very feature agents relied on, because the Anduril system was supposed to do the watching for them.\u00a0<\/p>\n The smugglers repeated the tactic dozens of times. Other smugglers would cover groups with netting or blankets so they would remain undetected while walking through the brush. Only afterwards, having seen the group farther inland and noticed clues about where the people had crossed, would Sullivan review the footage and see the crossings that were missed. He worked with Anduril, sending engineers videos of the crossings to retrain the firm\u2019s algorithms. But the situation had not improved by the time he got promoted to a sector-level job sometime in 2022, he says.<\/p>\n \u201cThe whole purpose of their system,\u201d Sullivan says, was the idea that \u201cthe cameras are moving around, identifying automatically and tracking and recording and flagging.\u201d Having cameras that could pan on their own worked wonders, he says. But the algorithm had its limits. \u201cYou look at it on the screen yourself, and you see the blob and the raft moving across\u2014well, you know that\u2019s people. But to get an AI to identify that is a challenge.\u201d<\/p>\n When the towers were first being rolled out at the Santa Teresa station in 2021 and 2022, Galvan says, similar issues led to a negative feedback loop: An agent would see a tower miss something significant and come to distrust the algorithm. When that agent\u2019s turn came to operate the towers and manage the alerts, they might override the AI altogether and use the camera manually. That would lead to more missed alerts, more distrust.<\/p>\n Despite these shortcomings, the El Paso sector\u2019s relatively flat landscape meant that the system\u2019s cameras had about 80% to 90% visibility, according to our topographical analysis. That was better than in hillier or more mountainous areas, like the Otay Mountain Wilderness to the east of San Diego, where we estimate Anduril’s towers could see just 15% to 25% of their promised coverage area.\u00a0<\/p>\n CENGIZ YAR FOR MITTR<\/p>\n<\/figure><\/div>\n It was in this wilderness, in fact, that some of the first bodies started appearing near Anduril\u2019s towers. During one week in August 2021, two women in their 20s, from the same city in Mexico, died miles apart. Their bodies were found near three different towers that were first observed on satellite imagery between March and July that year.\u00a0<\/p>\n One of them, 26-year-old Sarahi Hern\u00e1ndez Alfonso, began her journey to cross into the US on August 5, and medical investigators note that she reportedly fainted the next day near the Otay Mountain Wilderness and was left behind. It would be another four days before the Mexican government reported her missing to Border Patrol on August 10, supplying a set of coordinates. Agents went to those coordinates and found her decomposing body. She\u2019d died 1.3 miles from two different Anduril towers, one of which our analysis found had a clear line of sight.<\/p>\n Just the day before, 25-year-old Karina L\u00f3pez Antonio was found dead near a third <\/em>Anduril tower. She had crossed the previous night with her cousin and nephew. That morning, she felt sick, and her nephew looked for a Border Patrol agent to help. When agents returned, she was dead.\u00a0<\/p>\n The following October in New Mexico, where the new Anduril towers had been rolled out, agents were patrolling on ATVs when they came across footprints. They followed them until they found the body of 31-year-old C\u00e9sar Perea Itzincab. The presence of maggots and the level of decomposition indicated that he had died at least a week earlier, and medical examiners on the scene believe he had dragged himself to the spot where his remains were found. He was 1.5 miles away from an autonomous tower\u2014within Anduril\u2019s advertised range\u2014and should have been visible to the camera, according to our topographical analysis.<\/p>\n We can\u2019t know what those cameras saw as these people died. Footage and data from Anduril\u2019s towers are overwritten every 30 days, and a former official with internal affairs at CBP told us the information wouldn\u2019t be saved for longer unless it was part of an active investigation\u2014which starts only if someone dies in custody. CBP did not respond to questions about specific incidents like this one, and the Sunland Park Police Department closes cases like this when it determines that no crime has been committed.\u00a0<\/p>\n The lack of documentation is a missed opportunity, says Amerika Garcia Grewal, co-director of the Frontera Federation, which aims to help rescue migrants in distress\u2014or find and identify their remains. \u201cThe surveillance towers along the border could<\/em> be incredibly useful,\u201d she told us. For example, they could in principle be used to hold Border Patrol agents accountable for whatever actions they did or did not take to locate someone in distress. \u201cWhat the tool turns out [to do] depends on the person who is holding it,\u201d she says, adding, \u201cI don\u2019t trust the folks that are using them.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIf I could get that footage,\u201d she says, \u201cthen we would go through that, and hopefully bring some answers\u201d to family members and \u201cdocumented proof of what happened\u201d in their loved ones\u2019 final moments.\u00a0<\/p>\n When asked about deaths near Anduril towers, agents often point to faults in the technology. Galvan, for example, says the towers don\u2019t capture how groups move: A large group of 20 people might splinter into smaller groups, especially if agents are pursuing them, and the tower doesn\u2019t keep track of everyone. If someone\u2019s missed, he says, \u201cthat person stays behind in the brush, out of sight.\u201d Then they might pass out\u2014which could be a death sentence in the desert.\u00a0<\/p>\n And though Border Patrol says the towers can \u201chand off\u201d surveillance of people from one tower to another, agents on the ground say that people are often missed during these handoffs. On top of that, the algorithms remain imperfect, according to Jason Owens, the chief of Border Patrol from June 2023 to March 2025. \u201cWe never really got to the point of \u2018Set it and forget it,\u2019\u201d he says.<\/p>\n Agents also say they were just stretched too thin to respond effectively. Around 2022 and 2023, the border saw historically high levels of migration. Title 42, a policy that began under Trump and continued under Biden until May 2023, cited a public health emergency to expel migrants before they could apply for asylum. But the rapid expulsions carried fewer of the repercussions that could normally follow an apprehension, and many people simply tried to cross again. <\/p>\n Meanwhile, asylum claims had been rising for years, while shifts in US immigration policy and in the places migrants where originating from meant more people required lengthy processing rather than being quickly returned across the border or to their home countries. That increasingly tied up agents with people who had already been apprehended, they said, leaving fewer available to respond to surveillance alerts.\u00a0<\/p>\n In other words, from the agents\u2019 perspective, the effectiveness of Anduril\u2019s towers was limited by the same issue that had always caused trouble: There just weren\u2019t enough agents.<\/p>\n PHILIP CHEUNG\/THE NEW YORK TIMES VIA REDUX<\/p>\n<\/figure><\/div>\n But the overwhelming demands on agents cannot explain all the deaths our investigation found. In 2024, the border started to get quiet again. By July of that year, the number of Border Patrol encounters nationwide had plummeted from their highs in December 2022. Encounters in the El Paso sector, where the Anduril towers in New Mexico were located, had fallen to nearly one-tenth of their peak. Agents were less tied up than they\u2019d been in years. The technology was supposedly improving, too.\u00a0<\/p>\n Galvan had left for a promotion by this time, but he says agents had come to trust the towers more, and they helped train the algorithm by giving a thumbs up or thumbs down if the system identified something correctly or incorrectly. There was also a new smartphone program: Every agent at the station was given an Android device with a map of where other agents were, and it sent alerts from the station about what an Anduril tower detected.\u00a0<\/p>\n Despite all this, the deaths near towers continued.\u00a0There was Morales in April, whose body Border Patrol learned about only from the landfill workers, though it had lain for hours within sight of an Anduril tower.\u00a0<\/p>\n Others were discovered by luck.\u00a0<\/p>\n On June 20, Border Patrol agents were mistakenly tracking a group of people they thought might be migrants, though they were in fact employees of the same landfill. Those employees told the agents they had come across a body, which turned out to be partially mummified remains of a man in his 40s who died within range of two Anduril towers.\u00a0<\/p>\n Three days later, on the 23rd, another: the body of a 21-year-old Guatemalan man discovered by agents while on patrol, 1.3 miles from a tower across clear and open desert. Two days after that, another: An agent was looking for a lost person when he came across the remains of a 56-year-old man\u2014just a football field\u2019s distance from the previous one, with a similarly clear and unobstructed view to a tower.<\/p>\n So if Santa Teresa had gotten quieter\u2014and become something of a showcase for Border Patrol\u2019s newest technology efforts\u2014what was going on?<\/p>\n \u201cAgents review the information and determine the appropriate response\u2014the technology does not make law enforcement decisions,\u201d Beckham, CBP\u2019s assistant commissioner, said. Meanwhile, individual agents described scenarios where they might not prioritize responding to alerts.<\/p>\n Sometimes \u201changing back\u201d was a strategy: Agents might observe a group to see what route they would take, or agents might not<\/em> respond to a small group, in case those people had been sent by smugglers to distract from a larger group coming behind them. Other times, agents might deem the location where a group of migrants had first been spotted to be impractical for an apprehension, and instead wait to intercept them at another location.<\/p>\n Knowing someone\u2019s location didn\u2019t always lead to immediate action. Volunteers describe providing Border Patrol with the coordinates of someone who was lost but alive and then waiting, \u201csometimes [for] a week,\u201d for agents to reach the location, says Garcia Grewal, from Eagle Pass, Texas. They might be told \u201cOh, so-and-so went out there and they found remains,\u201d she recalls. \u201cWell, they weren\u2019t remains when we called you. They were alive.\u201d<\/p>\n CENGIZ YAR FOR MITTR<\/p>\n<\/figure><\/div>\n Mireya Morales, the younger sister of Jos\u00e9 Morales Bernal, who died by the landfill on the day before his birthday in April 2024, wasn’t aware her brother died near several surveillance towers, or that the government said these towers could save lives. “Well that’s good,” she said of that promise, “but in this case, it didn’t help my brother. And there’s no way to know exactly how things played out.”<\/p>\n “Border Patrol should have found him quickly,” she says, “and they could have done something.\u201d If they did, this journey into the United States\u2014his fourth trip\u2014likely would have ended with his apprehension, detention, and deportation to Mexico. But he would have seen the birthday texts that his sister sent the next day. At least he would have made it home to celebrate his eldest daughter\u2019s quincea\u00f1era, which took place earlier this year.<\/p>\n Stories like this are why Iv\u00e1n Chaar L\u00f3pez, an assistant professor of American studies at the University of Texas at Austin who leads its Border Tech Lab, says he\u2019d \u201crather talk about harms\u201d than about \u201cthe failure of an algorithm.\u201d He adds, \u201cA <\/strong>system may fail, but humans suffer.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Ultimately, any attempt to understand where things are going wrong is hampered by an institutional reluctance to measure the problem.<\/p>\n A complete audit of this virtual wall can only come from Border Patrol. The agency is, in some ways, increasingly equipped to take on that task: Agents told us that each time they apprehend someone, the location is logged with GPS coordinates, as are instances when Border Patrol sees evidence that someone crossed but cannot find them. It also has precise data on when each surveillance tower went up, which alerts came in, and how they were resolved. Having that information is the only way to measure whether the newest towers are truly missing fewer people than the previous generations.\u00a0<\/p>\n But researchers and outside oversight agencies say this ocean of data hasn\u2019t translated into a reliable system for measuring the effectiveness of the virtual wall. For example, CBP records the people it misses by logging \u201cgotaways,\u201d a tally of how many times agents see signs of someone who evaded apprehension\u2014footprints, appearances on camera, reports from other people who were apprehended. It\u2019s imperfect. And that creates room for interpretation.<\/p>\n \u201cThe goals with border enforcement have always been a moving target,\u201d says Jeremy Slack, a researcher of migration and border issues at the University of Texas at El Paso. \u201cThey\u2019re always set up so that it\u2019s a win-win.\u201d If apprehensions go up, for example, CBP says it means agents have gotten more effective at catching people. If apprehensions go down, it means the border is quiet because people are too scared to cross.\u00a0<\/p>\n JERRY GLASER\/U.S. CUSTOMS AND BORDER PROTECTION<\/p>\n<\/figure><\/div>\n That\u2019s not to mention the conflicting ideas within the agency about what the virtual wall was supposed to accomplish. Borkowski says higher-ups would ask how many fewer agents they could get by with if they built more towers. But supervisors receiving new towers told us they\u2019d often ask for more<\/em> agents, not fewer, because they now had more activity to respond to that had previously gone unseen.\u00a0<\/p>\n And if the goal was for the sight of the towers to deter people from crossing to begin with, an external study from RAND in 2020 was ambiguous: It found that deploying IFTs resulted in lower apprehension levels nearby but said this didn\u2019t mean the towers were actually deterring crossings. (Research by Boyce and colleagues found that earlier surveillance towers in southern Arizona pushed people to seek more difficult terrain out of view.) It leads to a question: Do the deaths near the virtual wall constitute unacceptable surveillance failures, or are they within the range of effectiveness the government deems acceptable? (CBP\u2019s response did not address our questions on how it explains these deaths.)<\/p>\n Against this backdrop, the Government Accountability Office and DHS\u2019s Office of the Inspector General have tried to focus on a narrower question: Is the virtual wall increasing the likelihood of apprehensions?\u00a0<\/p>\n The answer has been incomplete since 2014. That’s when the GAO first suggested that whenever agents log their activity in Border Patrol\u2019s database, they should include information about whether or not a piece of technology helped in their apprehension. This could at least do something to show Congress whether the technology is working. Border Patrol began collecting that information, but years of incremental improvements have been followed by repeated findings that the resulting data is unreliable or insufficient to determine how well the technology works. The reality, several people from Border Patrol told MIT Technology Review<\/em>, is that agents see it as a chore demanded only by bureaucrats who don\u2019t understand the realities of the border.\u00a0<\/p>\n It\u2019s \u201cspitting in the wind, to be honest,\u201d a former high-ranking official at DHS during the Biden administration told MIT Technology Review<\/em> on background. \u201cIf we have 10,000 people a day crossing in between the ports of entry, do you think an agent is worried about telling them how they freaking apprehended those people?\u201d Several other officials said that the logging of technology assists had improved, but not consistently enough to help much with analysis.\u00a0<\/p>\n And there is no procedure\u2014at the local or national level\u2014to examine individual deaths near the towers or analyze them collectively for surveillance failures. \u201cWe never thought about plotting [migrant deaths] to see if the towers were missing things or agents were missing people,\u201d said a former CBP official who evaluated how personnel handled deaths in custody.<\/p>\n \u201cNobody ever raised the issue,\u201d the official said, adding that doing so could reveal important gaps in the agency\u2019s approach: \u201cIf I still worked for CBP, and you brought it up, I would probably send some people to look.\u201d<\/p>\n In response to questions from MIT Technology Review<\/em>, CBP said that autonomous surveillance towers complement physical barriers by improving detection and situational awareness. Its statement did not address questions about its other technologies, or broader criticisms about how it evaluates the virtual wall.<\/p>\n CENGIZ YAR FOR MITTR<\/p>\n<\/figure><\/div>\n This lack of measurement has not slowed the enthusiasm for more technology funding. The government spending bill passed in July 2025 awarded $2.7 billion for border security technology alone, and CBP was quick to signal to industry that the money would soon start flowing. \u201cWe\u2019ve got an historic investment in infrastructure and technology coming up,\u201d a CBP director told tech companies in an industry webinar that month. In a December 2025 interview, when he was director of homeland security and immigration at the America First Policy Institute, Cooper Smith described the technology investments as \u201cfortifying\u201d the border against a future president who might be, in his estimation, weaker on the border than Trump. (According to LegiStorm, a research organization that focuses on political staffers, Smith now serves in a policy-focused role with CBP.) The number of Border Patrol agents has climbed too, to nearly 21,500 agents as of June 2026\u2014the highest in the agency\u2019s history.\u00a0<\/p>\n In the Big Bend region of Texas, surveillance towers are becoming a focus of local politics: Officials and residents across party lines, including the sheriff of Terrell County, are asking for Anduril towers instead of a controversial new border barrier project that\u2019s recently been halted.<\/p>\n CBP has announced a desire to spend $1 billion on nearly 1,500 more towers by 2034. The law now requires all these towers to be equipped with AI. In December 2025, Anduril\u2019s Palmer Luckey said the towers remained the company\u2019s best-selling product, one that gives \u201cbasically perfect situational awareness of what\u2019s going on in the area.\u201d Anduril\u2019s towers have been sold abroad\u2014to enforce the UK\u2019s borders, defend US Marine Corps bases in Japan and elsewhere, and serve as drone defenses for an Australian Air Force base.\u00a0<\/p>\n But as for CBP, Anduril will no longer be the only game in town; General Dynamics has now released AI towers of its own and received an order for them in June from CBP worth up to $115 million. The Electronic Frontier Foundation\u2014which has tracked surveillance towers since 2022\u2014says some have already been spotted at the border.<\/p>\n This time around, the agency will be spending this money with even less oversight than it had just a couple of years ago. In October 2025, the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees CBP, dissolved its department-level office that oversaw major spending programs.<\/p>\n CENGIZ YAR FOR MITTR<\/p>\n<\/figure><\/div>\n Most of the records on human remains that MIT Technology Review<\/em> collected were current only through the fall of 2025 or, in a handful of cases, early 2026. Even those dates come with a caveat: Many remains are never found, and others are found months after someone died. The reports can then take months to be released via public record requests. That makes it nearly impossible to keep track of how many people have died near surveillance towers in anything close to real time.<\/p>\n Still, the border today is significantly quieter. The latest figures from DHS show just 128,009 \u201cenforcement encounters\u201d from January to August 2026, compared with more than 2.4 million during the same period in 2024 (\u201cencounters\u201d count each of Border Patrol\u2019s interactions, not individual people).<\/p>\n Even as border crossing rates decrease and DHS speeds ahead with its tower acquisition plans, people are still dying within range of the surveillance towers.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n On September 14 2025, a 30-year-old Mexican woman named Graciela G\u00f3mez Hern\u00e1ndez died just over 350 yards away from the physical border wall that separated Southern California from Tijuana\u2014and within one mile of an RVSS tower. Earlier that afternoon, she had told her family that she could not walk any further, and her voice notes abruptly stopped.\u00a0<\/p>\n Her skeletonized remains were recovered nearly three weeks later, on October 4. Some of her bones were missing, and there was \u201capparent animal activity \u2026 to the ribs,\u201d as the medical examiner\u2019s report read.\u00a0<\/p>\n Sara Stroud, an organizer with the Borderlands Relief Collective, a volunteer humanitarian group that leaves water and supplies in a wilderness area frequented by people crossing the border, went to the site of her death a few days later to put up a memorial cross. A Border Patrol helicopter showed up almost immediately, flying low circles above the volunteers.\u00a0<\/p>\n Between the helicopter and the RVSS tower that was visible in the background, \u201cI was astounded about how we were being surveilled the whole time,\u201d Stroud says, adding that this was especially stark in contrast to the agency\u2019s often slow\u2014or absent\u2014responses to people who\u2019d died on camera.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cAre you telling me you didn\u2019t see it or you did<\/em> see it?\u201d she asks. \u201cBecause if you did see it, that\u2019s horrible. And if they can\u2019t, then how do you explain that?\u201d<\/p>\n Additional reporting by Lillian Perlmutter.<\/em><\/p>\n This work was supported by a grant from the <\/em>Tarbell Center for AI Journalism<\/em>.<\/em>Building the virtual wall <\/h3>\n
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![\"Retired](\"https:\/\/wp.technologyreview.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/082926-CengizYar-MITTechReview-30.jpg\")
Stories of some of the people that died near RVSS towers<\/h4>\n
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The next watchers<\/h3>\n
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Stories of some of the people who died near IFTs<\/h4>\n
\nThe age of autonomy<\/h2>\n
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<\/p>\n
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Stories of some of the people that died near Anduril’s autonomous surveillance towers<\/h4>\n
What happens next<\/h3>\n
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