AINEWS
A year long investigation found hundreds died near AI enabled border surveillance towers. The four reforms read like a listicle; they are gates a planned $1 billion, 2034 expansion needs to clear.
In one stretch of New Mexico desert, more than 18 people died in 2024 within range of surveillance towers that were meant to see them. Some walked through working coverage. Their remains went unnoticed for weeks, according to a year-long investigation by MIT Technology Review and Times of San Diego that mapped deaths near the US-Mexico border's "virtual wall" of AI-enabled towers.
The investigation counted at least 1,050 deaths near the network since 2015, a tally its reporters describe as a deliberate undercount. They analyzed roughly 600 towers; the government says 800 operate today, and there is no public map. Under a stated US government plan, the network is set to roughly triple by 2034, at a cost of about $1 billion. The defense contractor Anduril, which builds the newest generation of towers, continues to win major border-security contracts.
The four reforms the investigation proposes read like a listicle. They function as four pre-expansion accountability gates. The question is which of them the 2034 build will be forced to clear.
The first reform is a comprehensive audit by US Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the agency that runs the network. The methodology piece explains why the outside count is incomplete: CBP does not publish a comprehensive map of the virtual wall, so the investigation relied on mapping led by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and verified by satellite imagery. An internal audit would draw on CBP's own records, which it has kept since at least 2015. "If I were the federal government, I would do an audit, because this feels like it's not working," said New Mexico state representative Sarah Silva after the reporters showed her the 2024 figure for her district.
The second reform is a fix to the way the agency tracks deaths and remains. Border Patrol's internal database, the Border Safety Initiative Tracking System, has been in place since 2007, but national rules for entering cases only landed in 2021. In April 2025, the Government Accountability Office found that the Missing Migrant Program had improved its data collection but had no plan to use that data to measure whether it was reducing deaths, the program's stated goal. GAO made two recommendations. Neither has been implemented.
The third gate has been pending the longest. In 2014, the GAO recommended that agents log every time a piece of surveillance technology helped them apprehend someone. CBP agreed. By 2017, the GAO reported the data was unreliable; agents in Texas had credited a specific type of tower in apprehensions hundreds of times, even though no such towers existed in the state. Border Patrol said it would retrain. A former CBP official who served during the Biden administration, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss sensitive issues, called the mandate "spitting in the wind, to be honest." In August 2021, more than seven years after the 2014 agreement, CBP still had not produced any analysis of tower effectiveness. One was finished in 2022; its results are not public.
The fourth reform is procedural. When agents find a body believed to belong to a migrant, automatically check whether the death occurred within range of a tower, and if so, determine what the system detected and whether agents responded. There is currently no requirement to make that check, and CBP typically deletes surveillance footage from the towers after 30 days unless an internal review is opened, which usually happens only for deaths in custody. That is the gate that would have done the most for the New Mexico stretch where 18 people died in 2024: a single location documented in the investigation saw several deaths within a few months, sometimes just hundreds of feet from one another and from an advanced AI tower.
The four gates can be cleared one at a time. Treated together, they are the only check on whether the next round of towers is being built as a fix or as a scale-up of the same system. The window is the gap between this investigation and the next contract award. The watch item is whether the 2034 build is conditioned on those four gates being passed first, or whether Anduril's contract pipeline moves on its own schedule.