Technology for surveillance makes the US-Mexico border even deadlier

At the southern US border in the middle of the Arizona wilderness, a monitoring tower more than 150 feet high rises, its swivelling cameras scanning the valley below.

It can observe three surrounding groups and the foothills of the Baboquivari Mountains, one of the most perilous routes for migrants travelling from Mexico to the United States, from a distance of up to 7.5 miles.

The recently installed tower is one of the most innovative upgrades to the purported virtual border wall that US border enforcement vendors claim they rely on to protect the approximately 2,000 mile frontier.

However, educators and humanitarians worry that the expanding surveillance technology is turning migrants into a death trap.

Sam Chambers, an arizona nation college geographer who specialises in migration and surveillance infrastructure, said that “out here, surveillance is loss of life.”

He told Thomson Reuters that “the more cameras you put up, the more migrants are driven to take longer, riskier routes to evade them, placing their bodies under strain and their lives in danger.”

The tucson sector of the Arizona border, one of the busiest and bloodiest points of entry for migrants from Mexico, is where the rising collection of cameras, sensors, drones, and aerial monitoring is most noticeable.

According to Chambers, US border authorities have been attempting to prevent migrants from entering urban areas since the 1990s, gradually replacing traditional checkpoints with newer technology that uses large areas of land for video projection.

Chambers creates intricate models to demonstrate how camera towers force migrants to take detours into difficult-to-reveal mountainous regions and deserts, where they perish from thirst and exposure to extreme weather, instead of taking safer, more direct routes.

He determined that the routes that migrants frequently use to escape being discovered require more water than they are able to carry and more effort than the typical ones, with fatal consequences.

Using information from the coroner’s office, chambers has mapped how the locations of deaths found in the barren tract have altered in response to the surveillance drive, with more bodies now being discovered in remote areas outside the range of the towers.

He claimed that there was “simply no humane manner” to monitor the border.

States are increasingly using virtual technology to disclose migration flows and enforce border controls as the number of people escaping conflict, poverty, and environmental calamity reaches record highs globally.

According to a central authority accountability office report, former President Donald Trump authorised $743 million for border monitoring technology between 2017 and 20.

President Joe Biden suspended the project on his first day in office and promised a more “humane” approach to immigration policy, while Donald Trump planned to build a physical border wall.

The biden administration is investing in virtual surveillance technology and advocating for tech-enabled intelligent borders that employ data analysis and artificial intelligence to detect and respond to events.

In July, Biden signed an agreement with the Mexican government to invest more than $1.5 billion in border infrastructure, with a large portion of the money going to cutting-edge technology.

$1 billion will be spent on each “border infrastructure” and “investments in present border protection generation and belongings” under Biden’s 2022 price range plan.

The operations room at the border patrol’s Tucson station receives an incredible amount of intelligence from dealers.

There are real-time feeds from several movement sensors located along potential migration routes, as well as images from powerful camera towers and quick-range cameras buried in the forest. Cameras even show the Nogales, Arizona border city’s underground drainage system as migrants struggle through the tunnels.

An app that is currently being tested in Arizona will soon allow agents in the region to access all of the statistics streaming into the operations room on their smartphones.

Border patrol agent and recently certified drone pilot Jose Robert Ortiz said, “here is the testing area for all sorts of equipment.”

According to border officials, human traffickers are to blame for the deaths of migrants, and high-tech surveillance is essential to discover — and shop — persons in a task that is getting harder and harder.

Over 2 million undocumented immigrants were arrested in this past year. According to data gathered by the UN’s international organisation for migration, the number of deaths that were officially reported along the US-Mexico border peaked at 727 last year.

“(Human traffickers) take them up to the mountains and instruct them to move since this is a good threat. They don’t care about people, according to john Mennell, a border patrol unit spokesperson for Arizona.

“When people get into danger, we step in to help them, and the surveillance helps us identify where they are,” he added, claiming that marketers respond to more than a dozen calls for assistance each day.

According to Paige Corich-Kleim, a spokesman for the nonprofit organisation no más muertes, which stands for “no more deaths,” the involvement of people smugglers was mostly a reaction to US border policies.

Making the crossing more challenging forced migrants to ask those groups for assistance, she claimed, adding that it was a simple adventure.

Dealers said it’s difficult to make a clear link between the monitoring technology and a rise in border arrests, but the equipment does provide “situational cognizance” in an environment when law enforcement is overwhelmed by migrants wanting to cross.

After a group of migrants triggered a motion sensor in late September, sellers wirelessly adjusted a camera to focus in on them as they crossed a high ridge.

The group moved just eight miles outside the range of the camera, causing the figures on the computer screen to appear slightly hazy. However, marketers planned to stop them after they descended the mountain because they knew the route they were likely to follow.

Once a migrant enters a town on foot or is picked up by a car, marketers believe they have three days to capture them before they blend in with the general population, or what marketers refer to as the disappearing line.

The goal in this situation is to “detect, discover, and classify,” according to Steve Adkison, deputy sector leader of border patrol in Tucson. “Location dominance is our goal.”

Since humanitarian organisations began keeping track in the 1990s, 225 remains have been discovered close to the Arizona border; however, this number is likely significantly understated because bodies frequently rot for years in the desolate area before they are discovered.

raymond daukei, an immigrant rights advocate and member of the tohono o’odham native american group, whose reservation crosses the border, claimed that “border patrol weaponized the wasteland.”

Migration rarely reached the reservation’s remote areas while daukei was growing up in the 1980s, but now, he claimed, increased policing in metropolitan areas is directing more people to the tribe’s property.

Leaders of the Tohono o’odham tribe have reluctantly approved the new monitoring towers, saying they are essential to protect tribal members from the smuggling cartels that are increasingly entering their territory.

“There are now people walking around with rifles, and houses have been broken into… Kendall Jose, vice-chairman of the reservation’s chukut kuk sector, where surveillance towers had just been built, declared, “We’re determined for protection.

The humanitarian organisations that have sprung up to provide food, water, and medical assistance to migrants are sceptical that more surveillance would lead to a more secure border region.

According to corich-kleim of no más muertes, “there’s this idea that building a wall is violent and xenophobic but brilliant tech is not.” however there is no doubt that it has the same effect.