MIT Technology Review found 1,050 people died near US-Mexico border surveillance towers between 2015 and 2024, exposing systemic failures in the virtual wall system.
The report highlights cases where individuals walked undetected through areas monitored by advanced AI-enabled towers and later died nearby, where their bodies remained unnoticed for weeks or months.
These deaths reflect flaws in the virtual wall, including broken towers, failed algorithms, and unresponsive agents.
The US is set to spend $1 billion to triple the size of the virtual wall by 2034. MIT Technology Review recommends that Customs and Border Protection (CBP) conduct a comprehensive audit of deaths near the virtual wall.
The report notes that CBP has had the ability to audit its surveillance network since at least 2015 but has never done so.
An internal audit would provide a more accurate count of deaths and help identify the most problematic areas of the border.
CBP also needs to improve its tracking of migrant deaths and how surveillance technology contributes to apprehensions. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that the agency’s current system for tracking deaths is incomplete, with many cases still not being recorded.
Additionally, the Missing Migrant Program, launched in 2017, lacks a plan to measure its effectiveness in reducing deaths or increasing rescues.
"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. She cited data showing over 18 people died near surveillance towers in her district in 2024 alone.
The report emphasizes the need for an audit to address the limitations of current data collection methods and improve transparency.
The report also calls for CBP to investigate deaths as potential surveillance failures. Agents should automatically check every migrant death against its internal database of towers to determine if the system failed to detect the person.
The report warns that without this process, valuable evidence about the death goes unexamined, and the virtual wall is not routinely treated as a potential cause of these fatalities.
Source: mittr
