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For the next few weeks, Closing Argument will be on the road, bringing you stories about the border, ICE, juvenile justice and bail reform from around the Southwest.
Heading west along the Texas-Mexico border into Big Bend Ranch State Park, the Martian landscape announces itself almost violently. One moment you're in a sleepy resort town of 100 or so people, and the next, the highway shoots down and up like a roller coaster, walled by imposing rock faces that fade into a panorama of mesas and plateaus. At the lowest point, a skinny body of water runs so gentle, you have to look at a map to convince yourself it could be named the Rio Grande.
About 45 minutes later, the park goes out with more of a whimper. The rippling gorges give way to rolling hills, light scrub, and eventually — when you’re still not sure you’ve left the park — the small town of Redford, Texas.
The border announces itself quietly here. First, an adopt-a-highway sign gestures toward a history mostly forgotten by the rest of the country, but one that resonates powerfully in the Big Bend region. It’s dedicated to the memory of Esequiel Hernández Jr., an 18-year-old American citizen who was shot and killed by a U.S. Marine in 1997, after the Clinton administration moved to militarize the border.
Then, a few more miles down the road, an unassuming shiny pole appears, jutting from a hilltop, maybe 30 feet into the air — easy to miss if you don’t know what you’re looking at. It’s an autonomous surveillance tower, capable of collecting long-range video alongside thermal and infrared sensors. The towers are just one element of what the Department of Homeland Security has come to call a “smart wall,” a layered mix of physical barriers and detection technology. Most Americans have seen images of the steel bollard walls at various points along the border, but, at present, those actual walls represent a minority of the enforcement infrastructure along the nearly 2,000-mile span of the U.S. border with Mexico.
The rest of this infrastructure is less photogenic, but comprises an intricate system of technology expansive enough to show parts of itself thousands of miles from this big, little river. Beryl Lipton, a senior investigative researcher at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told me that border enforcement doesn’t stop at the line on the map or the moment of crossing.
“Today’s technologies — high-definition cameras, microphones, digital data harvesting and AI-driven analysis — are being used to create an environment of mass surveillance that ensnares almost all individuals within the U.S.,” Lipton said.
The technology deployed on the border includes everything from hyper-visible tethered aerostats — massive blimp-like detection platforms hovering thousands of feet over the desert — to stealthy devices like unattended ground sensors to detect footsteps, and license plate scanners disguised as traffic cones. While many of these technologies are increasingly being updated with various forms of artificial intelligence, DHS distinguishes between systems that merely detect movement and those that use biometric technology to identify or track individuals.
According to DHS policy, detection technology — like the hundreds of autonomous towers that now dot the borderlands — is not considered a “rights-impacting” use of AI because those structures only detect. Civil liberties groups like EFF push back that the towers are capable of taking high-resolution images that the government could theoretically analyze later.
But there’s also border tech that is using AI to identify people in real time, and it’s not staying at the border. ICE agents are increasingly using a facial recognition tool and database known as Mobile Fortify, built on technology initially developed for Customs and Border Patrol officers to check the identity and immigration status of people entering or exiting the U.S. Last spring, 404 Media first reported on this use of AI facial recognition along the border, drawing on leaked internal ICE emails.
Last week, The New York Times reported that when a U.S. citizen in Minneapolis was following ICE agents to observe their conduct, one agent addressed her by name — information the agent may have obtained using some kind of facial recognition system, though DHS would not specify whether that was the case or which technology ICE is using. And while there’s something chilling about government agents generating a correct identification this way, the technology is also prone to false positives and errors, and according to reporting by WIRED, is being used by DHS for identity “verification” tasks it wasn’t designed for.
Surveillance isn’t the only border feature that immigration enforcement officers are bringing into the interior of the country. The on-and-off militarization that has characterized parts of the border for over half a century is increasingly a feature of ICE enforcement as well. Late last week, writing for The New York Times, reporter and former U.S. Marine Thomas Gibbons-Neff described some of the advanced weaponry that some agents are now carrying as “the physical manifestation of decades of war, fine-tuned and perfected for close-quarters killing.” The hardware mounted in their high-powered rifles includes suppressors, laser sights and modifications to make the rapid loading of ammunition faster.
But even as some border tools seem to migrate inwards, the borderlands still absorb a kind of enforcement density the rest of the country rarely sees. The Big Bend region has active-duty military personnel on site for the first time in 30 years. Brewster County Judge Greg Henington told me that despite some initial anxieties, residents have not been overly frustrated with the presence. County judges in Texas perform many of the functions of a county executive. “I can assure you people would be ringing my phone off the wall if that was an issue,” he said.
A border wall through Big Bend has long been seen as impractical and unnecessary, given how hard the rugged terrain is to cross, or to build on. The Big Bend Sentinel reported this week, however, that the federal government is currently seeking leases for wall construction that could decimate swaths of the region’s natural beauty and recreational access to the river. Known for some of the darkest skies in the country, stargazers have also worried for years about federal plans to flood the region with more “smartwall” tech, including stadium-style floodlights.
Further west in Arizona, a group of more than a dozen environmental organizations and Native American tribes is also warning about the environmental impact that bollard construction will have on endangered wildcats, bears, and other wildlife, along with disrupting water flows during river-swelling rains.
DHS has used waivers to push these projects along, citing an “acute and immediate need” to bypass the environmental impact studies and public transparency steps that large infrastructure work typically requires.
But by the administration’s own numbers, border crossings are currently at a 50-year low. “Consequences deter illegal crossings; when aliens know they will be detained at our border instead of being quickly released and paroled, like they were under Joe Biden, the results speak for themselves,” DHS Secretary Kristi Noem said at a press conference on Wednesday.
What’s less clear is the marginal impact that bollards, towers and blimps have had. Kathleen Bush-Joseph, a policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, a non-partisan think tank, told me that infrastructure can be strategically effective, helping funnel crossings towards places where agents are located. But she said that the dominant drivers for the drop in border crossings have been increased enforcement by Mexican authorities and the Trump administration’s deterrence campaign.
“From day one,” Bush-Joseph said, “the government has been broadcasting a message of “'don't come, or you’ll be detained,’ and people are receiving that message around the world.”