MIT Technology Review investigation finds AI-enabled border towers failed to prevent deaths

An investigation by MIT Technology Review and Times of San Diego found that AI-enabled surveillance towers along the US-Mexico border failed to detect people who later died nearby, often remaining unnoticed for weeks or months.

The towers, part of the US government’s "virtual wall" program, are operated by US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and include advanced, AI-enabled systems built by defense contractors such as Anduril. The US plans to spend $1 billion to triple the size of the virtual wall by 2034.

Journalists documented systemic failures: broken towers, algorithms that failed to detect people, and agents who did not respond to alerts. These failures occurred despite the towers being designed to enhance border security and prevent migrant deaths.

The investigation identified over 1,050 deaths near surveillance towers, but the actual number is likely higher due to incomplete tracking by CBP. The agency does not publish a comprehensive map of its virtual wall, and journalists relied on mapping work by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and satellite imagery to verify tower locations and installation dates.

The report highlights the lack of federal oversight and data tracking. CBP has never conducted a comprehensive audit of deaths near the towers, despite having the capability to do so since at least 2015. The agency also lacks a national system for tracking migrant deaths, relying instead on fragmented and inconsistent records from multiple agencies.

The investigation also found that CBP’s efforts to track the effectiveness of surveillance technology have been inadequate. In 2014, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) recommended that Border Patrol agents log when technology helped apprehend someone, but the data collected was found to be inaccurate and unreliable. CBP agreed to improve but has not produced a public analysis of the towers’ effectiveness, despite a 2022 review.

The report calls for four key actions to address these failures: conducting a comprehensive audit of deaths near the towers, fixing the way migrant deaths are tracked, improving the tracking of cases where surveillance technology leads to apprehensions, and investigating deaths as potential surveillance failures.