Cowboys and Algorithms

It’s only a matter of time before the drones, spy blimps, license plate readers, and motion-activated cameras come to the rest of America.

This article appears in the August 2025 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here.

Santa Cruz County, Arizona, is the smallest county in the Grand Canyon State, but its location makes it significant. Home to more than 50,000 people, the vast majority of whom identify as Hispanic or Latino, the county is located in the southernmost part of central Arizona and shares a 54-mile stretch of border with the Mexican state of Sonora.

Along this stretch of land is Nogales, the county’s administrative seat and a major port of entry into the United States; millions of people and billions of dollars in trade pass through it every year. Nogales, Arizona, and Nogales, Sonora, are bisected by a demarcation line established by the purchase, six years after the Mexican-American War, of Mexican land by the United States. But the sister cities—collectively referred to as Ambos Nogales—comprise a single urban area characterized by high levels of cross-border interaction and a common culture.

Today, the line bifurcating Nogales and other border communities is over- and undergirded by a militarized and surveillance-driven security apparatus. The latter established a foothold under the Obama and Biden administrations “as a more humane alternative to other border enforcement methods, such as building walls or putting children in cages,” Petra Molnar, associate director of the Refugee Law Lab at York University, writes in The Walls Have Eyes: Surviving Migration in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. “People will still arrive, but they’re going to take more circuitous routes to try to avoid surveillance, leading to an exponential increase of deaths,” she told the Prospect.

A U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) spokesperson denied this, telling the Prospect that “preventing the loss of life is core to our mission, and CBP personnel endeavor to rescue those in distress, a particularly important mission in the harsh environments along the southwest border.” In 2017, the agency established the Missing Migrant Program, an initiative focused on preventing deaths during attempted border crossings. However, according to CBP’s own data, migration-related deaths in the borderlands surged by 57 percent between October 2021 and September 2022.

Prevention through deterrence has been central to the bipartisan border security project for decades. Today, “the way it manifests itself visibly is just like East Germany,” Santa Cruz County Sheriff David Hathaway said in an interview with the Prospect. “Walls don’t just keep people out. They keep people in.”

Prevention through deterrence has been central to the bipartisan border security project for decades.

Walls are but one ingredient in the borderlands’ mix of barriers. In recent years, autonomous surveillance towers, drones, spy blimps, license plate readers, and motion-activated cameras have also been put in place. In the borderlands, no one is free from the ever-expanding surveillance and data collection nexus operated by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Federal agents have spent years perfecting a range of techniques and technologies that undermine civil liberties, all with the goal of sustaining the surveillance-driven immigration enforcement apparatus. The nearly ubiquitous surveillance has produced what is known as the panopticon effect.

“The panopticon [effect] is, of course, you think that they’re watching you, but they might not be,” Todd Miller, author of Build Bridges, Not Walls: A Journey to a World Without Borders, told the Prospect. “Like in the prison system, a camera could be there, but it might be turned off and no one’s looking, but psychologically, you think people are watching you.”

Nothing screams panopticon quite like CBP’s Tethered Aerostat Radar System (TARS), semi-stationary blimps providing low-altitude surveillance of the U.S.-Mexico border, Florida Keys, and Puerto Rico. TARS operators relay surveillance data to DHS, law enforcement, and military partners. Since the 2010s, CBP has contracted with British defense contractor QinetiQ and with Peraton—a private equity–owned national-security company based in Virginia—to maintain the program. The agency has dumped hundreds of millions of dollars into TARS. Last year, it also deployed a new aerostat in the Florida Keys amid “upticks in transportation avenues and conveyances for illegal smuggling, fishing, and immigration activities,” according to the agency’s website.

On March 6, the Senate passed the Coast Guard Authorization Act, instructing the U.S. Coast Guard and CBP to procure blimp-based surveillance systems for deployment in additional areas of operation. The move came one day after an aerostat at South Padre Island in Texas broke free and, after drifting hundreds of miles, crash-landed on a ranch property outside Dallas.

Runaway spy blimps aside, license plate readers (LPRs) can also be found throughout the borderlands. These devices, some of which are covert, capture images of license plates and convert those images into data. CBP uses that data to identify vehicles believed to be linked to cross-border crimes. LPRs also produce real-time alerts to allow CBP and other federal agencies to intercept suspicious vehicles.

For Hathaway, a self-described “big, tall gringo,” LPRs are part and parcel of dragnet surveillance in the borderlands. “I drive in a car with Arizona license plates, but I will get pulled over,” he told the Prospect.

Autonomous surveillance towers installed by CBP in the borderlands are the most visible manifestation of smart border technology to date, with the agency describing them as “a partner that never sleeps, never needs to take a coffee break, never even blinks.” CBP has received more than $700 million in federal funding for its surveillance tower program since 2017. Over the next decade or so, it will spend approximately $68 million to expand the program by upgrading existing towers and constructing hundreds more.

In early April, CBP unveiled plans to integrate machine-learning capabilities into the existing surveillance towers. First reported by The Intercept, modernizing these towers will facilitate automatic detection of anyone and anything moving near the Tucson-area border zone in Arizona. CBP has also tasked Google with operating “a central repository for video surveillance data,” supported by MAGE, a cloud computing platform. As part of the project, CBP is also partnering with IBM and Equitus, which will provide the software needed to collect visual data. That data will be stored on the agency’s Google Cloud.

The CBP spokesperson told the Prospect that technology affords the agency “persistent surveillance of the border region,” which reduces the need for manpower on the border and provides greater coverage to interdict migrant crossings, which have dropped significantly under the Trump administration.

But for residents of border communities, surveillance towers loom not just physically but mentally, creating a sense of perpetual observation while eroding any semblance of privacy. “They’re scanning the whole community and … zooming in on just regular day-to-day people going about their life,” Hathaway said.

ON THEIR NIGHTLY WALKS ALONG THE BORDER, David and Karen Hathaway see more than just a star-studded sky; they often spot a CBP-operated Predator B drone flying above. The drone is manufactured by General Atomics, a major defense contractor for the U.S. military. As Miller points out, the very same firms that “have been selling their products to the military now have another branch market for border surveillance.”

In September 2024, Hathaway testified before the House Committee on Homeland Security, telling lawmakers that he and other residents of border communities would prefer not to see their quiet neighborhoods “turned into a police state or a war zone.” During our interview, he reflected on an ordeal his wife had experienced when the two of them were returning home from the Mexican side of the border.

CBP uses facial biometrics for identity verification purposes at land border crossings, snapping pictures of travelers in pedestrian lanes before allowing them to pass through. The agency leverages one-to-one facial recognition technology to compare people’s facial features with the photos in their travel documents. According to CBP’s website, this ostensibly creates a “more seamless, secure, and safer travel experience,” but that wasn’t the case for Karen Hathaway. When she had her picture taken, the matching system spit out a red flag.

In recent months, Peter Thiel’s Palantir has secured nearly a billion dollars in government contracts.

Hathaway figured it was an anomaly, as both of them have passports and regularly travel across the border, but the authorities promptly escorted Karen Hathaway to a room where she was detained and had her cellphone taken away. “Eventually that episode ends, but the next time we crossed there was a red flag in the computer that [says] this person has been detained before, so it automatically creates another red flag every time,” he said.

It later occurred to his wife that, in her passport photo, she did not have glasses on. Hathaway told the Prospect she now avoids wearing glasses and tries to mimic the hairstyle from her passport photo prior to re-entry. “I think that’s a real, graphic demonstration of this kind of surveillance state that’s run amok down here,” he said.

Procurement documents reviewed by the Prospect reveal CBP’s intent to expand its error-prone identity verification system to land vehicles with the goal of collecting drivers’ and passengers’ facial biometrics. Dave Maass, director of investigations at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, called the capturing of biometrics that might be used for other purposes later on “a grave concern.” Moreover, given that “lots of people who live in the Mexican cities on the other side have special passes that allow them to cross regularly into the U.S.,” expanding the identity verification system to land vehicles may provide another avenue for CBP to entangle residents of cross-border communities in its technological dragnet.

WHEN CBP SEIZES ELECTRONIC DEVICES at the border during questioning or detention, the agency engages in a widely used intelligence practice known as document and media exploitation (DOMEX). This practice involves the scraping and analysis of contents from phones and laptops. The contents of those devices are then combined with data from myriad sources, including government databases, social media, and other records. There are minimal restrictions on what CBP can extract from electronic devices and how it may use that information. The agency’s own directive indicates that border agents may retain records from seized devices upon establishing probable cause or if “the information relates to immigration, customs, and other enforcement matters.” The bar is equally low for intelligence-sharing with other agencies.

The DHS Office of Intelligence and Analysis (I&A), which provides intelligence support to CBP and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), “has a mandate as broad as the rest of the department,” said Spencer Reynolds, senior counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice. The civilian intelligence-sharing arm of DHS has gained a reputation for targeting journalists and activists, and running large-scale collection operations in coercive environments like immigrant detention centers and jails.

“The office analyzes contents of phones or laptops seized by agencies like CBP and ICE, comparing them with personal data to create detailed pictures of people, their social networks, and their habits,” Reynolds told the Prospect. “I&A’s risks are particularly high under an administration that is making good on its promises to go after critics and immigrants.”

In June, ICE released a notice of intent to sole-source a training contract to Magnet Forensics, a digital investigations software development company. Its platform includes Magnet Graykey, a smartphone-cracking software capable of providing “same-day access to the latest iOS and Android devices—often in under one hour,” its website states.

For its part, CBP announced in May plans to renew its contract with Cellebrite, an Israeli digital forensics company with a long-standing history of partnerships with local law enforcement and DHS. Similarly to Graykey, Cellebrite’s flagship tool—the Universal Forensic Extraction Device—allows clients to extract data from a broad range of electronic devices.

INTELLIGENCE-SHARING IS AT THE HEART of I&A’s broad-based mission. It was also the focus of an executive order handed down by President Trump in March. Since then, his administration has been laying the groundwork for a large-scale strategic partnership with Peter Thiel’s Palantir. In recent months, the data analytics software giant has secured nearly a billion dollars in government contracts and re-ups.

On April 10, ICE disclosed that it had tapped Thiel’s company to develop a prototype for ImmigrationOS, a program designed to track people who are self-deporting and accelerate the agency’s targeting of those it is seeking to deport. Palantir, which began partnering with ICE in the early 2010s, currently operates a case management system for the agency. As 404 Media reported, its database enables ICE “to search for and filter people by hundreds of different, highly specific categories,” ranging from physical characteristics to LPR data.

Three days before ICE revealed its re-up with Palantir, the agency entered into a memorandum of understanding with the U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS). The memo shredded taxpayer privacy protections and granted ICE permission to request sensitive information from the IRS on individuals facing deportation. It was a stark departure from IRS best practices, which previously had emphasized neutrality and set a high bar for information-sharing with law enforcement. Prior to the finalization of the memo, top officials at the agency—including former acting IRS commissioner Melanie Krause, a Trump appointee—resigned in protest of the agreement, alleging it would violate taxpayer privacy laws.

On April 11, WIRED exposed Palantir’s collaboration with Elon Musk’s now-discredited Department of Government Efficiency to develop a “mega API” for accessing IRS records and sharing them throughout the federal government. This came after DHS and at least three other agencies had partnered with Palantir for access to its flagship data analytics platform, Foundry.

The idea of centralizing extensive data on all Americans prompted sharp bipartisan pushback. In a June 17 letter to Palantir chief executive officer Alex Karp, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) and nine other Democratic lawmakers voiced opposition to the IRS mega-database, describing it as a “surveillance nightmare that raises a host of legal concerns.”

Further opening the floodgates to unprecedented data sharing, the Airlines Reporting Corporation (ARC)—a lesser-known data broker with a chokehold on the market for information-sharing in the aviation industry—secured a sole-source contract from ICE to provide software services in May, procurement documents seen by the Prospect show. The U.S. Department of Defense, U.S. Department of the Treasury, and CBP have also contracted with ARC, which will sell an assortment of airline passengers’ travel data to ICE for immigration enforcement purposes.

FUNDING FOR THE BORDER-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX has steadily increased over the past decade, and private-sector partners of all stripes have been eager to cash in. Some, like IBM and Google, are household names, but others are as obscure as they are numerous. Researchers at the Electronic Frontier Foundation have been tracking the growing number of small-time players making their foray into the industry, documenting hundreds of tech companies that specialize in everything from biometrics to unattended ground sensors (which can detect footsteps).

The chilling effect of border authorities and immigration agents scooping up just about anyone suspected of crimmigration has reverberated across the country. The rise of indiscriminate enforcement activities—CBP raiding places of work and masked ICE agents detaining people at immigration courts and Home Depots—signals a nationwide implementation of the surveillance-driven immigration enforcement apparatus.

“Just because it’s happening at the border doesn’t mean it’s going to stay at the border,” Molnar told the Prospect. “We all need to pay attention to what happens in the border and in migration because it actually impacts all of us.”