How we made the first comprehensive map of deaths along the US border’s “virtual wall”

The story

technologyreview.com: Our 15-month investigation into death and surveillance along the US-Mexico border began with a simple question: Why did so many people die near government surveillance towers meant to help track and apprehend them? This story is part of Dying on Camera , a collaboration between MIT Technology Review and Times of San Diego . Journalists in both newsrooms spent the past year examining the failures of border surveillance technology and uncovering the stories of the people who die in the borderlands . To answer that question, we looked through thousands of pages of government documents, visited the border multiple times, and interviewed more than 45 people, including current and former White House advisors, presidential appointees, Border Patrol agents, medical examiners, sheriffs, humanitarian volunteers, and employees of tech companies. The result of our investigation is the first comprehensive map and analysis of deaths near border surveillance towers. Here’s how we built it, what decisions we made along the way, and what the data can and can’t tell us. Our data The investigation relied on knowing where migrants have died and where and when US Customs and Border Protection towers were installed. We analyzed cases dating back to 2015, allowing us to cover different border policies, presidential administrations, and tower technologies. Migrant deaths The US-Mexico border has been called the world’s deadliest land border, and Border Patrol estimates that more than 10,000 people have died during crossings since 2000—a figure that’s widely considered an undercount. But the amount of information available publicly on where and when these people died, and who they were, varies widely. Some remains are never discovered, and for those that are, there’s no national protocol for how the records are handled. We considered a case for further analysis if we could confirm three basic things: whether the person was believed to have been crossing the border, where the remains were fo

technologyreview.com: MIT Technology Review today published our investigation into how many people have died near the “virtual wall” of surveillance towers that the US government has installed along the US-Mexico border. We found cases of people who walked undetected through areas surveilled by advanced, AI-enabled towers and later died nearby, where their bodies remained unnoticed for weeks or months. These cases reflect systemic flaws in the virtual wall: broken towers, algorithms that failed to detect people, and agents who simply did not respond to alerts. This story is part of Dying on Camera , a collaboration between MIT Technology Review and Times of San Diego . Journalists in both newsrooms spent the past year examining the failures of border surveillance technology and uncovering the stories of the people who die in the borderlands . Each of these deaths should have raised alarms inside US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) about the flaws in the agency’s surveillance network. This is particularly true for cases near the latest towers built by the defense company Anduril, which continues to win major contracts and is poised to benefit from the windfall of federal money slated for border security. The US is set to spend $1 billion to triple the size of the virtual wall by 2034. Here are four ideas for what CBP should do next to address these failures. 1. Conduct a comprehensive audit of deaths near the virtual wall In this June 16, 2021, file photo, a family from Venezuela moves to a Border Patrol transport vehicle after they and other migrants crossed the U.S.-Mexico border and turned themselves in to agents in Del Rio, Texas. ERIC GAY/AP PHOTO “If I were the federal government, I would do an audit, because this feels like it’s not working.” That was New Mexico state representative Sarah Silva’s reaction when MIT Technology Review showed her that in 2024 alone, more than 18 people had died near surveillance towers in just one small stretch of desert near her district. An audit