She died at the San Diego border. A surveillance camera was in plain sight

Graciela Gómez Hernández was found dead in the Otay Mountain Wilderness on September 14, 2025. She had walked for only a couple of hours from Tijuana before collapsing.

The 30-year-old sent voice messages to her mother and sister in the early afternoon. She had not told them of her plan until the day before. Her goal was to reach Southern California to work, send money home, and buy her 11-year-old son a bicycle.

She likely climbed a ladder over the border wall or slipped through a gap in the fencing. Dozens of game trails cut through the sagebrush and manzanita. This was the first leg of a hike through the Otay Mountain Wilderness.

The eastern edge of San Diego is just a mile away. Countless migrants hike 10 or 20 miles north through the mountains to evade the Border Patrol. They emerge in smaller towns and on distant highways where there are fewer checkpoints.

Between 2 and 3 p.m., her sister said, Gómez Hernández sent a final message to her mother. “I can’t do it anymore,” she whispered into her phone. By the time a forensic crew came to collect her two weeks later, most of her body had disappeared into the earth.

She died on her own, but she was not, strictly speaking, alone. She was in one of the most heavily surveilled strips of land in the world.

Before she died, Gómez Hernández told her family in a WhatsApp message that she could see helicopters overhead and white Border Patrol trucks making periodic laps on the road below. And even if none of those agents saw her or knew she was in distress, something else had a clear view. Supervising the whole territory from a nearby hilltop was a slender gray surveillance tower.

That tower, made by General Dynamics and in place since 2019, has two sets of electro-optical and infrared cameras with long-range lenses that can track targets 5 to 7 miles away. Gómez Hernández was just one mile away.

Surveillance towers have proliferated in recent years. Contractors added newer camera systems that use artificial intelligence to distinguish border-crossers from other people and animals, and track their movements. The overall cost is more than a billion dollars.

Yet as the cameras scan the terrain, migrants continue to die in plain sight.

Thousands of migrants have died while crossing the border in the past two decades. Many of them died near Border Patrol surveillance installations. The phenomenon is especially pronounced in the Otay Mountain Wilderness just outside San Diego.

A Times of San Diego analysis counted hundreds of cases along the California border. There were at least 138 in the past four years where migrants’ remains were found within the range of the very cameras designed to help track and intercept them.

A topographical analysis conducted as part of an MIT Technology Review investigation estimated that more than half of these remains were found in a spot where a camera would have a clear view of a person. The terrain did not block the line of sight.

Some of these migrants died swiftly. They fell from the border wall or drowned in a canal or river. But dozens suffered slow deaths of exposure in the wilderness. These deaths might have been averted with emergency aid.

People who died in Southern California came from just across the border, or from as far away as Africa. They were as old as 70 and as young as 5. They died in the heat or the cold. But they all died within range of a surveillance camera.

Found in July 2023 was Marcia Dutra, a 36-year-old woman from Brazil who likely died of heat exposure next to a border fence. According to a medical examiner’s report, a group of migrants told the Border Patrol about her body when they were apprehended. An AI-equipped surveillance tower sits 2,000 feet northeast above the edge of a plateau, out of sight of the slope where she was found.

Found in February 2024 was Elvi Vasquez Bortolon, a 28-year-old Mexican man who died of suspected hypothermia on a ridge near the border wall. He had been dead for more than five days when a Border Patrol agent in a helicopter spotted his body from above. A remote video tower stands about 1,400 feet away, hidden from view by the ridge above the canyon.

Found in August 2024 was Ramón Montenegro, a 51-year-old man from Mexico who died of possible heatstroke in the mountains near Dulzura. An AI surveillance tower, invisible on the other side of a hill, sits 1,300 feet away. This distance is roughly the length of the parking lot at the San Diego Zoo.

More than 120 surveillance towers stand along the California border. This number comes from documents and live observations collected by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

The towers are not the only form of surveillance in the region. The border is blanketed by an interconnected network of trail cameras, underground movement detectors, radar, infrared sensors, drones, and even blimps. In March 2025, the Trump administration directed the Department of Defense to use satellites to watch the border as well.

Even when mountains or vegetation block a tower’s view, other devices may pick up the trail. Local advocates say surveillance technology in the Otay Mountain Wilderness is almost unavoidable.

Officials say the towers particularly excel at tracking passing migrants.

Anduril, the company that makes about half the towers now installed at the U.S.-Mexico border, said in a news release in 2024 that their towers “directly contributed to saving lives and stopping illicit drugs from entering the U.S.” In June 2026, the company said its installations had “autonomously identified hundreds of thousands of border crossings.”

John Morris, a Border Patrol sector chief in Arizona, told media at a convention in May 2026 that “We’re dang close to pretty much knowing everything that comes across.”

The proximity of so many deaths to high-resolution cameras leaves two distinct possibilities. Either the system did not detect these people in distress, or it did detect them—and officials offered no response.

Anduril, the defense contracting company that manufactures the AI-enabled towers, did not respond to questions from Times of San Diego about the towers’ performance in mountainous terrain.

A representative of General Dynamics, which made the tower closest to Gómez Hernández’s body, referred all questions to the Border Patrol.

The Border Patrol did not respond to questions from Times of San Diego regarding whether surveillance towers spotted Gómez Hernández prior to her death. They also did not answer about how surveillance cameras in general are used to detect people in emergency situations.

Rafael Hernández Larraenza, the leader of a search and rescue group called Desert Angels, says he believes some of the towers are “just adornment.” He claims they are not actually effective at tracking migrants. He also says Border Patrol agents, in occasional meetings with his search group, “say they don’t have the opportunity to do searches, that they don’t have enough time.”

People in need of rescue “are not a priority,” said Bryce Peterson. He compiles research on migrant remains for the advocacy group No More Deaths.

A wilderness, heavily watched

From the spot where Graciela Gómez Hernández’s body was found, a surveillance tower stands in clear view.

That tower is one mile away. A second, newer tower, on the other side of a hill, sits 1.4 miles away. Both are equipped with slow-spinning, long-range cameras.

The closer of these two towers is situated between two layers of border fencing. It is a long pole, over 100 feet tall, reaching into the sky. It peers not only onto hillsides where migrants walk, but into the brightly-colored cinderblock homes of a Tijuana neighborhood.

The second tower is much shorter, just 33 feet tall. It surveys the canyon where Gómez Hernández would most likely have arrived if she had kept walking.

This new tower, built by a company called Anduril, decides for itself whether a moving object in the field is relevant. The two dark, round cameras on the pole give the impression of eyes. They rotate slowly, then lock in on a target, before swiveling elsewhere.

Osvaldo Ruiz, the volunteer coordinator for the Border Angels, a group that leaves water and supplies along migrant trails near San Diego, says the Otay Mountain wilderness has “beacons throughout the mountains” that “can see over a lot of the mountains facing the border.”

“At entry sites that migrants or travelers may come through, there are also hidden cameras inside of rocks or inside of bushes that are camouflaged for you