On April 8, 2024, José Morales Bernal walked into the United States near Sunland Park, New Mexico, just 360 feet from a Customs and Border Protection surveillance tower. He died of environmental exposure that same day.
Morales was within range of three towers built by the defence tech firm Anduril. These structures use cameras and artificial intelligence to track movement and alert agents via smartphones. The system was designed to spot migrants before they reached the town and to ensure help arrived quickly if someone was injured.
That did not happen. Landfill workers found Morales lying in the sand at 1 p.m. When they returned at 4 p.m., he had not moved. They called Border Patrol. Agents arrived 45 minutes later. He was dead. An agent later told 911 it was likely a migrant crossing through the area, unaware that the man had been moving near the agency’s own cameras earlier that day.
Dying on Camera
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.
The towers surrounding Morales were only the latest addition to the virtual wall the government has spent 25 years and billions of dollars building along the entire border. This network includes earlier generations of towers with more basic features, blimps, drones, seismic sensors, and tunnel-sensing robots. Together, all this technology provides persistent surveillance and situational awareness to help the Border Patrol quickly and accurately detect people crossing and make sure agents are sent to intercept them. CBP has also credited it with saving lives.
The numbers
A first-of-its-kind investigation by MIT Technology Review reveals that deaths like Morales’s are startlingly common. We cross-referenced nearly 4,000 locations where human remains were found—drawn from records collected by nonprofit groups like No More Deaths and Humane Borders, as well as hundreds of records we obtained in Texas—with information on nearly 600 towers identified by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. We considered when towers were installed and when each person is estimated to have died, and combined this information with field reporting from the border. The result is the first comprehensive map and analysis of deaths near CBP surveillance towers.
Our investigation shows that a humanitarian crisis at the border has unfolded in view of the government’s own cameras.
We found more than 1,050 people who died within range of border surveillance towers between 2015 and early 2026. These deaths are not failures of a few towers or technologies: We found deaths within the advertised range of nearly two-thirds of all the towers we analyzed. Our topographical analysis—which assessed the degree to which terrain might block a tower’s view of a particular death and its surveillance area in general—found that some have sight of as little as 10% of their advertised surveillance area, and yet we also found most deaths did not occur in towers’ blind spots. These deaths are not the result of legacy systems, as our estimate found more than 110 people have died within range of modern autonomous towers from Anduril, among the most advanced systems CBP has deployed, since 2021.
The overall picture reveals repeated failures of one of the virtual wall’s basic security functions, as CBP has described it in press releases: to effectively identify and locate migrants entering illegally into the United States.
The year that Morales died, 18 other people died in that same stretch of desert in range of the three Anduril towers. Five were visible from the same surveillance tower closest to where his body was discovered.
One man, after walking a mile past the border and in range of two AI towers, dragged his 30-year-old brother into the shade when he began having trouble breathing, according to records we obtained from the medical examiner. The two were spotted by Border Patrol only when the man waved down a helicopter for help; by the time agents arrived, his brother was already dead. A 24-year-old woman died near another Anduril tower, where our terrain analysis showed it should have had clear sight of her location. Her body lay unnoticed for weeks; it was decomposed, and blistered by the summer heat, when it was spotted by agents patrolling the area.
A few miles west, and a short drive from a Border Patrol station, four other AI towers stood watch. Near them, 10 more bodies were found that year, all in locations where at least one tower had a clear view.
Defence company response
In response to a list of questions, an Anduril spokesperson replied that once a tower is delivered, it is operated by CBP, and directed questions about specific incidents to the agency. The response noted that an incident occurring nearby does not mean the tower missed a detection and said actual surveillance ranges vary depending on terrain, physical obstructions, and the boundaries CBP sets for where the tower should look. CBP is able to set virtual boundaries on towers’ views for privacy and other reasons. The Anduril spokesperson also alleged inaccuracies in our reporting, given those boundaries and obstructions, but did not respond to follow-up questions on what was inaccurate.
Systemic failure
The most pressing question in any death near the virtual wall is whether authorities knew someone was there and failed to reach them or weren’t aware anyone was crossing at all. Either is a system failure. And the deaths we found capture only the failures that left a trace—we don’t know how many people pass through undetected, or how many bodies remain undiscovered.
Interviews with more than 45 people—including current and former White House advisors and presidential appointees, Border Patrol agents, medical examiners, sheriffs, humanitarian volunteers, and employees of tech companies—showed that both types of failures are occurring: The technology is failing to detect, and agents are failing to respond. Both show the limits of throwing technology at a complex problem.
The findings reveal previously unreported issues with the virtual wall, even as it continues to enjoy broad political support and a surge in federal spending. Border security hardliners have long seen it as another tool for stopping smugglers moving drugs or people, while others tout it as a cheaper alternative to a physical wall. In 2023, the government estimated that its plans for using the towers, which now number 803, would cost $6.2 billion over their lifespan. With the historic levels of funding it was awarded in 2025, CBP plans to spend $1 billion for 1,497 more towers by 2034.
But our reporting shows that CBP has done little to assess how its towers are working or how many people have died where they keep watch.
Officials who oversaw border security across the last four presidential administrations told us they believed deaths near the so-called virtual wall were either exceedingly rare or nonexistent. But our reporting shows that is not the case. None could point to any comparable analysis the government had ever conducted on its own. Former agents and officials also told us that when someone’s body is found, CBP does not formally investigate whether surveillance should have detected them or, if they were detected, why agents didn’t reach them before they died.
In response to nearly 30 questions about our findings, which covered multiple generations of technology, Hilton Beckham, CBP’s assistant commissioner for public affairs, said, “Autonomous surveillance towers use artificial intelligence to detect and classify people, vehicles, and animals and alert Border Patrol agents to activity in monitored areas … ASTs complement physical barriers and other border security infrastructure by improving detection and situational awareness between ports of entry. CBP evaluates the technology based on its impact on detection, response coordination, agent safety, and mission outcomes.”
“I’m sure that the cameras and other surveillance assets do deliver … useful intelligence and enhance operational efficacy in some places, under some conditions, in certain circumstances,” says Geoff Boyce, an assistant professor of geography at University College Dublin who has studied surveillance technology used at the US southern border. “I’m also absolutely positive—because this has been the track record—it is not delivering the level of operational support, information, or efficacy that either the companies delivering these infrastructures or the Border Patrol and Department of Homeland Security claim.”
What this means for the people making things is plain. The equipment is not working as advertised. Agents are not responding in time. The government continues to spend money on a system that fails to save lives.
