4 ways to address the failures we found along the US border’s “virtual wall”
MIT Technology Review James O'Donnell ● Covered by 3 sources
MIT Tech Review found migrants dying near US border towers that missed them or got no response. The fix isn’t more towers alone; it’s basic audits, tracking, and accountability.
Based on reporting by MIT Technology Review, James O'Donnell — read the original for the full story.
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MIT Technology Review says the US border’s “virtual wall” is failing in ways that should embarrass the people running it. The team, working with Times of San Diego on the Dying on Camera project, found people who walked through areas watched by AI-enabled towers, then died nearby without being noticed for weeks or months.
The article points to a messy chain of failure: towers that were broken, software that missed people, and agents who did not act on alerts. That matters because the government is still expanding this system. The US plans to spend $1 billion to triple the size of the virtual wall by 2034, and the latest towers come from Anduril, a company that is already winning major contracts.
The first fix is blunt: do a real audit. CBP does not publish a full map of the towers, so the reporters had to piece together locations from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, satellite images, and thousands of pages of records. They examined nearly 600 towers, but say that is still well short of the 800 the government says are operating today. Their count of more than 1,050 deaths near the towers is therefore an undercount, not a full tally.
The second fix is data hygiene, which sounds dull until you learn how broken the current system is. Border Patrol’s internal tracking tool has existed since 2007, but national rules for entering cases only arrived in 2021, and the GAO still found missing cases after that. The Missing Migrant Program, launched in 2017, improved data collection, but the GAO said in April 2025 that CBP still had no plan to use that data to see whether it was actually saving lives.
And then there’s the basic question of whether the towers do what CBP says they do. The GAO told Border Patrol back in 2014 to track when surveillance helped make an apprehension. CBP agreed, then produced bad data, with agents in Texas even crediting towers that did not exist there. Years later, the agency still had not publicly shown whether the system was effective. The reporters’ bottom line is simple enough: if the wall is meant to save lives, CBP should start checking the bodies against the cameras.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is what happens when a border policy gets sold as magic and managed like a shrug. More towers without basic audits is just expensive weatherproofing for failure. CBP does not need another glossy promise; it needs a death log, a camera log, and the nerve to read both.
Read more about this at: MIT Technology Review
