border towers

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

She had only walked for a couple of hours, and already she was lost.  It was early afternoon on Sept. 14, 2025, when 30-year-old Graciela Gómez Hernández crossed the border from the eastern edge of Tijuana into Southern California, sending voice messages to her mother and sister as she walked.  This story is part of Dying […]

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View from the grid location where a body was found towards Border Patrol Surveillance Tower 022, along the southern U.S. border in Sunland Park, New Mexico.

The US spent billions on border surveillance. Why can’t it catch people before they die?

When José Morales Bernal crossed the border into the United States on April 8, 2024, the day before his 32nd birthday, it should have triggered a chain of technological alerts and human responses.  As he walked through the desert in southern New Mexico that morning, he was within range of three surveillance towers. Newly installed

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4 ways to address the failures we found along the US border’s “virtual wall”

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

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

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

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