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Surveillance at the Border
Santa Cruz County, Arizona, is the smallest county in the Grand Canyon State, but its location makes it significant. Home to more than 50,000 people, the vast majority of whom identify as Hispanic or Latino, the county is located in the southernmost part of central Arizona and shares a 54-mile stretch of border with the Mexican state of Sonora.
Along this stretch of land is Nogales, the county’s administrative seat and a major port of entry into the United States; millions of people and billions of dollars in trade pass through it every year. Nogales, Arizona, and Nogales, Sonora, are bisected by a demarcation line established by the purchase, six years after the Mexican-American War, of Mexican land by the United States. But the sister cities—collectively referred to as Ambos Nogales—comprise a single urban area characterized by high levels of cross-border interaction and a common culture.
Today, the line bifurcating Nogales and other border communities is over- and undergirded by a militarized and surveillance-driven security apparatus. The latter established a foothold under the Obama and Biden administrations “as a more humane alternative to other border enforcement methods, such as building walls or putting children in cages,” Petra Molnar, associate director of the Refugee Law Lab at York University, writes in The Walls Have Eyes: Surviving Migration in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. “People will still arrive, but they’re going to take more circuitous routes to try to avoid surveillance, leading to an exponential increase of deaths,” she told the Prospect.
A U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) spokesperson denied this, telling the Prospect that “preventing the loss of life is core to our mission, and CBP personnel endeavor to rescue those in distress, a particularly important mission in the harsh environments along the southwest border.” In 2017, the agency established the Missing Migrant Program, an initiative focused on preventing deaths during attempted border crossings. However, according to CBP’s own data, migration-related deaths in the borderlands surged by 57 percent between October 2021 and September 2022.
Along this stretch of land is Nogales, the county’s administrative seat and a major port of entry into the United States; millions of people and billions of dollars in trade pass through it every year. Nogales, Arizona, and Nogales, Sonora, are bisected by a demarcation line established by the purchase, six years after the Mexican-American War, of Mexican land by the United States. But the sister cities—collectively referred to as Ambos Nogales—comprise a single urban area characterized by high levels of cross-border interaction and a common culture.
Today, the line bifurcating Nogales and other border communities is over- and undergirded by a militarized and surveillance-driven security apparatus. The latter established a foothold under the Obama and Biden administrations “as a more humane alternative to other border enforcement methods, such as building walls or putting children in cages,” Petra Molnar, associate director of the Refugee Law Lab at York University, writes in The Walls Have Eyes: Surviving Migration in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. “People will still arrive, but they’re going to take more circuitous routes to try to avoid surveillance, leading to an exponential increase of deaths,” she told the Prospect.
A U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) spokesperson denied this, telling the Prospect that “preventing the loss of life is core to our mission, and CBP personnel endeavor to rescue those in distress, a particularly important mission in the harsh environments along the southwest border.” In 2017, the agency established the Missing Migrant Program, an initiative focused on preventing deaths during attempted border crossings. However, according to CBP’s own data, migration-related deaths in the borderlands surged by 57 percent between October 2021 and September 2022.
https://prospect.org/justice/2025-08-05-border-surveillance-algorithms/]