Investigation Finds Over 1,050 Deaths Near US Border Surveillance Towers

The 15-month investigation, part of the Dying on Camera collaboration, drew on records from groups including No More Deaths and Humane Borders, as well as hundreds of records the journalists obtained from Texas agencies. It found deaths within the advertised range of nearly two-thirds of all the towers analyzed. A topographical analysis found that terrain can limit some towers to as little as 10% of their advertised surveillance area, but most deaths did not occur in towers’ blind spots. More than 110 people have died within range of modern autonomous towers built by Anduril since 2021, according to the investigation.

One case examined was that of José Morales Bernal, who crossed the border into southern New Mexico on April 8, 2024, the day before his 32nd birthday. He was within range of three towers built by Anduril and equipped with cameras and AI to automatically detect and track people. Morales died 360 feet from the closest tower. Local landfill workers, not Border Patrol, first spotted him; they called the agency after seeing he had not moved. Agents arrived 45 minutes later and found him dead. An autopsy concluded he died of “environmental exposure.” In a 911 call reporting the body, an agent described the deceased as “probably one of the migrants crossing through there,” according to the investigation.

Customs and Border Protection has said its surveillance technology provides “persistent surveillance” and “situational awareness,” and the agency has credited it with saving lives. But the investigation found that the virtual wall has systemic flaws: broken towers, algorithms that failed to detect people, and agents who did not respond to alerts. CBP does not publish a comprehensive map of its virtual wall. The government says 800 towers operate today; the analysis covered nearly 600, making the tally of more than 1,050 deaths an undercount.

The US is set to spend $1 billion to triple the size of the virtual wall by 2034. Anduril continues to win major contracts and is positioned to benefit from the increase in federal border security spending, the investigation reported.

Along the California border, a Times of San Diego analysis counted at least 138 cases since 2022 in which migrants’ remains were found within the nominal range of a nearby surveillance tower. A separate MIT Technology Review topographical analysis estimated that more than half of those people were likely within a tower’s field of view. The phenomenon is especially pronounced in the Otay Mountain Wilderness outside San Diego.

Graciela Gómez Hernández, 30, crossed from the eastern edge of Tijuana into Southern California on Sept. 14, 2025. She sent voice messages to her mother and sister as she walked and later told her family she could see helicopters overhead and white Border Patrol trucks on the road below. In a final WhatsApp message to her mother, she whispered, “I can’t do it anymore.” Her body was collected two weeks later. A General Dynamics tower in place since 2019, with electro-optical and infrared cameras capable of tracking targets 5 to 7 miles away, stood about one mile from where she died.

Other cases in the investigation include Marcia Dutra, a 36-year-old Brazilian woman found in July 2023 who likely died of heat exposure next to a border fence, with an AI-equipped tower about 2,000 feet northeast above the edge of a plateau and out of sight of the slope where she was found. Elvi Vasquez Bortolon, a 28-year-old Mexican man, was found in February 2024 on a ridge near the border wall after suspected hypothermia; he had been dead for more than five days when a Border Patrol agent in a helicopter spotted his body. A remote video tower stood about 1,400 feet away, hidden by the ridge above the canyon.

The investigation also described gaps in how migrant deaths are tracked. Border Patrol has had its Border Safety Initiative Tracking System since 2007, but national rules for entering cases were not established until 2021. The Government Accountability Office found in 2022 that many cases still were not being tracked, especially deaths not discovered by Border Patrol. In 2023, the GAO reported that Border Patrol had taken steps to fix that, but outside researchers consistently find the agency’s estimates to be undercounts. CBP launched its Missing Migrant Program in 2017; in April 2025, the GAO found the program was improving how it collected and tracked data but had no plan to measure whether it was increasing rescues or reducing deaths. The GAO made two recommendations, neither of which has been implemented.

There is no national agency that collects and publishes all available records on migrant deaths, the investigation found. In Texas, records requests to individual counties can stall for years, and some agencies charged between $300 and $1,300 to fill requests. Most agencies do not record whether a person is believed to have been crossing the border when they died. Among the recommendations in the investigation is a comprehensive audit of deaths near the virtual wall. New Mexico state representative Sarah Silva, after being shown that more than 18 people died near towers in 2024 in one small stretch of desert near her district, said, “If I were the federal government, I would do an audit, because this feels like it’s not working.” Sources told MIT Technology Review that CBP has never done such an audit, though it has had the ability to conduct one since at least 2015.