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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.
Prevention through deterrence has been central to the bipartisan border security project for decades. Today, “the way it manifests itself visibly is just like East Germany,” Santa Cruz County Sheriff David Hathaway said in an interview with the Prospect. “Walls don’t just keep people out. They keep people in.”
Prevention through deterrence has been central to the bipartisan border security project for decades.
Walls are but one ingredient in the borderlands’ mix of barriers. In recent years, autonomous surveillance towers, drones, spy blimps, license plate readers, and motion-activated cameras have also been put in place. In the borderlands, no one is free from the ever-expanding surveillance and data collection nexus operated by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Federal agents have spent years perfecting a range of techniques and technologies that undermine civil liberties, all with the goal of sustaining the surveillance-driven immigration enforcement apparatus. The nearly ubiquitous surveillance has produced what is known as the panopticon effect.
“The panopticon [effect] is, of course, you think that they’re watching you, but they might not be,” Todd Miller, author of Build Bridges, Not Walls: A Journey to a World Without Borders, told the Prospect. “Like in the prison system, a camera could be there, but it might be turned off and no one’s looking, but psychologically, you think people are watching you.”
Nothing screams panopticon quite like CBP’s Tethered Aerostat Radar System (TARS), semi-stationary blimps providing low-altitude surveillance of the U.S.-Mexico border, Florida Keys, and Puerto Rico. TARS operators relay surveillance data to DHS, law enforcement, and military partners. Since the 2010s, CBP has contracted with British defense contractor QinetiQ and with Peraton—a private equity–owned national-security company based in Virginia—to maintain the program. The agency has dumped hundreds of millions of dollars into TARS. Last year, it also deployed a new aerostat in the Florida Keys amid “upticks in transportation avenues and conveyances for illegal smuggling, fishing, and immigration activities,” according to the agency’s website.
On March 6, the Senate passed the Coast Guard Authorization Act, instructing the U.S. Coast Guard and CBP to procure blimp-based surveillance systems for deployment in additional areas of operation. The move came one day after an aerostat at South Padre Island in Texas broke free and, after drifting hundreds of miles, crash-landed on a ranch property outside Dallas.
Runaway spy blimps aside, license plate readers (LPRs) can also be found throughout the borderlands. These devices, some of which are covert, capture images of license plates and convert those images into data. CBP uses that data to identify vehicles believed to be linked to cross-border crimes. LPRs also produce real-time alerts to allow CBP and other federal agencies to intercept suspicious vehicles.
For Hathaway, a self-described “big, tall gringo,” LPRs are part and parcel of dragnet surveillance in the borderlands. “I drive in a car with Arizona license plates, but I will get pulled over,” he told the Prospect. |
