Immigration is one of the most hotly debated issues in the United States, despite the current administration’s lack of any clear policy. We have deep disagreements about how tightly immigration should be controlled and who should be accepted as new residents and future citizens. But what if whatever policy politicians ultimately decide on is implemented with the usual efficiency and fiscal responsibility of government? What if the network of watchtowers in , many of which have been deactivated at great expense, are like train wrecks?
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Network of blind surveillance towers
“Nearly one-third of the Border Patrol’s main surveillance system cameras along the U.S. southern border are not working, according to an internal Border Patrol memo sent in early October.” NBC News reported last week. “The major outage affected approximately 150 of the 500 cameras installed on surveillance towers along the U.S.-Mexico border.”
This is big political news at a time when voters are consistently voting. rank immigration between them Main concerns.
Part of the problem is that multiple federal agencies with different priorities are responsible for these cameras. Border Patrol uses surveillance technology to cover remote areas where agents cannot be constantly present. But the Federal Aviation Administration does handle contracts for maintenance and repair of camera networks.
The affected towers are part of a remote video surveillance system that is a subset of a complete network of border surveillance towers. As Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) I explained it in detail last year.the federal government began installing surveillance towers 20 years ago through a series of projects, cancellations, restarts, and mutually incompatible technologies.
“Throughout the 2010s, CBP re-implemented tower-based systems, resulting in disparate tower systems that could not interact with different vendors,” said Dave Maass. I wrote For EFF.
It would be surprising if the federal government did something with a reasonable budget and schedule, and the watchtowers didn’t break with tradition. For example, just one program, the Secure Border Initiative Network, took six years to cover Arizona’s tiny border.
High cost and no standard
“By 2010, CBP had installed 15 SBInet tower systems along 53 miles of Arizona’s 387-mile border with Mexico at a cost of approximately $1 billion,” the Government Accountability Office (GAO) said. ) stated in the report. 2017 report About network-wide flaws. “However, in January 2011, the Secretary of Homeland Security announced the discontinuation of future SBInet systems in response to internal and external reviews that identified concerns regarding the performance, cost, and schedule of system implementation.”
This plan was superseded by the Arizona Border Surveillance Technology Plan and the Southwest Border Technology Plan. A combination of various systems According to to interceptDaniel Boguslow’s production cost was approximately $6 billion. they finally Integrated in 2022 However, legacy technologies still face challenges in terms of age and incompatibility with other parts of the network.
Are those very expensive watchtowers doing their job?
among them 2017 reportGAO found that the Border Patrol “has not yet reached a position to fully quantify the impact of these technologies on its mission.” That was (and still is) more than a decade after watchtowers began being built along Arizona and the rest of the Southwest. part of the north) border. This is not the first time GAO has urged the Border Patrol to consider “developing and applying performance indicators for border technologies in accordance with previous recommendations.” [to] Help the Border Patrol more fully assess progress in implementing the Southwest Border Technology Plan and determine when mission benefits will be realized. ”
Of course, if the system is working, it’s easy to evaluate. In its annual DHS assessment released in February of this year, GAO noticed Customs and Border Protection officials said the program anticipates the development of an integrated surveillance tower system. [operations and support] There will be a shortfall of 23% in FY2024 and 36% in FY2025, which could increase the risk of aging and existing towers becoming inoperable. ”
And now, nearly a third of the remote video surveillance system towers are completely offline.
A history of disappointment
This is not the first time that border surveillance systems have fallen short. Ten years ago, as a member of the House Homeland Security Committee’s Subcommittee on Border and Maritime Security. tore it apart Customs and Border Protection officials talk about the status and cost of guard towers in Arizona. They were particularly outraged that GAO’s advice to adopt metrics to assess network effectiveness was ignored. Apparently it was still being ignored three years later.
Therefore, it is difficult to know how much border security would be affected if a large number of towers were to be taken out of service, as they have not been evaluated according to any criteria. But it’s clear Border Patrol agents are upset. That’s because someone leaked a memo about the issue to NBC News, and because of the Border Patrol union. I spoke out “The inoperability of surveillance towers along the border raises serious concerns for police safety and border security.”
In other words, the various contradictory parts of the border tower program, like everything else the government does, are inefficient, expensive, and operate without accountability. . The various contractors who pocketed the money along the way building the tower, as is usually the case, probably did pretty well. But it’s not clear how Americans benefited from the billions spent.
That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do anything about the confusion over immigration. Many Americans are understandably concerned about the unrestrained situation at the border and the lack of any guidance it provides.
But we shouldn’t be surprised if the actual implementation of immigration and border policies, once decided upon, looks a lot like an expensive tower sitting in the desert, doing nothing.
