Patrolled by Predator drones, radar blimps, dogs, and scanners, the U.S./Mexico border is now a state unto itself: Borderworld
Posted 01.17.2012 at 11:15 am
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Miles and Miles: Helicopter-borne cameras near Laredo, Texas, offer a heightened perspective to U.S. Border Patrol agents tracking any undocumented migrants who might attempt to cross the Rio Grande. John B. Carnett
5. “BUGS”
Back at the command-and-control center a few hours later, I found myself on the other side of that camera, studying the same stretch of the river. The shift in perspective was dizzying. Twenty large screens lined the front wall of the control room and flickered from one surveillance camera to another; a television in the middle of the wall had been tuned to Fox News. Agents sat behind desks, scanning the monitors and occasionally speaking on the radio with agents in the field.
Smugglers are often stupid, and sometimes they are greedy. They are just as frequently ingenious, however.The Rio Grande Valley sector employs dozens of Remote Video Surveillance Systems, most of which are on fixed towers. Each RVSS is made up of four cameras, two of which are infrared for night duty. The agents who are assigned to camera duty in the control room zoom and pan the cameras as needed. At night they can manipulate the contrast of the infrared video, shifting from “black hot” to “white hot,” rewinding and forwarding through the digital file as needed to identify what is often merely a fleeting glimpse of an unidentified animal, possibly human. Sources of thermal energy abound. Rocks, concrete blocks and even the plants radiate heat, but warm-blooded animals stand out most vividly, and they move.
A seismic sensor buried alongside an active trail detects foot traffic and transmits its radio signal to the command center. Such unmanned ground sensors have been used for decades, but engineers continue to reduce their size and increase their sensitivity. Border Patrol agents have placed some 11,000 sensors along the U.S. border, and they move them constantly in an effort to keep up with the ever-shifting traffic patterns along the infinitely forking paths that radiate outward from the line.
Agent Jose Mancillas demonstrated what happens when he receives a signal from a ground sensor. He glanced left to a small screen displaying the current locations of his “bugs” and quickly typed a few keystrokes. One of three large flat-screen monitors at his desk instantly displayed a river camera’s infrared image. Using a joystick controller, he panned the camera and zoomed in. There wasn’t much to see just then, so he pulled up a file of a recent incursion. Eight ghostly white bodies sprang out of the brush and sprinted in an awkward hunkered-down posture toward the steel pickets of the border fence. They had activated the sensor about 50 yards south of the levee, three miles away from the Rio Grande. As soon as he had confirmed that there was traffic on the move, Mancillas had hit the radio, alerting a unit he knew was standing by just around the bend. We watched several members of the group perch on the fence; then the agents came into view and the aliens retreated. One leaped all the way from the top of the fence and hit the ground hard. We all winced. But he got up and ran south, back toward Mexico, with the rest of his group.
Suddenly all motion stopped. The file ran backward as Mancillas worked the controls of the NetGuard-EVS video client. He wanted to show me additional footage of recent traffic. Often you get just a flash of white, and it takes an experienced eye to determine whether to respond. The cameras are a good tool, but they can’t see everything, and the harsh South Texas weather degrades their performance. In January, during a severe cold snap, the cameras simply froze in place.
6. “A HUGE DIFFERENCE”
Upriver from brownsville lies McAllen, a more affluent community where local conditions, both natural (thick brush) and political (height restrictions), have prevented the deployment of remote video surveillance towers. Here the Border Patrol employs mobile surveillance systems that can be moved to hotspots as needed. Agent Jaime Medina joined us in McAllen and led an excursion into the broad fields that run alongside the levees that crisscross the fertile floodplain next to the Rio Grande.
Driving along a levee in the dark is a disconcerting experience. The land drops away sharply into an abyss of chirping crickets, singing frogs and other loud, gregarious creatures of the subtropical darkness. As I traveled with agents Milian and Medina through a night in which all fields were black, I had to strain my eyes to find some landmark. I tried to imagine what it was like patrolling out here with nothing but flashlights and a good sense of direction. We finally came to a “scope truck,” a pickup with a 20-foot retractable camera tower mounted on its bed. As with the stationary tower systems, the scope truck can shift between daylight and infrared viewing. We were parked on a kind of promontory or juncture in the levee. In daylight we no doubt would have been treated to a spectacular view of South Texas’s agricultural production. Historically, most of these vast fields have been worked by Mexican migrant workers, many of them undocumented.
Border Patrol officers monitor this area day and night, using scope trucks and also personal night-vision equipment such as the TAM-14, a short-range thermal monocular, and the Recon III Lite, a heavy thermal binocular, often mounted on a tripod, that includes a laser targeting system. The laser can guide agents wearing night-vision goggles to a group by fixing them with a beam invisible to the naked eye but brightly apparent to anyone wearing the proper eyewear. Such equipment, which was in short supply in previous years, is now widely used. After an impressive demonstration of the scope truck’s long-range thermal camera, the agents offered to show me the laser; wearing night-vision goggles, I was able to clearly see the red beam as it targeted a spot near the river.
Airplanes, helicopters and drones can highlight targets using similar devices to even greater effect. I later rode in a helicopter equipped with a FLIR Star Safire HD camera that was sensitive enough to detect the heat signature left by a body in high grass long after the body itself had moved on. The Star Safire comes equipped with a laser targeting system and a powerful infrared spotlight that can be slaved to the camera, and thereby bathe groups of aliens in a light they cannot see. As Mancillas had told me in the Brownsville control room, “it makes a huge difference when you can see in the dark.”
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Excellent article Roger! Have you written about operation “Fast and Furious”?
For over 20 years an organization in ohio has been researching and using technology that enables them to see and talk to people from a central location without visible equipment. it was being used before haarp or gwen were finished. This technology has been kept secret from the public, only a small group of people, including police and doctors knew about it. it has grown. as of 2012 nearly all police, firefighters and medical professionals in columbus, ohio are aware of it. most cops in the rest of the state along with indiana are also aware. maybe some doctors and nurses are in fear for their own safety and that of their families while the police and mental health professionals seem to have been advanced to their position because of their willingness to work with this organization. please read dttv.info
Mr. Knight's dream of video fusion is a Big Pipe dream. It is a concept of tomorrow, and always will be.
Mr. Knight killed a competing system (nicknamed Broad Pipe) that was based on the commercial off-the-shelf Inmarsat system.
At a tenth of the size and a tenth of the cost, the system was ready for immediate deployment upon the entire fleet of CBP aircraft. Instead, it was forced out by the big budget Big Pipe program (primarily to justify the expenditure of funds on other components of the Big Pipe system).
The new Multi-role Enforcement Aircraft (MEA) was delivered incomplete because certain Big Pipe technology hadn't yet made it to market.
A bright light needs to be shined on the CBP air program; the taxpayers deserve more.
All this would not be happening if New York or Washington D.C. were where El Paso or Los Angeles is! There would be no debate, and no illegal immigration.
Good point D13.
Sometimes a change in perspective is all that is needed.
Sometimes while finding a solution to a problem it is also use full to identify what is NOT working, and stop wasting energy on that.
How dare a citizen to go out and consume illegal drugs and thus finance the cartels? If us citizens would stop taking drugs there would be no drug problem.
US is the one that needs help to be without drugs and violence.
Plenty of crimes in US every year : 30,000 gunshot fatalities.
This keeps the police and feds plenty busy.
Nothing was stated in this article that isn't common sense or could be found with a simple Google search. Motion detectors and cameras are pretty standard kit. Drones are becoming ubiquitous, soon they will monitor your daily commute to work. As the various agencies that patrol our boarders are extensions of our government I am sure there are protocols in place that prevent too much information being given to a blogger. We lost our chance to "help" Mexico when gave tax breaks to Corporate America to outsource and they went to India instead of heading south. I am curious though, with all the tech at the border, why do we continue to fail to find the underground highways the cartels keep building.
Good article. I was happy to read Mark Borkowski's observation, because it's something I've been saying for quite awhile. Borkowski said that a large part of the problem is artificially created by our Congress and its irrational and arbitrary immigration and guest-worker policies.
People unthinkingly paint everyone who crosses the border illegally with the same brush, but there is a huge difference between drug traffickers and people who simply want to work here to have a better life. If Congress just changed the guest-worker laws so we could hand everyone a green card at the border--fingerprint, ID, and register them--and welcome them to work in the U.S., it would solve a lot of problems at once. One of which would be, as Borkowski said, that it "would cut off a lot of the traffic BETWEEN the points of entry. In fact, at a certain point, you would only have the really bad people left, the drug smugglers and the terrorists." It's not amnesty or citizenship, but a very simple way to allow people who want to work here to do so legally and to increase the pool of hard working, inexpensive labor (and increase tax revenue...are you listening politicians?). It would also end the tragic human trafficking trade and the coyotes who profit by it.
Then CBP could focus on the real criminals instead of being overwhelmed with weeding out good people whose only crime is wanting to work here so badly that they are willing to circumvent the inexcusably stupid guest-worker (and immigration) system governed by INS...which is arguably the most ridiculous bureaucracy in the federal government.
I grew up on the border of mexico/new mexico. Nobody really cares a whole lot that Mexican illegals are coming here to do landscaping and crop harvesting, its the drug cartels and human slave traffickers who are the problem. You run into a pack of illegal's in the desert and it's not a problem. Run into drug cartel members and your gonna get your throat slit. If everyone knew how dangerous these cartels are then there would be no argument about taking harsher measures against them.
Popular science makes for so much innocent fun. But what you've written here is a thoroughly depressing view of a thoroughly depressing piece of human culture. You've written a tech view of a human story.
There's no indication anywhere in your piece that people living the other side of this man-made border are human beings with god-given inalienable rights. They're just aliens, stupid greedy, blips on a screen who try to cross walls and fall off. They're bad guys tainted by involvement in drugs.
Meanwhile the good guys have lots of popular tech - blimps and computers and CCTV. Plus they can even read tracks from a galloping horse; they're almost John Wayne!
As someone who grew up there you hint at the real place that lies behind all the concrete and tech. But there's a great deal more to be said about the human stories and reasons behind economic migration. And evidence of what's going on in the war on drugs. Why do individual Americans want to consume so many drugs. Why does the state choose to persist in a war on drugs which creates a vast unregulated business in criminal hands just like alcohol prohibition did before it?
Dark-skinned people are responding in a normal and predictable way to economic opportunity. They're supplying produce that Americans want. What you describe is a state-sponsored attempt to resist market forces, to solve an essentially human problem with technology deployed with a military mindset.
The US will spend a lot of money. It won't solve the problem. No-one will be happy.
And in writing this story the way you have you show no sign of empathy with the key players involved. From the perspective of liberty, justice, and loving thy neighbour this story has lost the plot. Don't close yourself off to the human aspect; I bet the more you look into it the more compelling it will get...
It is in USA tolerance of the companies that hire illegal aliens that inspire illegal people to enter out country. A poor person, with no education and no opportunity, living in an unsafe environment wants to escape his local situation for a poor job in the USA and a government that protects the people, even the illegal peoples. How can you blame an illegal alien from leaving his bad situation for a better one?
Even those caught enter the USA illegally, are given food, a bed, clothing if needed, medical attention for a short time. This is a step up from the nothing they have from where they come from. Imagine if you are poor and without a job, home and food and one day as you sit on a pile of dirt you see some cancerous bump, broken arm, a bullet hole, skin disease or just any other health problem on your body and you do not feel that well, too. In your country there is no help. So just enter good old USA and we are obligated by law to help the sick illegal alien, prior to returning him back to his country.
The USA tolerance of companies that support illegal aliens is the problem. Remove the rainbow and its pot of gold. And the wall is a good idea too. But in reality, the flow of illegal aliens will never stop and long as the poor are poor and are being helped in the USA. At best at times, we only slow it down.
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See life in all its beautiful colors, and
from different perspectives too!
Great article, very insightful and helpful in understanding more so what is happening with the power that our government wields.
At the same time I also find my self considering what will happen if this Big Pipe were to be turned against the american people?
I am in China at the moment and I am sure that in this nation the Big Pipe would be easily integrated into the systems of control... but then again this is China, not the USA. We must understand that different systems need different rules and measures. But what works for China will not work for the US.
China is a nation that still follows the Emperors way of rule (the rulers are above the law - so who you know determines what freedoms and influence you have). But the US is a nation of Laws where every one including the president is bound to the law and all are accountable to the law.
So if we, in our wisdom, should elect a government of people who are so corrupt that they have no frills about using their power to stay in power, how much would the Big Pipe help them in that endeavor? I think of the Born Ultimatum movies and that's what I see.
Correct me if I am wrong.
D13 01/17/12 at 11:16 am
What do you think Mexico is - a medieval dungeon, a Russian gulag? Mexico is one of the richest countries in the world. The richest man in the world lives in Mexico City. Mexico is loaded with natural resources. Mexico’s economy is better than ours. Mexico has a lower unemployment rate than we do. Mexico has a much lower deficit than we do. We owe them NOTHING. We are always on the short end of the trade stick. This is the United States of America … NOT the United Nations …. NOT the Mexican Dept of Welfare.
If a tomato can cross the border into the US from Mexico, I don't see why a person can't cross the border. Oh I forgot, we have laws. Its our law against other people. Only we are allowed to be where we our, except for famous people, rich people and fast runners having the ability to jump high fences.
Not to be a cynic, but something doesn't make sense? With all that technology and surveillance, mega quantities of illicit drugs are still flowing across the border like the Mississippi River? I wonder how that is possible without collusion between entities on both sides of the border?
The cartels are making billions in illicit drug sales and I would wager that there are both Mexican and American officials making lots of money in bribes and payoffs?
I have been on both sides of the border off and on for almost 20 years now and have gone through the Border Patrol checkpoints many, many times, both Mexican and American, and they don't seem like they would miss much, with all the technology, scanners, K9 units etc etc?
One time I got a 'red light' going into Mexico at Nogales, I was packed for an extended stay in Magdalena de Kino, Sonora, a little town about 50 miles South of the border, working as a bio-medical engineer on a project for the company I was at the time employed. Anyway, the Mexican border agents had me open the trunk on my midsize rental car and they pulled out my clothes and laptop and whatnot, then they asked why I had so many pairs of jeans? I explained in Spanish that I was going to be staying in Mexico for a couple of months, so I needed to have some clothes to wear?
I guess they have had a problem with Mexicans buying jeans in the US, then selling them on the Mexican side? They somehow were avoiding some type of tariff by doing this?
So, if they are that ticky-tack, then how in the heck are the cartels moving mega quantities of coke, heroin, methamphetamine and pot across the border into this country every day of the week?
Like I said, somebody has got to be cooperating on this side of the border? Unfortunately, it wouldn't be a surprise to me if the corruption ended up being at the higher levels of the political spectrum, rather than just among the peons?
A sad situation all around............
d13 said:
"Besides giving terrorists and drug cartels enought details on our border technology to effectively make it useless, was the goal of this article to get POPSCI readers to post ways to cirumvent these "kool" technologies?"
Apparently d13 does not realize that the information found in the article is neither classified, difficult to find on the Internet nor hard to figure out given time and observation.
I feel we are turning america into a guilded cage, crusted with invisible, razor sharp barb wire. I do not welcome this change in the least. The creator of the Big Pipe said himself, the older program failed because people tried solving various human, sopcial, political problems with technology. And they didnt know what problem they were trying to solve with what tech. I think his argument is easily turned back in his face to show something he didnt intend. People are trying to meet these issues with technology, trying to pound all the square pegs into round holes with brute force instead of actually solving the problems themselves.
I especially object to broadening the border patrols inlfuence and power beyond the border with all the instances of items being 'confiscated' and never returned. Such items as cameras, computers, laptops, these items are expensive and while a few might be honestly being lost under the current ridiculous system in place, I feel alot are also outright theft. We have too many instances of abuse/theft at the border and in our airports to justify giving these people more power.