This is an adapted excerpt from the Sept. 27 episode of “Connect with Jacob Soboroff.”

When we think of the southern border, we usually picture a wall, something physical: visible, tall and stretching across the landscape. But there’s more to the border than the literal barrier. Over the past 25 years, U.S. Customs and Border Protection has built a virtual wall, too — a nearly 2,000-mile network of surveillance towers, blimps and drones.

Unlike President Donald Trump’s physical wall, this virtual one hasn’t drawn the same level of controversy. Lawmakers in both parties generally support it, and Democrats have at times embraced it as a more sensible alternative to a literal border wall. Across multiple administrations, billions of dollars have poured into the system.

Take the towers. CBP describes them as high-tech remote structures that monitor border regions, detect unauthorized crossings and track movement in real time. Using radar, thermal imaging and high-definition cameras, they’re designed to scan the terrain day and night.

More than 800 towers are already in use, with an estimated lifetime price tag of $6.2 billion, according to a 2023 government estimate. That number will almost certainly keep climbing: CBP plans to spend another $1 billion on almost 1,500 more towers enabled with artificial intelligence over the next decade.

That’s a whole lot of money. And CBP says it’s money well spent. The agency claims the technology is safer and “more effective” and helps keep agents “one step ahead.” It also says the virtual wall saves lives, regularly issuing press releases that credit the technology with helping agents rescue migrants.

So with all that technology supposedly watching, it’s hard to understand why no one helped José Morales Bernal.

According to MIT Technology Review, Bernal crossed into the U.S. through the scorching desert of southern New Mexico in April 2024, one day before his 32nd birthday. He was within range of three AI-powered surveillance towers, systems designed to detect people automatically and to alert nearby agents.

But that never happened. Landfill workers later spotted Bernal lying in the sand and assumed he was asleep. Three hours later, when he still had not moved, they called Border Patrol. Authorities confirmed that he died from environmental exposure. His body lay just 360 feet from a surveillance tower for hours.

If the system had worked as advertised, Bernal would have been apprehended — and perhaps he’d still be alive.

When MIT Technology Review confronted CBP with their findings, the agency responded that the automatic surveillance towers “complement physical barriers and other border security infrastructure by improving detection and situational awareness between ports of entry. CBP evaluates the technology based on its impact on detection, response coordination, agent safety, and mission outcomes.”

And Anduril, the tech company that makes these newest towers, told MIT Technology Review, in part, that once a tower is delivered to CBP, it is operated by the agency. They also said that an incident occurring near a tower does not mean it missed a detection.

But, unfortunately, Bernal’s death is not an outlier. MIT Technology Review and the Times of San Diego identified more than 1,000 known deaths within the range of border surveillance towers between 2015 and 2026. The journalists found deaths within the advertised range of almost two-thirds of the towers they analyzed. And newer technology has not necessarily changed the outcome: Since 2021, they estimate that “more than 110 people have died within range of modern autonomous towers,” which are among the most advanced systems CBP has deployed.

That’s the real kicker: CBP has spent billions building a system meant to see everything — yet, as the investigation found, “CBP has done little to assess how its towers are working or how many people have died where they keep watch.”

Allison Detzel contributed.

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