One-third of DHS’s border surveillance cameras don’t even work

The House Committee connected Homeland Security is looking into Customs and Border Protection’s (CBP) surveillance web successful the aftermath of a study that astir one-third of the agency’s cameras on the US-Mexico borderline don’t work. Privacy advocates accidental this is conscionable the latest lawsuit of costly borderline surveillance infrastructure not moving arsenic advertised.

An interior Border Patrol memo obtained by NBC News said that “several method problems” had contributed to a large-scale outage of the Remote Video Surveillance Systems, a bid of surveillance towers and cameras that person been utilized to remotely surveil the borderline since 2011. According to the memo, astir 150 of the 500 cameras are non-operational. The memo says that the Federal Aviation Administration — and not CBP — is liable for servicing and repairing the cameras, and that the bureau had interior problems gathering Border Patrol’s needs. Border Patrol is considering replacing the FAA with a contractor that tin supply “adequate method support” for the cameras, the memo states.

Rep. Mark E. Green (R-TN), the seat of the House Homeland Security Committee, has asked DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas to crook implicit accusation connected the camera strategy by October 23rd. In his missive to Mayorkas, Green called the cameras and different surveillance tools “a unit multiplier.” The missive besides claims that sources told the committee that 66 percent of the cameras were inoperable — a overmuch higher fig than the 1 cited successful the Border Patrol memo reported by NBC News.

Though Green’s missive frames the cameras’ malfunctioning arsenic a caller issue, a abstracted CBP authoritative told NBC News that the agency’s surveillance apparatus has not been decently managed for the past 20 years. As the Electronic Frontier Foundation recently noted, CBP and Border Patrol person tested assorted iterations of a surveillance web on the borderline for decades — and clip aft time, these systems person been shown to beryllium costly and ineffective astatine reducing unauthorized borderline crossings.

CBP’s expanded surveillance of the borderline has funneled migrants onto much remote, unsafe routes on the border, contributing to a important summation successful deaths. In immoderate case, unauthorized borderline crossings have dropped significantly successful caller months: successful September, CBP reported the lowest level of migrant encounters betwixt ports of introduction since 2020.