When José Morales Bernal crossed the border into the United States on April 8, 2024, the day before his 32nd birthday, it should have triggered a chain of technological alerts and human responses. As he walked through the desert in southern New Mexico that morning, he was within range of three surveillance towers. Newly installed by US Customs and Border Protection (CBP), they were built by the defense tech company Anduril and equipped with cameras and AI to automatically detect and track people.
They transmit live video to nearby control rooms and can send alerts to the government-issued smartphones held by agents in the area, prompting the closest available to respond. This story is part of Dying on Camera , a collaboration between MIT Technology Review and Times of San Diego . Journalists in both newsrooms spent the past year examining the failures of border surveillance technology and uncovering the stories of the people who die in the borderlands .
These AI-enabled towers are meant to give greater visibility across the 1,951-mile southern border, freeing up border agents from having to spend hours staring into video monitors. They were installed in this particular place to spot border crossers before they reached the nearby town of Sunland Park. If the system worked as intended, Morales should have been apprehended.
If he needed medical help, agents were trained to provide it. The view from where José Morales Bernal’s body was found toward a Customs and Border Protection surveillance tower made by Anduril, along the southern US border in Sunland Park, New Mexico. CENGIZ YAR FOR MITTR That didn’t happen. Despite the nearby surveillance towers, it was employees of the local landfill, rather than Border Patrol, who first spotted Morales that morning.
At 1 p.m. the workers saw him again, now lying in the sand. At 4 p.m. the landfill workers saw that he had not moved and called Border Patrol. Agents arrived 45 minutes later. He was dead. When an agent then called 911 to report the body, he said it was “probably one of the migrants crossing through there,” seemingly unaware that Morales had been moving near the agency’s surveillance systems earlier that day.
The agent can be heard sounding unsure of Morales' location despite the proximity of an AI-powered surveillance camera. The call has been edited for length. Morales had died just 360 feet from the closest surveillance tower. Two more towers stood watch to the east and the west. An autopsy later concluded that he had died of “environmental exposure.
” The towers surrounding Morales were only the latest addition to the “virtual wall” the government has spent 25 years and billions of dollars building along the entire border, which also includes earlier generations of towers with more basic features, as well as blimps, drones, seismic sensors, and even tunnel-sensing robots.
Together, all this technology provides “persistent surveillance” and “situational awareness” to help the Border Patrol quickly and accurately detect people crossing and, crucially, make sure agents are sent to intercept them. CBP has also credited it with saving lives. But a first-of-its-kind investigation by MIT Technology Review reveals that deaths like Morales’s are startlingly common.
We cross-referenced nearly 4,000 locations where human remains were found—drawn from records collected by nonprofit groups like No More Deaths and Humane Borders, as well as hundreds of records we obtained in Texas—with information on nearly 600 towers identified by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. We considered when towers were installed and when each person is estimated to have died, and combined this information with field reporting from the border.
The result is the first comprehensive map and analysis of deaths near CBP surveillance towers. Our investigation shows that a humanitarian crisis at the border has unfolded in view of the government’s own cameras. José Morales Bernal died the day before his 32nd birthday. PHOTO COURTESY MIREYA MORALES We found more than 1,050 people who died within range of border surveillance towers between 2015 and early 2026.
These deaths are not failures of a few towers or technologies: We found deaths within the advertised range of nearly two-thirds of all the towers we analyzed. Our topographical analysis—which assessed the degree to which terrain might block a tower’s view of a particular death and its surveillance area in general—found that some have sight of as little as 10% of their advertised surveillance area, and yet we also found most deaths did not occur in towers’ blind spots.
These deaths are not the result of legacy systems, as our estimate found more than 110 people have died within range of modern autonomous towers from Anduril, among the most advanced systems CBP has deployed, since 2021. The overall picture reveals repeated failures of one of the virtual wall’s basic security functions, as CBP has described it in press releases: to effectively identify and locate migrants entering illegally into the United States.
The year that Morales died, 18 other people died in that same stretch of desert in range of the three Anduril towers. Five were visible from the same surveillance tower closest to where his body was discovered. One man, after walking a mile past the border and in range of two AI towers, dragged his 30-year-old brother into the shade when he began having trouble breathing, according to records we obtained from the medical examiner.
The two were spotted by Border Patrol only when the man waved down a helicopter for help; by the time agents arrived, his brother was already dead. A 24-year-old woman died near another Anduril tower, where our terrain analysis showed it should have had clear sight of her location. Her body lay unnoticed for weeks; it was decomposed, and blistered by the summer heat, when it was spotted by agents patrolling the area.