This story is part of The Arizona Republic’s ongoing examination of a bipartisan effort to reform the nation’s immigration laws.
By Bob Ortega | The Arizona Republic
TUCSON – A long, sharp, high-pitched beep sounds every 30 or 40 seconds at the Border Patrol’s windowless sector-control room.
Agents here monitor a vast array of video screens and sensors linked to cameras, radar and other surveillance equipment along 262 miles of the Arizona-Mexico border — including hundreds of ground sensors that beep loudly whenever one detects something.
That something might be a drug smuggler or a migrant — but far, far more often, it’s a cow, or the wind, or some other false alarm, which may be why the agents seem to pay these constant beeps little mind.
To complement the 651 miles of barriers along the U.S.-Mexican border, Customs and Border Protection deploys drones, tethered radar blimps, P-3 Orion surveillance aircraft, thermal-imaging devices, towers with day and night video cameras, ground surveillance radar and much more.
But, as the ceaseless beeping of the sensor alarms illustrates, many pieces of that technology are flawed: Some produce frequent false alarms, some suffer detection failures or leave gaps in coverage. Then, too, CBP — despite spending more than $106 billion over the past five years militarizing and securing the border — struggles to mesh these pieces smoothly together so it can make good use of the data they provide.
The flaws, the gaps and the challenges in analyzing the data have left CBP, of which the Border Patrol is a part, unable to answer such seemingly basic questions as how well all of this technology works and how many of the people and how much of the drugs coming across the border make it through.
