A recent disclosure of an internal memo from the United States Border Patrol has revealed that 30% of the camera towers in the “Remote Video Surveillance System” (RVSS) program are out of service. This report highlights multiple technical issues affecting approximately 150 towers along the border. Surprisingly, Congressional leaders have expressed astonishment and urged Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas to provide explanations for this situation.
For decades, surveillance on the border between the United States and Mexico has been criticized as a costly effort without a clear definition of the problem it seeks to solve. Despite bipartisan consensus on the ineffectiveness of these strategies, there is a constant competition to increase funding for initiatives that repeatedly fail. Oversight reports have underscored the deficiencies of these towers since the mid-2000s, raising the question of why these problems have not been resolved in the past twenty-five years.
One possible explanation is that these cameras act more as a political spectacle, capturing public attention initially, but their effectiveness fades over time. Border communities, meanwhile, are being used as testing grounds for technology companies seeking to profit from possibly exaggerated national security threats.
The narrative of surveillance towers on the border follows a repetitive cycle. The Border Patrol implements programs with flashy names, but over the years, oversight agencies conclude that the outcome is a disaster. Instead of abandoning these projects, border security officials renew them without addressing the original problems. From the Integrated Surveillance Intelligence System (ISIS) in the 1990s to later projects like the Secure Border Initiative (SBI), this pattern has been repeated frequently, with each new acronym hiding a track record of failures.
Despite bipartisan criticism and reports from the Government Accountability Office highlighting ineffectiveness and irregularities in contract management, Washington continues to support these surveillance technologies. Rather than addressing the situation with more humanitarian approaches or foreign policy reforms, the issue is likely to be presented as an “invasion” that justifies military responses. Additionally, technology companies and military contractors wield considerable influence and are positioned to reap huge profits, at the expense of taxpayers and the civil liberties of border communities.
The persistence of this issue, with billions of dollars wasted on ineffective technologies, does not seem to be changing in the near future, perpetuating a history of failures in the current approach.
Referrer: MiMub in Spanish
