I want to put my hand in the border.
I'm standing in the United States, it's 103 degrees, and I'm looking across a river
into Mexico. If someone wanted to they could just swim across in like, two minutes.
Border patrol has all of these
mechanisms for making sure that doesn't happen.
Eyes in the sky.
GPS coordinates.
Conex box.
Motion X.
Raid tower.
ATVs.
There's a laser.
Alpha 5.
Shallow draft rain vessel.
One sensor. Another sensor.
Tactical operation centers.
Binos.
Scouts.
Mobile units.
Agents on horseback.
There's been all this talk about building a wall
on our southern border. It could cost up to seventy billion dollars.
We're building the wall. We're building the wall, folks. We're building the wall.
Turns out there already is kind of a wall. In addition to the hundreds of
miles of physical wall that exists, there's a wall of technology, of
surveillance, where people and technology and infrastructure spend days and nights
staring at the border. That's what I went down to Texas to look at and I want
to understand if the billions of dollars that we spend on this technology
is actually worth it.
These white blimps, which are actually called aerostats, are tethered to the
ground. And they have cameras on them. These cameras can zoom in to miles and miles
away to see what's going on in the ground. They can see in the dark with
infrared. They're able to see any sort of movement. This thing is called a raid tower.
I just spent like 20 minutes inside of the control room. Man, we were
able to like zoom in on people on the other side of the border and it was like
super clear and perfectly focused. Then you have seismic sensors.
It's picking up movement. Sensors are set up to kind of create a path.
Let's say you have one sensor go off. A few minutes later, another sensor goes off.
So that lets the agent know that they're taking a certain route. Now, if it's that one
sensor and another sensor: okay they're taking another route. And you know how
long it takes from point A to get all the way to, let's say, the highway. So it
kind of gives us an opportunity to gauge the amount of time that we have to respond.
Another way the border patrol does this job is with motion sensor
cameras. Basically, cameras that are out in the middle the brush that have motion
trackers on it. So when someone walks by, it takes a photo. Hunters actually use
these to track, like, deer. And they can see where deer are by taking a picture
of them whenever they come in front of the camera.
Down in this area of southern Texas,
there's not a lot of walls, but they use the walls strategically to
funnel people to other places: other parts of the border that don't have
walls, but where they have cameras and where they have a lot of eyes.
Now it's time to go on some boats with the border patrol.
You have to get past us before you can even touch dry land.
One of the tricky things about this
specific sector, is that there's a really windy river that goes throughout the
entire thing. Because of that a straight line between two cities might be a
hundred miles, but it covers 300 river miles.
No matter how much fancy technology they have here
to stare at the border, the most important function
and skill that these border patrol agents have, is what they call cutting sign.
There's brand new fresh sign right there. There's gotta be somebody here right now.
What's that?
There's somebody here right now.
Sign can be anything: it can be a boot print, matted down grass, stuff left behind.
His heel right here and how it's kicked up, that tells us that he's running.
They use old hunting techniques in order to find out: who was in an area, where they went,
how many people, what they were carrying. Over the years these border patrol agents
have developed a keen sense for tracking down migrants.
The Native Americans did tracking. It goes way back. If you're hunting, you track.
Might be a child.
You never want to see children making this trip.
One of the benefits to having the border patrol
be this collection of people and technology, is that you can move it
around. Instead of having permanent infrastructure always in one spot, you're
able to have this kind of fluid range of assets.
We're constantly adapting.
We're constantly looking at new technology and different aspects that we can throw in their way.
All of this costs us a lot of money. The border patrol's budget is 14
times bigger than it was in 1990. It's just gotten bigger and bigger every single year.
A lot of that increase in budget is going into this new technology, into this infrastructure.
And so the next question is: is this actually effective?
Only 30% of the people who are actually crossing into our country get caught by the
border patrol, 30%. Even with all of this technology and all these people and all
of these mechanisms for staring at the border, including walls, they still have a
very difficult time keeping people from entering our country. So in American
politics if we're gonna have this discussion about securing our border, we
need to come to terms with the fact that this is an expensive and very complicated
enterprise. And the idea that we can put up a wall or any other technology that
would just solve the problem is ignorant and naive to the reality on the ground.