The virtual wall stops no one. It only counts the dead.

An investigation by MIT Technology Review, in partnership with the Times of San Diego, reveals that the smart surveillance towers strung along the U.S.–Mexico border — the so-called "virtual wall" — failed to detect migrants who walked right through them and died in the desert, their bodies sometimes undiscovered for weeks or months. The failures are systemic: broken towers, algorithms that didn't register human beings, agents who ignored alerts. Every such death should have triggered a red flag at Customs and Border Protection, especially in sectors where the new towers from defense contractor Anduril are deployed — towers that keep winning massive contracts and stand to reap a $1 billion infusion to triple the array by 2034.

No internal audit was ever conducted

The investigation's first recommendation: run a comprehensive audit of deaths near the towers. New Mexico Representative Sarah Silva reacted to the finding that more than 18 people died in 2024 alone in a single desert stretch near her district: "If I were the federal government, I would conduct an audit, because it feels like this isn't working." The problem is that CBP publishes no complete map of the array. Reporters were forced to rely on mapping by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and verify locations via satellite imagery. They analyzed nearly 600 towers — well short of the 800 the government claims are operational — and tallied more than 1,050 dead in their vicinity, a figure that is almost certainly an undercount. CBP has held precise operational data for every tower since 2015. Sources confirmed that no such audit has ever been performed.

The documentation system collapsed long ago

The second recommendation: fix how the agency records deaths and bodies. No national agency collects and publishes all available records. The investigation had to sift through thousands of pages of documents from dozens of entities in Texas alone, and the picture remains partial because no shared protocol exists. Border Patrol has maintained an internal system, the Border Safety Initiative Tracking System (BSITS), since 2007, but nationwide rules for entering cases were only established in 2021. A year later the Government Accountability Office found the system still wasn't functioning properly — a finding cut off in the original document, though the direction is clear: the infrastructure for investigating these failures simply does not exist.