This Arizona reporter found that drones used in Ukraine are now monitoring U.S.-Mexico border

But we begin this morning with a local reporter who found an unexpected connection in her work to her home country of Ukraine.

Alexandra Markovich was born in Ukraine — the country is still entangled in a hard-fought war against Russia, one of the world’s premier military powers.

But, she never imagined there would be much overlap between her work here in the Southwest — for the Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting — and her home country.

That is, until she started looking at the surge of technology being used to monitor the U.S.-Mexico border and found a burgeoning drone industry. And that led her right back to Ukraine. Markovich joined The Show to talk more about how.

Full conversation

ALEXANDRA MARKOVICH: Good morning. Thanks so much for having me.

GILGER: Start with that connection for us. Like what connection did you find between the U.S.-Mexico border here and where you were born in Ukraine?

MARKOVICH: My beat at Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting is criminal justice. And I started looking into mass surveillance and the systems and technologies that are used to do that along the border. And I was browsing one of these companies that has a pilot program coming up with a county, Cochise County, down at the southern border and went back in their history and saw, oh, whoa, they've been in Ukraine. I wonder if there's a trend here. Is this the only one? Is there more of a connection than just the social media post.

GILGER: And you found quite a trend. Like this is definitely like a kind of an industry of drones being quote unquote "battle tested in Ukraine on the front lines" for various reasons and then being brought here to be used on our southern border.

MARKOVICH: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, Ukraine has become the proving ground for defense companies, and it's the epicenter of modern drone warfare. And it's interesting because military-grade technology has long been used at the border. I mean, think about Predator drones, right? Those were used in Iraq and Afghanistan, and now they're used in the borderlands. And I'll also add to surveil protesters, right?

But as we have with military grade technology in Ukraine, these tools are commercial and they're cheap and they're off the shelf. And they're then used for the military context. And then that allows them to be used in a much more widespread way on the borderlands.

GILGER: OK, so you went back to Ukraine. You saw these drones at work in a few different ways there. How were they working? They're on the front line sort of targeting Russian soldiers as you might expect, but they're also being used basically to surveil Ukrainian soldiers or maybe potential soldiers who are trying to basically dodge the draft?

MARKOVICH: Yeah, so drones in Ukraine are used in a couple ways. The primary way is definitely in the war. And they're taking — it's crazy — commercial off-the-shelf drones, and some are used to surveil Russian forces, and others are used basically, you know, you take a drone, strap a bomb onto it, and it becomes a lethal weapon.

The other way is that Ukraine has a mandatory draft, and a bunch of people are trying to escape being drafted into the war, and they're fleeing through the western and the southern border.

And drones are an extremely effective way of monitoring a large swath of territory for human activity, just in the same way that in the United States and the southern border with Mexico, drones can be used to monitor people who are trying to enter the country. So it's kind of a reverse situation to what we have here.

GILGER: Very interesting connection. Talk about how successful these kind of, like you said, kind of cheap drones have been in Ukraine. One soldier told you one drone replaces 30 people.

MARKOVICH: Yeah, at least. And you know, when he said that, I think he was thinking far more because the way and what I'll say is that Ukrainians know the power of these drones to be able to spot people in extremely rough terrain that otherwise would be impossible to get to or in the dark, impossible to see people, right?

Where in the U.S., we are and have for a long time already been using drones on the border, but not at anywhere close to the scale that Ukrainians have learned that they can use drones in order to really give kind of complete coverage of an area.

So what Ukrainians do, they'll have a drone in the air at all times. As soon as one battery dies, they have another one that's coming right up behind it to monitor a border. totally continuously. And in the United States on the southern border, we've had some of those tools in place, but it's not like when you drive to the borderlands and take a look, there's not drones in the air constantly flying around you as the way that it is in Ukraine.

GILGER: And you hear that sound, right, in Ukraine, like a soldier described it to you as the scariest sound on the battlefield, is that kind of hum of a drone?

MARKOVICH: Yeah, we met with the soldier who was back in training others, other, they have a specific border guard unit that also fights on the front lines. And when he heard the sound of a drone, I think it just recalled to him, you know, specifically those first-person-view drones that are strapped with explosives in the last year or so of the war have made it so deadly and so terrifying that even just getting into position now is, extraordinarily dangerous in a way that it wasn't quite before.

GILGER: Let me ask you lastly here about another kind of problem you found here. Once this technology is kind of brought to the increasingly militarized U.S.-Mexico border, there's almost no oversight you found, right, of this kind of use of technology. And these lines seem to be really blurring. Tell us about that.

MARKOVICH: Yeah, with a technology like drones that's dual use, it can be used for a variety of things, right? It could be used, drones are used in agriculture. Drones can be used for so many things, and what matters is the end that they're used for.

And the truth is that in the United States, with the border agencies, there's very little oversight as to what these agencies are actually limited to do. They can go far beyond their simple purview of monitoring the border, as we've seen with the surveillance of protesters.

And so when you have such a wide mission and mission creep with these agencies, and then you have very few new guardrails such as there's, for example, no single federal standard governing drone use and the technology is advancing so quickly, much more quickly than the regulations themselves, there's a lot of potential for abuse with the wrong actors.