Arizona reporters find hidden surveillance around U.S.-Mexico border, Tohono O'Odham Reservation

There is a lot of technology around the U.S.–Mexico border. But it turns out there’s even more tech in that area than many people know about — because it’s out of sight.

Jerod MacDonald-Evoy of the Arizona Mirror was part of a team that looked into this. He joined The Show to talk about what they found.

Amber Victoria Singer/KJZZ

Full conversation

MARK BRODIE: Jerod, good morning.

JEROD MACDONALD-EVOY: Good morning.

BRODIE: Let's talk about where you went, because this is a little bit of a reporting trip for you and a colleague, right?

MACDONALD-EVOY: Yeah. So this was a collaboration between myself and Todd Miller at the Border Chronicle. Todd's done a lot of reporting on the past 20 years on the southern border, specifically a lot of reporting on surveillance technology. We ended up driving around areas like Gila Bend, Tucson, Nogales, the Sells area. We drove basically pretty much as much as we could of the Tohono O'odham Reservation as well.

BRODIE: And one of the things that you write about was sort of the, I don't want to say the lengths that, that are gone to, but the way that some of this technology is hidden is sort in a way that people driving by wouldn't necessarily notice that it's there.

MACDONALD-EVOY: Yeah. One of the things that we found was that these automatic license plate readers are placed within traffic cones, is one of the main ways that they're kind of making their equipment a little bit more covert. They're placing them in orange traffic cones or these other, they're moving them now into these larger yellow, those impact cushion kind of cones.

And they're also putting them in other places as well, like behind street signs or hidden in these, what, those trailers that, that usually you would see that have, you know, warning signs of construction up ahead.

BRODIE: So what do law enforcement agencies say they're doing with these? Like, why do they need them there?

MACDONALD-EVOY: So these specific devices, these automatic license plate readers, belong to Customs and Border Patrol and the Drug Enforcement Agency, our administration. And they told me, well, Customs of Border Patrol told me that they use this to, to stop illicit trade, to disrupt drug trafficking and criminal, criminal networks.

And they, they told me that, you know, for national security reasons, they don't really talk a lot more else about it. And that's what they said that this, this technology is used for.

BRODIE: OK. So they didn't want to talk too much about it. But it sounds as though you were able to talk to some folks who have sort of been impacted by this, and they were interested in talking about it. What'd you hear from them?

MACDONALD-EVOY: Correct. So we ended up speaking to some people who live out in the Tohono O'Odham Reservation, where we found that at the entry and exit points of the reservation, people are scanned by, you know, when they're entering the reservation, they're scanned by Customs and Border Patrol. When they're exiting the reservation, they tend to be scanned by DEA.

And we found that people in this area are they're aware of this technology and they find that, you know, a lot of the times when they're, they're driving, say, from off reservation into the area that they, they may get stopped by Border Patrol who say that, you know, you're driving in an odd way, or they may say, you know, that, you know, we saw you driving from this really far away area or into this one area, and we, we found that suspicious or people are just getting, you know, stopped consistently a bunch of times and not really given a reason why.

BRODIE: I also want to ask you about some of the technology that is visible that, you know, people can see. And you describe some. What I, what I imagine are cameras or some kind of like, sensing technology that when you guys, like, drove up or walked up close to it, you could see it following you. Is that right?

MACDONALD-EVOY: Yeah. So these are, that was one of these, they're called integrated fixed towers. They're also called IFTs for short. They're kind of integral to what's called the digital or virtual wall. And they're these, these kind of tall towers that on the top have these really high powered cameras that can see for miles.

A lot of them are on public land. And when myself and Todd and a person we were interviewing went out to go view one of these towers, we were walking towards it, and it pivoted towards us and looked at us as we were walking towards it.

Now, these towers, they, they kind of dot areas along Nogales. They're a little closer to the border than I would say some of these more covert things we've been talking about, which we found one of those covert things more than 100 miles away from the border, one outside of Apache Junction. But these are closer to the border and stare usually directly at the border.

Customs and Border Patrol denied a records request I made asking for the footage that was taken that day of myself and my fellow reporter.

BRODIE: What is the rationale for, as you say, using some of this technology farther away from the border, you know, 100 miles or more away from the actual border?

MACDONALD-EVOY: Well, Customs and Border Patrol, their, their jurisdiction is generally 100 miles from the border. That's what was established by Supreme Court in the late 1940s as their jurisdiction. That that perimeter kind of includes like Tucson, Willcox, Sells.

But when I reached out to CBP to ask them about this, you know, us finding two different covert ALPR devices outside of that 100 mile radius, 132 miles, 111 miles, they told us that, you know, while that 100 mile area is primarily where they operate, within that there are other laws that allow them to operate anywhere in the United States. That was pretty much the answer that they gave us.

BRODIE: OK, so Jerod, very quickly before I let you go, is there evidence to suggest that this kind of technology works at keeping bad stuff from happening?

MACDONALD-EVOY: Well, Border Patrol is pretty hush on how this is being, you know, used in investigations or being used at all. There's, there's not a lot of insight into how this is being used to catch smugglers or in cases, they're pretty mum on on how this is being used on their end.

You know, we've seen a lot of talk lately on how ALPR devices are being used by local law enforcement in cases of things like Flock, which CBP and federal law enforcement are known to also be able to have access to.

But we also know that these devices do make mistakes. They misidentify license plates, they misidentify people, or the people behind accessing this data can also make mistakes. So it's not a perfect system and it's also been prone to data compromises and hacking that have led to issues as well. As such as there was a system used by CBP back in 2019 called Perceptics that was compromised. That led to a lot of Arizona license plates and driver's license being leaked onto the dark web.