The US has spent billions building a "virtual wall" of surveillance towers along its southern border over the past 25 years, promising they will help detect and apprehend border crossers and save lives. Some were even under the watch of newly installed AI-powered towers designed to spot people automatically. Our findings reveal a humanitarian crisis more visible than previously known, and repeated failures of the virtual wall's basic security promise. Join MIT Technology Review editors and reporters for a conversation examining the failures of border surveillance technology and uncovering the stories of the people who die in the borderlands. The US spent billions on border surveillance. Why can't it catch people before they die?

The US spent billions on border surveillance. Why can't it catch people before they die? When José Morales Bernal crossed the border into the US in April 2024, the day before his 32nd birthday, he was within range of three surveillance towers equipped with cameras and AI to automatically detect and track people. If the system worked as intended, Morales should have been apprehended. If he needed medical help, agents were trained to provide it. Instead, Morales died just 360 feet from the closest tower.

The US spent billions on border surveillance. Why can't it catch people before they die? Surveillance towers, increasingly powered by AI, promised faster responses to crossings. Our investigation of deaths near the towers found they are failing to deliver. When José Morales Bernal crossed the border into the United States on April 8, 2024, the day before his 32nd birthday, it should have triggered a chain of technological alerts and human responses. As he walked through the desert in southern New Mexico that morning, he was within range of three surveillance towers. Newly installed by US Customs and Border Protection (CBP), they were built by the defense tech company Anduril and equipped with cameras and AI to automatically detect and track people. They transmit live video to nearby control rooms and can send alerts to the government-issued smartphones held by agents in the area, prompting the closest available to respond. This story is part of Dying on Camera, a collaboration between and . These AI-enabled towers are meant to give greater visibility across the 1,951-mile southern border, freeing up border agents from having to spend hours staring into video monitors. They were installed in this particular place to spot border crossers before they reached the nearby town of Sunland Park. If the system worked as intended, Morales should have been apprehended. If he needed medical help, agents were trained to provide it. Despite the nearby surveillance towers, it was employees of the local landfill, rather than Border Patrol, who first spotted Morales that morning. At 1 p.m. the workers saw him again, now lying in the sand. At 4 p.m. the landfill workers saw that he had not moved and called Border Patrol. Agents arrived 45 minutes later. When an agent then called 911 to report the body, he said it was "probably one of the migrants crossing through there," seemingly unaware that Morales had been moving near the agency's surveillance systems earlier that day. Morales had died just 360 feet from the closest surveillance tower.

The US has spent billions on surveillance towers, but hundreds of people have died near them. Here's how to strengthen federal oversight. We found cases of people who walked undetected through areas surveilled by advanced, AI-enabled towers and later died nearby, where their bodies remained unnoticed for weeks or months. These cases reflect systemic flaws in the virtual wall: broken towers, algorithms that failed to detect people, and agents who simply did not respond to alerts. This story is part of Dying on Camera, a collaboration between and . Each of these deaths should have raised alarms inside US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) about the flaws in the agency's surveillance network.

Haptic upper limb exoskeletons are robots that assist human operators during task execution while having the ability to render virtual or remote environments. Therefore, the stability of such robots in physical human-robot-environment interaction must be guaranteed, in addition to performing well during task execution. Having a wide range of Z-width, which shows the region of passively renderable impedance by a haptic display, is also important to render a wide range of virtual environments. To address these issues, in this study, subsystem-based adaptive impedance control is designed for having a stable human-robot-environment interaction of 7 degrees of freedom haptic exoskeleton. The presented control decomposes the entire system into subsystems and designs the controller at the subsystem level. The stability of the controller in the presence of contact with the virtual environment and human arm force is proved by employing the virtual stability concept. Additionally, the Z-width of the 7-DoF haptic exoskeleton is drawn using experimental data and improved using varying virtual mass element for the virtual environment. Finally, experimental results are provided to demonstrate the perfect performance of the proposed controller in accomplishing the predefined task.

It's no secret that Palmer Luckey's Anduril Industries has been developing a "virtual wall" to heighten national security -- he's been at it for the better part of three years. That work (for better or worse) has finally paid off. According to a new report from the Washington Post, the Trump administration awarded Anduril a lucrative five-year contract to erect hundreds of AI-powered surveillance towers along the U.S.-Mexico border by 2022. "These towers give agents in the field a significant leg up against the criminal networks that facilitate illegal cross-border activity," said Border Patrol Chief Rodney Scott in a statement released by U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Anduril's hardware almost looks like it belongs in orbit, rather than sitting amid desert scrub.

When I first began reviewing robot vacuums, there was a sharp demarcation between budget robovacs for $300 or less, and the primo powerhouses that left your house sparkling clean. They were great for a quick tidy-up or to film your cat riding on them, but they weren't that powerful or efficient. This yea, you can get a whole bevy of features for a lot less. You can see most of them in the Roborock E20. The E20 is the more affordable version of their flagship mop-and-vac combo, the S5.

Palmer Luckey, the virtual reality pioneer, left Facebook in 2017, six months after it was discovered that he had secretly funded a pro-Trump campaign group dedicated to influencing the US election through "shitposting" and "meme magic". The 25-year-old Oculus founder now has a new venture, Anduril Industries, this time supporting Trump's immigration policies directly through the creation of a surveillance system designed to detect unauthorised crossings of the Mexican border. Anduril Industries is one of a growing number of companies playing on the fear of "bad hombres" to cash in on government contracts for hi-tech virtual alternatives to physical wall. From drones and sensors to AI-powered facial recognition and human presence detection, these surveillance systems promise cheaper border control but at what cost to civil liberties? "These systems are reflective of advances in sensor and analytics technologies that are going to have serious repercussions for Americans' privacy," said Jay Stanley, senior policy analyst with the ACLU.

A former Facebook executive is spearheading a new Silicon Valley startup that hopes to build a digital wall at the US-Mexico border. Palmer Luckey, the 25-year-old who led Facebook's virtual reality unit Oculus, has now launched a firm focused on merging defense and consumer tech. Called Anduril Industries, the company is now working with Customs and Border Protection in California to test out its virtual wall, which has already found some success, according to Wired. Anduril has also set up several towers, equipped with antennas and other sensors, at a ranch in Texas to test out out the technology. There, the firm has constructed three, portable 32ft towers with radar, antenna and laser-enhanced cameras, as part of a system its calling Lattice, Wired noted. Lattice can pick up on and identify motion that's as far as two miles away.

When you hear talk of a border wall, you typically picture an actual, physical construction. The Oculus co-founder and his startup Anduril Industries have been working on a virtual wall -- one complete with cameras, sensors and VR -- with the aim of scoring a US defense contract and providing border security at a fraction of the cost of a physical wall. Luckey discussed plans for this technology last year, but now it's being tested, both officially and unofficially, and it's catching the eye of US officials. Wired reports that Anduril has constructed a prototype of its Lattice system on a ranch in Texas and is also conducting a government-funded test of its technology outside of San Diego. "They said they could provide broader border security for a lower cost," Melissa Ho, managing director of Silicon Valley's Department of Homeland Security office, told Wired.