Journalists from MIT Technology Review and Times of San Diego spent a year examining the failures of border surveillance technology and the stories of people who die in the borderlands. The investigation began with a simple question: Why did so many people die near government surveillance towers meant to help track and apprehend them?
To answer that question, the team looked through thousands of pages of government documents, visited the border multiple times, and interviewed more than 45 people, including current and former White House advisors, presidential appointees, Border Patrol agents, medical examiners, sheriffs, humanitarian volunteers, and employees of tech companies.
The investigation relied on knowing where migrants have died and where and when US Customs and Border Protection towers were installed. The team analyzed cases dating back to 2015, covering different border policies, presidential administrations, and tower technologies.
The US-Mexico border has been called the world's deadliest land border, with Border Patrol estimating more than 10,000 deaths during crossings since 2000—a figure widely considered an undercount. The amount of publicly available information on where and when people died, and who they were, varies widely. Some remains are never discovered, and for those that are, there is no national protocol for how the records are handled.
The team considered a case for further analysis if they could confirm three basic things: whether the person was believed to have been crossing the border, where the remains were found, and roughly when the person died.
They created the dataset by merging existing ones compiled by other organizations, including No More Deaths, Humane Borders, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, with new records obtained from more than a dozen agencies. Texas was the biggest missing link in most existing databases, unlike Arizona which has an initiative to share records online, and New Mexico which leaves individual counties to handle death investigations. Some Texas county records existed, compiled by a handful of dedicated researchers.