In California border town, AI raises fresh questions over decades-old surveillance tower

Update: The Calexico City Council voted to approve the lease for the surveillance tower at Nosotros Park. Read our coverage here.

The corner of Wozencraft Street and Linholm Avenue is lined with colorful single-story homes. On a recent morning, birds chirped over the hum of a nearby lawnmower, while cars filed in and out of driveways. 

But in this peaceful scene of the “American Dream” — here in Calexico, a California border town in the state’s southeasternmost county — one thing sticks out from the rest.

A surveillance tower, equipped with a pair of cameras that swivel erratically, adjusting their view to and from the U.S.-Mexico border in the distance, protrudes into the sky. 

Operated by the U.S. Border Patrol, the system can detect people on the move miles in the distance using infrared and high-resolution zoom cameras, a spotlight and laser illuminator. From a command and control room, an agent watches the feed, adjusting the view of the camera.

For more than two decades, the federal government has quietly operated this tower at Nosotros Park, where it sits wedged between a residential neighborhood and an outdoor space where retirees take strolls in the mornings and kids play basketball in the evenings.

Now, the Calexico City Council could soon approve another nearly 20-year lease allowing the tower at the park. But privacy experts and community activists worry that the surveillance operations — including the role of artificial intelligence — bring risks for both migrants and residents. 

In a letter to Mayor Gloria Romo sent Tuesday, advocacy groups urged the council to delay its vote until more information could be gathered and disseminated among the residents. 

“In an era where the public has grave concerns on the impact of unchecked technology on youth and communities of color, we do not believe enough scrutiny and skepticism has been applied to this agreement and CBP’s proposal,” they wrote in the letter.

The item is scheduled for a vote on Wednesday, but Romo told inewsource that she believes the council should postpone any action.

While the predominantly Latino community has long been accustomed to a high level of surveillance, Calexico and other cities along the border are at the center of a rapidly expanding and experimental surveillance system.  

Customs and Border Protection, or CBP, has plans to transform the nearly 2,000-mile southwest border through a dynamic network of camera towers, drones, aircraft and underground sensors which will use artificial intelligence to detect migrants crossing into the U.S. illegally and deploy agents to the scene.

The agency had not responded to inewsource’s questions about the tower by Tuesday evening.

While negotiations with CBP offer an opportunity to push the agency for more information, the council has so far failed to, at least publicly, ask questions about how the tower operates, how it collects data or how impacts on residents could be mitigated.

“While a human being may be able to tell the difference between children playing games or residents getting ready for work, AI is prone to mistakes and difficult to hold accountable,” leaders from Imperial Valley Equity & Justice Coalition, Electronic Frontier Foundation, or EFF, Calexico Needs Change and American Friends Service Committee wrote in the letter.

The contract renewal also comes at a contentious and divisive moment for Calexico. 

Voters just ousted the two youngest, most progressive council members, Gilberto Manzanarez and Raúl Ureña, the latter of whom is transgender, in an April recall that ended in an impassioned exit of the council members last week. Manzanarez and Ureña were the top vote getters in the election just two years ago.

The ousted council members and their supporters said the recall was driven in part by transphobia, as well as opposition from cultural conservatives threatened by progressive policies. But the recall’s leader denied that transphobia played a role, and instead blamed Manzanarez and Ureña for crime and homelessness in the city’s downtown.

Now, only three of the normally five council members meant to represent Calexico residents will decide the fate of the tower. 

Council member Javier Moreno said he was “still researching the information” on the issue as of Tuesday afternoon. Council member Camilo Garcia did not return inewsource’s requests for comment. 

Residents differ on surveillance

Jesús Arellano can see the surveillance tower from his home. He remembers when it was first installed. 

“They never even asked us for permission. Nothing, nothing, nothing. They arrived and put up a tower and the tower has been there for years,” Arellano said in Spanish. 

He knows the cameras are meant to monitor the border, but he wonders why they sometimes point toward his home. 

“You go outside, just chilling, they’re recording everything you’re doing. So they rob your privacy,” Arellano said. 

While Arellano was skeptical of the surveillance, other residents passing through Nosotros Park on a recent weekday morning welcomed what they saw as helpful vigilance in an area they say is troubled by drug use and vandalism at night. 

“It serves as protection for us,” said Juana Guijarro, a Calexico resident of 36 years who walks through the park every morning. 

At a time when Calexico, a city where nearly a quarter of residents live below the poverty line, struggles with understaffing including in its police department, some residents viewed the surveillance cameras as an added security measure.

“There’s no law enforcement. There’s nothing. We don’t have protection,” said Angelica Dueñas, a Calexico resident of nearly 50 years who said she is in favor of surveillance cameras.

But community activists, including Daniela Flores of the Imperial Valley Justice & Equity Coalition, said residents don’t have enough information about the towers. 

“I just don’t think people know the level of surveillance that’s happening and the threats that come with it,” Flores said. 

The tower at Nosotros Park is one of five in the 8.6-square mile city and hundreds along the border, according to a surveillance tracking map from EFF. Although it isn’t currently operated by artificial intelligence — it’s part of an older tower model called “remote video surveillance system” — the contract leaves open the possibility for CBP to make changes to the current tower. 

Documents show CBP plans to upgrade 45 towers in the El Centro Sector, which includes Calexico. And CBP officials are clear about their intent to use artificial intelligence broadly across the border, in conjunction with surveillance towers and an array of other tech tools, to detect and identify border crossers and deploy agents to the scene. 

Advocates are pushing the council to ask CBP what data the tower will collect, who it could be shared with, who will be held accountable for misuses or mistakes and whether the tower could be located elsewhere or programmed not to point at the park or residential area, among other questions. 

None of the council members expressed opposition to the lease at a previous meeting, including the now-recalled members, though Manzanarez wanted more than the $1,500 annually that initially CBP offered.

“My only concern is the actual price of the lease,” Manzanarez said then. “We’re talking about the federal government in this area placing super expensive high tech equipment in a park that for a long time, and still currently, is not even fully (lit) up.”

Council member Moreno said they should let CBP use the property free of charge. 

Ultimately the council decided 3-2 to renegotiate the contract price with CBP, with Moreno and Garcia casting the dissenting votes. Under the most recent version of the proposed lease, CBP would pay $9,000 annually with 2% increase each year.  

Concerns of AI in communities

Surveillance technology comes at a huge cost to both migrants crossing into the U.S. from Mexico and the communities on the border where surveillance is most concentrated, according to privacy experts.

And despite hundreds of millions in federal funding over the years, multiple reports from watchdog agencies have found little evidence that the surveillance tower programs have had the intended effect. 

Instead of deterring immigration, critics say surveillance has driven migrants seeking safety in the U.S. to take more dangerous routes to avoid apprehension, leading to thousands of deaths or disappearances over the years. 

Communities on both sides of the border get caught in the fray, becoming “receptacles” of experimental technology prone to mistakes, said Petra Molnar, a lawyer and anthropologist who recently published a book on artificial intelligence at the border. 

Molnar pointed to issues with the use of AI in facial recognition, which studies have found is generally less accurate for people of color and has already led to several wrongful arrests.

“If we already know that AI and automated decision making is far from perfect … how can we ensure that it doesn’t both replicate the issues that are already inherent in the system and not create new ones?” Molnar said. 

In Calexico, where 98% of residents identify as Latino, faulty AI decision-making could create dangerous situations for community members, according to Dave Maass, director of investigations at EFF. 

“It may push police or law enforcement or Border Patrol to respond aggressively to something that the algorithm has determined as a crime or an incursion when it really isn’t,” Maass said. 

Aside from faulty AI, experts said communities need to consider the technology’s capability for mass data collection and how it could be used in the future — potentially outside of what agencies may initially promise.  

Dinesh McCoy, a staff attorney at Just Futures Law, a legal advocacy group for immigration and criminal justice, said that kind of “mission creep” — when surveillance technology is used for purposes outside of the initial scope — has happened before. 

In 2020, CBP used surveillance drones to spy on protesters following the police killing of George Floyd. In other cases, the National Security Agency employees misused surveillance technology to spy on their romantic partners.

“The more and more that we normalize mass surveillance in daily life, the more that that surveillance will chip away at anyone’s sense of privacy. And I think we should all be concerned about normalizing that,” McCoy said.

The current contract being considered between Calexico and CBP would allow the surveillance tower “solely for noncommercial governmental use” but gave no further specifics. 

4:45 p.m. May 16: This story was updated to clarify that CBP surveillance is meant to detect migrants crossing into the U.S. without legal permission.

8:15 a.m. May 15: This story was updated to include that CBP did not immediately respond to inewsource’s questions about the lease.