By Kari Jacobson
FAIR
Whistleblowers from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) told a congressional committee this month that the vast majority – or 66 percent – of surveillance cameras along the southern border are broken. At the same time, an internal agency memo leaked to news outlets last week confirmed that surveillance cameras at the border have been plagued with widespread outages. This prompted Members of Congress to send a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, calling on him to explain the failures and mismanagement of taxpayer funds.
According to the House Homeland Security Committee, the whistleblowers informed them that some of the busiest southern border sectors have nearly 50 or more cameras offline with multiple towers that have been out of service for more than a year. The whistleblowers also informed the Committee that the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the vendor responsible for the repair of these cameras, contracts to companies employing non-U.S. citizens “who may be physically manipulating the equipment on the camera towers.”
The Border Patrol’s surveillance cameras are not only instrumental in helping agents track and apprehend illegal aliens attempting to cross, but they also determine how many “gotaways” have evaded law enforcement and were never processed or vetted. A DHS source said that due to the broken cameras, the number of gotaways crossing the border could be “way more than reported.”
The same time as the House Homeland Security Committee was speaking to whistleblowers, a Border Patrol memo, dated early October, was leaked to the press, reportedly saying that roughly 30 percent of the agency’s cameras are inoperable. The Remote Video Surveillance System (RVSS) consists of more than 200 towers and has been utilized for over a decade to better monitor illegal border crossings, particularly in remote areas. However, according to the memo, around 150 of 500 cameras along the southern border are currently down due to “several technical problems.” Although some repairs have been made over the past month, the memo notes that there are still more than 150 outstanding repair requests.
The Border Patrol memo also states that the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is, in large part, responsible for the disastrous surveillance outage. The FAA is tasked with servicing and repairing the cameras, but the memo explains that it has faced internal issues in keeping the cameras operational. While the FAA plans to send staff to the border to address the outages, the Border Patrol is now considering replacing the FAA with a private contractor.
Multiple Border Patrol agents and the National Border Patrol Council (NBPC), which serves as the Border Patrol’s union, have voiced serious concern over the outages. Art Del Cueto, vice president of the NBPC, stated, “Once again, we have another situation of ineptness from this administration, and it continues to show how out of touch DHS leadership is. Not only does this have an impact on the country by not knowing who or what is coming in, it also impacts the safety of the agents working the front lines.”
DHS’s failure to ensure the cameras were operable may not come as a surprise to Members of Congress who sounded the alarm about Border Patrol’s surveillance cameras earlier this year. During a Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing in April, Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.) pressed Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas on the status of Border Patrol’s surveillance systems and expressed concern that outages would result in increased numbers of gotaways. Mayorkas repeatedly dodged answering whether the cameras had been fully operational throughout his tenure or whether there had been any outages along the southern border. In one notable exchange, Mayorkas argued that “[i]f a technology goes down for a short period of time I may not have visibility of that, I’m the Secretary of the Department.” Sen. Marshall closed by calling out Mayorkas’ failure to provide clarity on the problems, asking, “[h]ow can you keep track of the gotaways if you have no program in place that tells us when [the cameras are] working or not working?”
Under the current administration, more than 10 million illegal aliens have been encountered at our borders. Faced with this historic flood of people, Border Patrol agents have been forced to spend their time processing and releasing illegal aliens, as more and more illegal border crossers evade detection. Just last month, a House Homeland Security Committee report revealed that CBP has recorded an estimated two million known gotaways since FY 2021, which “far exceeds the 1.29 million recorded from FY10-20 combined.” In March 2023, then-Border Patrol Chief Raul Ortiz testified to the Committee that, “the true number of gotaways—detected and undetected—could be as much as 20 percent higher than reported.”
The border crisis continues, yet shortfalls in critical Border Patrol surveillance systems only stand to make it worse. Without the ability to properly monitor the southern border, there’s no telling what types of threats could be entering the country undetected.
