The walls have eyes: How Trump plans to supercharge border security with tech

In December 2024, president-elect Donald J. Trump was named Time’s Person of the Year. Immigration ran like a current through his interview for the magazine, and Trump reiterated his goals again: “Whatever it takes to get them out. I don’t care. Honestly, whatever it takes to get them out… I won it in 2016 on the border, and I fixed the border, and it was really fixed, and they came in and they just dislodged everything that I did… I consider it an invasion of our country.”

Borders are both real and artificial. They are what historian Sheila McManus calls an “accumulation of terrible ideas,” created through colonialism, imperial fantasies, apartheid, and the daily practice of exclusion. Today, there are millions of people on the move because of conflict, instability, and climate change, as well as for economic reasons. But politicians and the media often talk about the people crossing borders—whether by force or by choice—in apocalyptic terms, as a “flood” or “wave” or, according to president-elect Trump, “rapists” or “vermin,” terms that are underscored by xenophobia and racism.

In recent years a technological frontier has emerged to control migration through tightening of borders and inland surveillance. Some of the control methods are old. Passports and physical border walls have always been used to separate and exclude people, but new technologies are making their way into immigration, deportation, and refugee processing, at a faster rate than ever before. Decisions such as whether to grant a visa or deport or detain someone, which would otherwise be made by administrative tribunals, immigration officers, or border agents, are now made by machines through algorithms. Enforcement agencies like Europe’s Frontex, for example, use predictive analytics, which call on large datasets to forecast human behavior, in this case to project where people may be crossing borders.

There has also been a rise in the use of biometrics, or the automated recognition of individuals based on their biological and behavioral characteristics. Biometrics can include fingerprint data, retinal scans, and facial recognition, as well as less well-known methods of using technology that can recognize a person’s vein and blood vessel patterns, ear shape, and gait. Even more experimental are lie detectors relying on AI to determine who is telling the truth at the border, while voice-printing technologies analyze accents and patterns of speech.

Meanwhile, the surveillance dragnet is only continuing to expand, with a growing arsenal of cameras, blimps, loud sound cannons, and even robodogs deployed to control borders. Indeed, in the United States, president-elect Donald J. Trump has signaled an increasing reliance on surveillance to help him accomplish his goals. And the goals are many.