The Trump administration has awarded a contract to a California-based startup to design and build “autonomous surveillance towers,” to will monitor and detect moving objects along the souther border.
The tech company, Anduril Industries, will build and deploy 200 mobile surveillance towers that will be able to detect objects, people, animals and vehicles moving along, and attempting to cross the U.S.-Mexico border.
The towers will be solar-powered and will “provide autonomous surveillance operations 24 hours per day, 365 days per year.”
Cameras on the towers will identify moving objects and notify patrol agents. The agents will then make final determination as to what the object is and the nature of the threat it poses.
CBP officials lauded the technology, saying it will give agents an advantage in securing the border.
“These towers give agents in the field a significant leg up against the criminal networks that facilitate illegal cross-border activity,” Border Patrol Chief Rodney Scott said in a statement. “The more our agents know about what they encounter in the field, the more safely and effectively they can respond.”
Details of the contract were not released but Anduril tells the The Washington Post that the contract will last five years and is worth in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
“Anduril is proud to support US Customs and Border Protection as it expands its use of innovative technology solutions to greatly improve situational awareness and agent safety along the US border,” company CEO Brian Schimpf told The Hill.
Photo by Tomas Castelazo via Wikimedia Commons