She died at the San Diego border. A surveillance camera was in plain sight

Graciela Gómez Hernández, 30, did not tell her family about her plan until the day before she crossed from the eastern edge of Tijuana into Southern California on the afternoon of Sept. 14, 2025. She hoped to work in California and send money back to her three children and her parents in southern Mexico; her oldest son, age 11, had asked for a bicycle. She sent voice messages to her mother and sister as she walked. The story is part of "Dying on Camera," a collaboration between MIT Technology Review and Times of San Diego, whose journalists spent the past year examining the failures of border surveillance technology and uncovering the stories of people who die in the borderlands.

Gómez Hernández either climbed a ladder over the border wall or slipped through a section in steep terrain where fencing has yet to be built, following dozens of game trails that cut through the dust on hillsides of sagebrush and manzanita. It was the first segment of a hike through the Otay Mountain Wilderness. Though the eastern edge of San Diego is just a mile away, countless migrants hike 10 or 20 miles north through the mountains to evade the Border Patrol, emerging in smaller towns and on distant highways with fewer checkpoints. The mountainous terrain makes some areas difficult to access, but the area is blanketed with interconnected surveillance technology.

Between 2 and 3 p.m., her sister said, Gómez Hernández sent a final message to her mother: "I can't do it anymore," she whispered into her phone. Before she died, she told her family in a WhatsApp message that she could see helicopters overhead and white Border Patrol trucks making periodic laps on the road below. By the time a forensic crew came to collect her, two weeks later, most of her body had disappeared into the earth.

She died on her own, but she was not, strictly speaking, alone: she was in one of the most heavily surveilled strips of land in the world. Supervising the whole territory from a nearby hilltop was a slender gray surveillance tower, made by General Dynamics and in place since 2019, which boasts two sets of electro-optical and infrared cameras with long-range lenses that can track targets 5 to 7 miles away. Gómez Hernández was just one mile away. Surveillance towers have proliferated in recent years as contractors added newer camera systems that use artificial intelligence to distinguish border-crossers from other people and animals and to track their movements, at an overall cost of more than a billion dollars — yet as the cameras scan the terrain, migrants continue to die in plain sight.