How we made the first comprehensive map of deaths along the US border’s “virtual wall”
MIT Technology Review and Times of San Diego conducted a 15-month investigation into death and surveillance along the US-Mexico border, starting from the question of why so many people die near government surveillance towers meant to help track and apprehend them. The project, part of the collaboration Dying on Camera, had journalists from both newsrooms spend the past year examining failures of border surveillance technology and uncovering stories of people who die in the borderlands. To answer the question, they reviewed thousands of pages of government documents, visited the border multiple times, and interviewed more than 45 people, including current and former White House advisors, presidential appointees, Border Patrol agents, medical examiners, sheriffs, humanitarian volunteers, and employees of tech companies. The result is what the article describes as the first comprehensive map and analysis of deaths near border surveillance towers, along with an explanation of how it was built, the decisions made, and what the data can and cannot tell us.
The investigation relied on knowing where migrants have died and where and when US Customs and Border Protection towers were installed. It analyzed cases dating back to 2015 so the dataset would cover different border policies, presidential administrations, and tower technologies. On deaths, the US-Mexico border has been called the world's deadliest land border, and Border Patrol estimates more than 10,000 people have died during crossings since 2000—a figure widely considered an undercount. Public information about where and when these people died, and who they were, varies widely: some remains are never discovered, and for those found there is no national protocol for handling records. A case was considered for analysis if the team could confirm three things: that the person was believed to have been crossing the border, where the remains were found, and roughly when the person died. The dataset merged existing compilations shared by No More Deaths, Humane Borders, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation with new records obtained from more than a dozen agencies.
Texas was the biggest missing link in most existing databases of migrant deaths. Unlike Arizona, it has no initiative to share such records online, and unlike New Mexico, it leaves individual counties to handle their own death investigations. Some records for individual counties existed, compiled by a handful of dedicated researchers, but nothing was comprehensive or current. The investigation identified 17 Texas counties as relevant: Culberson, Jeff Davis, Presidio, Terrell, Val Verde, Kinney, Maverick, Dimmit, Webb, Zapata, Jim Hogg, Starr, Hidalgo, Cameron, Kenedy, Brooks, and Duval. The investigation also notes that there are other counties where migrants have died beyond those 17.
The article is framed as a methodology explainer: it walks through how the team built the map, the choices it made, and the limits of what the data can show. By combining death records with tower installation timelines, the project aims to shed light on the failures of border surveillance technology and the human toll in the borderlands.