For ads-free news, click here.
From Washington Examiner: CHAMPLAIN, New York — Technology has largely taken the place of a physical wall on the U.S.-Canada border, where federal law enforcement officials depend on digital systems and electronic devices to multiply their presence.
At a time when the White House is pushing Congress to pass tens of billions of dollars in funding for more wall at the southern border, federal police up north say the investments in tech have proven themselves and should be strengthened.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection personnel told the Washington Examiner during a tour of the border in upstate New York that they want to see more technology incorporated in how they do their jobs, patrolling the vast spaces between border crossings and inspecting vehicles coming through the ports of entry.
When the Washington Examiner recently toured the border in New York, U.S. Customs and Border Protection personnel said additional technology would help them patrol the 4,000-mile northern border, which is over twice as long as the southern border (1,950 miles). With no physical wall, technological devices help them secure the large areas between border crossings, and they help at vehicle inspection points at the ports of entry. Devices such as drones, ground sensors, infrared cameras, and long-range cameras are essential, especially because they have less personnel to patrol the massive border area than they have at the southern border.
In the north, technology is used as their wall, and there are no plans for a physical barrier. In fact, lawmakers who back a southern border wall don’t see the need in the north.
“There are parts where, look, a wall isn’t going to stop people,” Claudia L. Tenney (R-NY), who supports the southern border wall, said in an interview. “What it does is slows them down so that the Border Protection can get time to get to people and find people that might actually be committing crimes or trafficking either people. It’s a little trickier with the weather conditions and also with these waterways.”
In some areas, Border Patrol has installed physical barriers of a sort. For example, cement blocks were set on the edge of two properties where vehicles were being used in smuggling attempts. According to the Examiner, that has stopped the activity.
The most effective items have been technology, however. For example, agents have installed cameras fixed to electrical poles, trees, and signs to locate people walking across the border. They are even 3-D printing trees fitted with cameras to make them more hidden and, therefore, effective.
But the Border Patrol’s only has 49 stations and a limited number of cameras “due to financial constraints,” the Examiner report. The technology also prevents at least one agent from being physically present in the already understaffed area, as the cameras and sensors must be monitored to make the effective.
“Unless somebody’s literally just staring at the screen as that person comes across, we won’t know that we had an entry,” said Raymond Bresnahan, the chief patrol agent in charge of Swanton Sector’s Champlain Station in Champlain, said.
Bresnahan would like to have technology that incorporates artificial intelligence to help. One example of AI benefitting agents would be in differentiating between animals and people.
Scott Good, the chief of Border Patrol’s Law Enforcement Operations Directorate in Washington, explained the type that the technology they need and use at the US-Canada border is also inhibited ny the weather there.
“This technology also has to be developed in a way that they can withstand the harsh temperatures and the harsh environments that we see on the northern border,” Good said in an interview. “You get out to these remote places in these large expanses on the northern border — there is no electricity. … It’s really not a big deal for us to use solar power for that, right? But you start getting these areas where the snow falls onto the solar panels, or it’s just cloudy for long periods of time and you don’t see the sunshine for a long time. That’s another thing that we have to look at. How do we extend battery life in cold weather?”
READ MORE at Washington Examiner.
The Dennis Michael Lynch Podcast archive is available below. Never miss an episode. Subscribe to the show by downloading The DML News App or go to Apple Podcasts.
