Our 15-month investigation into death and surveillance along the US-Mexico border began with a simple question: Why did so many people die near government surveillance towers meant to help track and apprehend them? This story is part of Dying on Camera, a collaboration between MIT Technology Review and Times of San Diego. Journalists in both newsrooms spent the past year examining the failures of border surveillance technology and uncovering the stories of the people who die in the borderlands. To answer that question, we looked through 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 of our investigation is the first comprehensive map and analysis of deaths near border surveillance towers. We analyzed cases dating back to 2015, allowing us to cover different border policies, presidential administrations, and tower technologies. Migrant deaths The US-Mexico border has been called the world’s deadliest land border, and Border Patrol estimates that more than 10,000 people have died during crossings since 2000—a figure that’s widely considered an undercount.

We considered a case for further analysis if we could confirm three basic things: whether the person was believed to have been crossing the border, where the remains were found, and roughly when the person died. We created our dataset by merging existing ones that had been compiled and shared by other organizations, including No More Deaths, Humane Borders, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, with new records we obtained ourselves from more than a dozen agencies. Public records requests in Texas Texas was the biggest missing link in most existing databases of migrant deaths.

Unlike Arizona, it has no initiative to share records online, and unlike New Mexico, it leaves individual counties to handle their own death investigations. We identified 17 counties in Texas that would be relevant to our investigation: Culberson, Jeff Davis, Presidio, Terrell, Val Verde, Kinney, Maverick, Dimmit, Webb, Zapata, Jim Hogg, Starr, Hidalgo, Cameron, Kenedy, Brooks, and Duval. In most of these counties, locally elected administrative judges called justices of the peace collect the most comprehensive information on local deaths.

But records requests submitted to these individual judges can stall for years (indeed, some of our requests to justices of the peace remain unfilled more than a year after we filed them). Reports from justices of the peace sometimes leave out the scene or location details we needed; some justices never even visit the place where a migrant died, instead formally declaring the person deceased over Face Time with the first responders on scene. MIT Technology Review instead filed records requests to the sheriffs of these 17 counties beginning in July 2025.