How we made the first comprehensive map of deaths along the US border’s “virtual wall”

MIT Technology Review and Times of San Diego published what they describe as the first comprehensive map and analysis of deaths near US border surveillance towers, part of a collaboration called Dying on Camera. The 15-month investigation examined failures of border surveillance technology and analyzed nearly 4,000 cases dating back to 2015, according to the news organizations.

The project merged existing datasets from No More Deaths, Humane Borders, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation with records the outlets obtained from more than a dozen agencies. MIT Technology Review said it filed records requests to sheriffs in 17 Texas counties beginning in July 2025, receiving usable records from 14; records were not received from Dimmit or Duval, and Maverick's office charged a per-record fee the outlet called cost prohibitive. The Texas requests produced over 4,000 pages and more than 1,500 cases in the final analysis.

The report included more than 1,700 cases from Humane Borders, drawn from the Pima County Office of the Medical Examiner, and nearly 1,000 from No More Deaths. It cited Border Patrol's estimate that more than 10,000 people have died during crossings since 2000, a figure widely considered an undercount.

For tower data, the outlets used EFF's database published in April 2026. Government records suggest about 800 towers are deployed, while EFF has logged about 600, so the analysis misses deaths near uncatalogued towers, the report said. A match required the death to have occurred within a tower's published surveillance range and the tower to have been present when the person was estimated to have died.

The report stated the analysis establishes when a tower was present, not whether it was operational. It also said the outlets excluded cases where the virtual wall did not appear relevant, such as deaths inside Border Patrol stations or in car crashes during pursuits. For three Texas counties, the outlets used Anthropic's Claude via API to extract coordinates from case reports, then verified batches by hand.

The outlets consulted Greg Hess, director of Arizona's Pima County Office of the Medical Examiner, on translating scene and decomposition descriptions into rough estimates of when a person died. EFF director of investigations Dave Maass collaborated throughout the project, and Minho Kim, now a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford, led the distance analysis.