From Robots to AI: The Tech Behind Trump’s Plan to Secure the Southern Border; The walls Have Eyes: How Trump Plans to Supercharge Border Security with Tech

From robots to AI: The tech behind Trump’s plan to secure the Southern Border:

Kevin Cohen, the CEO and co-founder of Tel Aviv-based startup RealEye, opens his computer, ready to introduce the tools that he believes will keep America’s borders more secure.

The screen fills with photos of people young and old, from all ethnicities, genders, and backgrounds.

“We’re basically aggregating information from hundreds of thousands of sources online, not only to classify someone as a potential danger or threat but also to indicate the probability of them meshing into various nefarious networks,” says Cohen. “We can take 50,000 individuals and within literally seconds, I can give you the insights and the indexing of their behavior.”

RealEye has developed two AI-driven platforms, Masad and Fortress, that provide real-time vetting and “semi-active” monitoring of immigrants entering a country either legally or otherwise, with a history of illegal or suspicious activities.

These tools draw not just on criminal records (which could be as innocuous as traffic violations), but also digital footprints left on social media and the dark web.

Cohen pulls up the profile of a man named Yosef, and instantly the man’s history appears like bullet points on the screen.

“We can see that this specific individual funnels money to Hamas and other operatives,” says Cohen. “We know this guy is no good.”

In just a few days, Donald Trump will be inaugurated for his second term as US president. He’s vowed that on Day One, his priority will be “the largest deportation operation in American history,” and there is “no price tag.”

Trump’s plans to secure our Southern border include everything from a proposed hotline center for citizens to call in tips on undocumented migrants to building a massive immigration detention center on a 1,402-acre plot on the Rio Grande.

Trump has also indicated his intention to continue construction of a 30-foot-high fence across the US-Mexico border. In fact, he’s considering declaring illegal immigration a national emergency to unlock funds for border wall construction.

In December, Trump even filed an amicus brief in support of a legal effort to stop the Biden administration from selling border wall materials.

A court order put a stop to Biden’s efforts. Further emboldened, Trump will likely also revisit plans he’d considered in his first term, like floating barriers, which were briefly tested in the final year of his presidency.

In 2023, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott picked up on the idea, of constructing 1,000 feet of sphere buoys in a section of the Rio Grande. Despite attempts by the Biden administration to stop it, claiming the floating barriers violated the federal Rivers and Harbor Act, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled last summer they could remain. —>READ MORE HERE

The walls have eyes: How Trump plans to supercharge border security with tech:

In December 2024, president-elect Donald J. Trump was named Time’s Person of the Year. Immigration ran like a current through his interview for the magazine, and Trump reiterated his goals again: “Whatever it takes to get them out. I don’t care. Honestly, whatever it takes to get them out… I won it in 2016 on the border, and I fixed the border, and it was really fixed, and they came in and they just dislodged everything that I did… I consider it an invasion of our country.”

Borders are both real and artificial. They are what historian Sheila McManus calls an “accumulation of terrible ideas,” created through colonialism, imperial fantasies, apartheid, and the daily practice of exclusion. Today, there are millions of people on the move because of conflict, instability, and climate change, as well as for economic reasons. But politicians and the media often talk about the people crossing borders—whether by force or by choice—in apocalyptic terms, as a “flood” or “wave” or, according to president-elect Trump, “rapists” or “vermin,” terms that are underscored by xenophobia and racism.

In recent years a technological frontier has emerged to control migration through tightening of borders and inland surveillance. Some of the control methods are old. Passports and physical border walls have always been used to separate and exclude people, but new technologies are making their way into immigration, deportation, and refugee processing, at a faster rate than ever before. Decisions such as whether to grant a visa or deport or detain someone, which would otherwise be made by administrative tribunals, immigration officers, or border agents, are now made by machines through algorithms. Enforcement agencies like Europe’s Frontex, for example, use predictive analytics, which call on large datasets to forecast human behavior, in this case to project where people may be crossing borders.

There has also been a rise in the use of biometrics, or the automated recognition of individuals based on their biological and behavioral characteristics. Biometrics can include fingerprint data, retinal scans, and facial recognition, as well as less well-known methods of using technology that can recognize a person’s vein and blood vessel patterns, ear shape, and gait. Even more experimental are lie detectors relying on AI to determine who is telling the truth at the border, while voice-printing technologies analyze accents and patterns of speech.

Meanwhile, the surveillance dragnet is only continuing to expand, with a growing arsenal of cameras, blimps, loud sound cannons, and even robodogs deployed to control borders. Indeed, in the United States, president-elect Donald J. Trump has signaled an increasing reliance on surveillance to help him accomplish his goals. And the goals are many.

Throughout his campaign and after reelection, Trump has committed to sweeping reforms of the US immigration system, vowing to: conduct the largest mass deportation in American history, assisted by the military; end birthright citizenship; militarize the border and introduce more border surveillance; reintroduce travel bans similar to the infamous Muslim travel ban in his first term; revive the “remain in Mexico” policy; penalize sanctuary cities that limit cooperation with federal deportation agents; greatly expand the ambit of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE); deputize the National Guard to carry out immigration arrests; suspend refugee admissions; and more. —>READ MORE HERE

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