The US is in a surveillance arms-race — cartels are outpacing US systems to evade border protection.

The U.S.-Mexico border poses a growing security challenge, including an evolution toward cartel-waged electronic warfare, that demands new technological capabilities, experts say.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) is quickly adopting various innovations to enhance its enforcement.

“CBP is surging resources and increasing efficiency, prioritizing smart border security solutions, making historic investments in technology, taking the fight to cartels and smugglers and doing more with our regional partners than ever before through a combination of technology, infrastructure, personnel and other enforcement solutions to ensure our border remains secure,” a CBP spokesperson told SIGNAL Media.

The large investment in border technologies saved over 70,000 hours of agent time, the CBP claimed.

Among the new initiatives, one seeks to make the presence of CBP officers less predictable to potential offenders.

“We have a program that we were awarded called ARST, which is Autonomous Relocatable Surveillance Tower,” said Mike Powell, director of business development innovation solutions at Elbit Systems of America, a company that supplies a variety of border surveillance technologies.

Powell described the CBP’s latest program as an attempt to address evolving challenges. Currently, human smugglers and drug traffickers move away from towers and toward areas with little or no surveillance. Therefore, mobile platforms are the next step in the cat-and-mouse encounters.

“The concrete reality is that there are thousands of people who cross the border, the U.S. and Mexico border,” said Karine Côté-Boucher, associate professor of criminology at the University of Montreal.

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In 2022, the CBP encountered 2,378,944 migrants at the southwest land border. This number includes single adults, individuals in a family unit, accompanied minors and unaccompanied children.

The CBP figure represents 0.85% of the world’s total of 281 million migrants, according to the United Nation’s International Organization for Migration.

“On a global scale, what’s happening in the U.S. is not that big,” said Côté-Boucher, speaking about worldwide immigration. Nevertheless, the problem at the border is larger than immigration.

In 2022, 288,000 pounds of drugs were seized at the southwest land border, giving traffickers an opportunity to hide in lawful traffic and migration, according to the same agency.

The 2023 government budget is allocating $15.3 billion for the CBP and $8.1 billion to immigration law enforcement. These figures include $309 million for border security technology.

Barriers and facilities populate the area between both countries, and technologies are an increasingly important piece of the enforcement puzzle.

There are two main sources of experience when deploying new tools in this area. One comes from adapted U.S. armed services technology and the other comes from the Gaza-Israeli border. Terrorists’ attack methods are comparable to those employed by criminals trying to smuggle substances into the United States.

Meanwhile, innovations once reserved for warfighters find a space along the line that separates the two countries.

“Where we become a lot more valuable is when you do [surveillance] and [transport], we can do a gimbal and have surveillance, but we can also have a drop mechanism to where we can supply, either troops or people in the field, with any type of supplies that they might need,” said Jason Wright, senior program manager, Small Unmanned Aerial Division at AeroVironment.