For decades, all that separated the U.S. from Mexico was barbed wire.
Now, after a massive infusion of cash from Congress, President Donald Trump’s administration is swiftly building what it has dubbed a “smart wall,” a combination of 30-foot-tall steel fencing and an array of sophisticated technology like sensors, cameras and towers allowing Border Patrol to surveil the territory.
Officials say the technology is complementary to the physical wall and frees up agents for other tasks.
“It’s a smart wall. It’s not just a barrier,” Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Rodney Scott said during recent congressional testimony. “It maximizes the use of our most valuable resource, which is our agents.”
Contracts for hundreds of miles of wall already inked
The wall has been a top priority for Trump, a Republican, since he first ran for president.
During the administration of President Joe Biden, a Democrat, the border emerged as a flashpoint, with thousands of people pouring into the country each day. Those numbers started to taper off shortly before Trump returned to office last year and then slowed to a trickle, with his broader illegal immigration crackdown serving as a deterrent for would-be smugglers.
Flush with $46 billion to finish the wall after an infusion by Congress for immigration enforcement, CBP is inking tens of billions of dollars in contracts to build the wall and push along the president’s signature project.
Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said recently that a preliminary part of the wall will be finished by “this time next year.” Scott said his agency is putting up 6 miles of wall a week.
Hundreds of miles had already been built before Trump returned to office. As of mid-June 2026, CBP has erected another 74 miles and aims to build hundreds more. There is no wall planned for roughly 535 miles of the roughly 2,000-mile-long border, because rugged terrain already serves as a natural barrier. Ground sensors and towers will be used instead.
CBP is also going back to hundreds of miles of already built wall and adding more technology, lights and roads. Along the long stretches of river in Texas that mark the border with Mexico, they’re deploying 12- to 15-foot-long cylinder-shaped buoys meant to keep illegal immigrants or smugglers from crossing the border.
More technology being deployed on the border
Technology is playing a greater role in the Trump administration’s effort to make illegal crossings along the border more difficult, part of a broader transformation of CBP in the years since Sept. 11, 2001, into an intelligence operation with a surveillance network whose reach extends far beyond the nation’s frontiers, according to reporting by The Associated Press.
Surveillance towers can range from fixed towers with video, infrared and radar technologies that have a range of roughly 8 miles to remote video surveillance systems that have cameras and a spotlight fixed on top. Some are mounted on the backs of trucks so agents can drive them to different parts of the border.
Increasingly, these towers are autonomous. They can scan an area, analyze what they’re seeing using artificial intelligence and alert Border Patrol agents to something suspicious. Proponents say this helps keep Border Patrol agents out in the field instead of sitting in front of computer screens watching for activity.
The big GOP tax cuts and spending bill passed by Congress last summer requires that CBP buys only the autonomous towers, and the department is deploying an additional 95.
Underground, buried fiberoptic cables can sense movement, capturing data that is also then analyzed by AI.
“We follow the contour of the land. We go through trees. We go down into the river banks. We can go absolutely everywhere,” said Magnus McEwen-King, CEO of Sintela, which has a contract with CBP to install the cables. He spoke at a recent border security expo in Phoenix, where some of the technology was on display.
CBP also uses ground sensors and trail cameras to detect smuggling routes.
The Associated Press contributed to this article