The Use of Drones at US Mexico and Canadian Borders

The United States Customs and Border Protection has always kept its secrets when it came to patrolling the US Mexico border. According to this article, written by Cyrus Farivar, approximately half of the US Mexico border is now being watched by drones. This program first began in March of 2014 and it may expand to the Canadian borders in 2015.
 
Drones are military pilot-less aircraft used to view landscapes and record any events on earth from a certain altitude. The drones "fly over remote areas with a high resolution video camera and return within three days for another video in the same spot." The videos are used to see if there are any footprints or vehicle trails in the land around the border that could be used to capture people that cross illegally. It seems like the drones could capture more when flying above the border than solely agents but officials say that only two percent of drone missions did offer evidence of unauthorized border crossings. Apparently there is more detail that comes out of ground sensors than these drone missions.

There are a couple of issues that this situation introduces. One of these issues involves drones replacing the jobs that officers have patrolling the border. If only two percent of the missions actually return viable data that shows that there could have been a breach on the border, then it seems extremely more efficient for the government to have a team of people monitor the border with drones as opposed to thousands of officers watching the ground. A machine might be more accurate than a human being at tracking movements in areas and it also does not need to sleep and take paid vacation days. With such technology at their fingertips, there is no reason to be shocked at the implementation of this system at the Canadian border, where the illegal border-crossing rate might be even lower than the rate at the US Mexico border.

It's interesting to see how these drones handle situations where smugglers can lead people underneath the ground through tunnels created specifically for this purpose. In some situations it seems like it would be more useful to have humans monitoring on the ground and having the ability to intercept these people, rather than simply having a drone witness the action. I believe that this tool is a great supplement when it comes to battling the unlawful activity at the border, but only when it does not replace hard work done by thousands of officers on the ground.

Source: Link