MEXICO CITY (CN) — No other region in the nation was more politicized during the 2024 elections than the U.S.-Mexico border. The border was the anchor of now President-elect Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign and a litmus test for political affinities, a place to project one’s politics onto.
The border is real-time experiment in for-profit detention and ever-expanding surveillance technology — but for the millions who live there, it is also a mundane place of daily commute for school, work and to visit family.
“One thing to understand for people who don’t live on the border is that we talk about the border like other people talk about traffic. We view the border as a hard-to-predict chaotic element that causes inconvenience. We are very connected family-wise and culturally. Lots of my students cross the border every day,” said Jeremy Slack, chair and professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Texas at El Paso, in a phone interview. “People talk about it as if it needs to be walled off, but we depend on each other.”
Slack, who has years of experience documenting and researching migrants and deported families on either side of the border, said it’s unclear what to expect on border policy in the beginning weeks of Trump’s presidency.
“It will be lots of people trying to figure out what the situation is,” he said. “But no one is happier about Trump being president than organized criminals.”
Slack said that Trump will likely discontinue most — if not all — legal pathways towards asylum, including access to the U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s CBP One app, which allows migrants to schedule an appointment at participating ports of entry for an asylum request to enter the U.S legally.
“The [CBP One] process was far from perfect, far from perfect, but it was really cutting into [organized criminal] business. They wanted to make that money as easy as possible without having it complicated by people with an app,” Slack said. “Lifting the program will also create more restrictions for people to seek asylum and will push people back into organized crime.
“Mexico will walk a fine line. Trump may be able to limit asylum seekers but can’t really turn people away if their request is based on fear. His lynchpin to decrease migration through the border is going to depend on Mexico clamping down on migrants coming through,” he said.
Mexico has beefed up its border security in recent years, specifically with the construction of Torre Centinela in downtown Juárez, scheduled for completion in March. The tower is the looming nerve center of the Centinela Platform, consisting of 10,000 surveillance cameras installed in the border state of Chihuahua capable of face and license-plate recognition.
A Memorandum of Understanding, signed by the governors of Chihuahua and Texas, states their commitment to cooperation on the border.
“The state of Chihuahua is incorporating technologies such as drones to patrol the border, AI databases connected to the driver license registry and biometric filters to assist in the capture of cartel leaders,” the memorandum reads. That information will be shared across both states.
“I see the tower as kind of a rubric of how Mexico will react to Trump. We don’t know what it’s going to really do,” Slack said.
On Nov. 20, 2025, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum declared her support for Mexican immigrants in the U.S. in response to Trump’s proposed plan to deport undocumented migrants but hasn’t specified immigration policies within Mexico apart from the use of the country’s armed forces, who are responsible for curbing irregular migration into Mexico.
“Our countrymen and women are heroes and heroines, workers who support their families and the economy of Mexico, but also, so that it is heard well and clear, contribute to the economy of the United States,” she said in a press conference.
Mexico is also developing an app for Mexican nationals living in the U.S. to use if they think they are about to be detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The app is designed to alert family members and nearby Mexican consulates at the press of a button, though Slack said he wouldn’t count on large participation, especially among people living in the U.S. without status.
Border surveillance and detention
Drone manufacturing companies are securing contracts with U.S. Border Patrol.
One of these companies is AgEagle Aerial Systems, whose eBee TAC drone is currently being tested by the agency.
“The drone provides real time surveillance, thermal imagery, a mapping function and is easily deployable for the Border Patrol,” said Bill Irby, chief executive officer of AgEagle Aerial Systems, during a Zoom interview. “The eBee TAC drone has a 90 minute flight time, can be easily carried in a backpack and has a 20 mile radius.”
Critics of surveillance technology, however, see this type of technology as adding to a cycle of dehumanization that further adds to the criminalization of migrants who are legally exercising their right to seek asylum.
“Border surveillance is the latest manifestation of the dehumanization that borders have become very good at. Technologies like drones, cameras and even more sci-fi sounding projects like robotic dogs, all work to create a surveillance dragnet that traps people on the move,” said Petra Molnar, a lawyer and anthropologist specializing in migration and human rights.
Molnar said that the border has become a perfect place for testing surveillance technology before it is brought into civilian life, a kind of laboratory for surveillance technology tested on the most vulnerable.
Irby sees the situation differently.
“You have to let the evidence speak for itself. If we have criminality at the border, this type of technology doesn’t add to the criminality at the border, there already is criminality at the border,” he said. “Sovereign nations have to have secure borders.”
Both agree that border surveillance isn’t going anywhere and that artificial intelligence will greatly impact its use.
“If you’re not on board with AI, you’re going to be left behind,” Irby said.
Adding another piece to the puzzle of what’s to come, for-profit prison companies have benefited greatly over time from immigration. The two main players, CoreCivic and The GEO Group, saw their stocks soar after Trump’s reelection.
In 2023, 90% of all people in immigration detention were held in private, for-profit facilities.
The GEO Group, which runs ICE processing centers, received a $70 million investment to expand its services to the federal agency on Dec. 16.
The company made $2.41 billion in total revenue in 2023, its most since 2020, 43% of which comes from ICE contracts. CoreCivic received 30% of its revenue through ICE contracts in 2023, whose total revenue that year was close to $2 billion.
“These companies don’t just rely on detention facilities, but electronic monitoring as well as transport,” said Bianca Tyler, founder and executive director of Worth Rises, a non-profit dedicated to dismantling the prison industry. “The GEO Group specifically have vans, busses and planes equipped to deport people. They can certainly deport people across the Mexican border. They have deportation flights that are quite lucrative.”
In March 2024, The Geo Group was awarded a five-year contract from ICE to provide air operations support. The contract has an estimated worth of $25 million in annualized revenues for the company.
Tyler also noted that the company was the first corporation to max out its donations to Trump’s 2024 campaign.
She expects the use of private detention centers and tracking technology to expand under Trump’s administration as it did under his first administration.
“Trump is adamantly and publicly anti-immigration and exhibits a tremendous amount of brutality,” Tyler said. “But at the same time, we don’t have the infrastructure to carry out everything he promises. It’s going to be chaos at first, and lots of local police are going to be needed to help arrest people. It’s going to be unorganized, highly illegal and careless.”