TL;DR: Anduril Industries (founded by Oculus VR creator Palmer Luckey and backed by billionaire Peter Thiel) has deployed over 300 AI-powered surveillance towers covering 30% of the US-Mexico border. The company landed $550+ million in DHS contracts since 2018. Then the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed July 4, 2025, required all new border surveillance towers to be "autonomous," a standard only Anduril meets. That's not competition. That's a legislated monopoly, funded by $6 billion in new border tech spending. The GAO found CBP failed every single privacy protection for its surveillance tower programs. The EFF mapped towers pointed directly into residential neighborhoods. And the company's co-founder sat on Trump's transition team.
How You Legislate a Monopoly
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act includes a provision that slipped past most people's attention. It requires all new border surveillance towers purchased by Customs and Border Protection to be "tested and accepted by U.S. Customs and Border Protection to deliver autonomous capabilities."[1]
The law defines "autonomous" as using "artificial intelligence, machine learning, computer vision, or other algorithms to accurately detect, identify, classify, and track items of interest in real time."
A CBP spokesperson confirmed to The Intercept that Anduril is the only approved vendor under this framework.[1]
Read that again. Congress wrote a law that requires a specific technical capability. One company has it. That company's co-founder served on Trump's 2016 transition team. Its founder hosts presidential campaign fundraisers. A former Anduril executive was nominated as Trump's Under Secretary of the Army, and refused to divest his Anduril stock.[1]
The bill allocates $6 billion for border security technology. Homeland Security documents reference the need for "hundreds of new towers in the near future." And only one company can sell them.
$550 Million and Counting
Anduril didn't stumble into this position. They built it contract by contract over seven years.
- 2018: $4.8 million pilot, 10 towers in San Diego and Yuma
- 2019: $13.5 million Marine Corps test in Arizona
- 2020: $85 million. CBP declares the program a formal "Program of Record." Expansion to El Paso and Rio Grande Valley
- 2021-2023: ~$160 million in upgrades: better optics, AI drones, radar integration
- 2023: $38 million for 51 more towers
- 2024: $249.9 million Pentagon weapons systems award. 300th tower deployed in September
- 2025: $363 million one-year SBIR Phase III contract with Border Patrol
Total DHS contracts since 2018: 16, worth over $550 million.[2] And that was before the One Big Beautiful Bill opened the $6 billion tap.
What the Towers Actually Do
Anduril's Autonomous Surveillance Towers (ASTs) run on the company's Lattice AI platform. Here's what they can do:[3][4]
Standard Sentry Tower
10 meters tall. Detects a person at 1.7 miles, a vehicle at 2.2 miles. Uses radar to detect movement, then swivels a camera to classify what it sees using computer vision.
Extended Range Sentry (XRST)
80 feet tall. Autonomous detection at 5+ miles. Human-assisted detection at 7.5 miles. Deployed to Texas in November 2023. Uses a repurposed cosmetic hair-removal laser as an infrared illuminator. Yes, really.
Lattice AI Platform
Integrates radar, infrared, acoustic sensors, and computer vision. A single agent can monitor dozens of towers remotely across 8+ CBP sectors. Provides "tailored alerts within seconds of detection."
The towers run 24/7. They don't take breaks, don't get bored, and don't need a warrant. They scan continuously and flag anything that moves. Anduril says 300 towers now cover 30% of the US-Mexico border.[4]
And it's not just cameras. Anduril's product line includes the Roadrunner (autonomous drone interceptor), Anvil (counter-drone kinetic kill system), and undisclosed classified programs. The towers are the backbone, but they're building an autonomous weapons ecosystem around them.
Zero Out of Six on Privacy
In 2024, the Government Accountability Office assessed CBP's surveillance tower programs against six baseline privacy protections derived from the Fair Information Practice Principles. CBP failed all six.[5]
Not five out of six. Not four. Zero.
The GAO found that none of these protections were addressed in "technology policies, standard operating procedures, directives, or other documents that direct a user in how they are to use a Technology." CBP's defense? They pointed to their Privacy Impact Assessments, public-facing documents that the GAO rejected as inadequate for actually guiding agents on how to protect privacy.[5]
A separate GAO assessment found that a third of CBP's older Remote Video Surveillance System towers are completely offline.[6] The EFF summarized it plainly: "US border surveillance towers have always been broken."[6]
The pattern is clear. CBP buys surveillance tech first. Writes privacy protections never.
Pointed at Your Backyard
The EFF spent two years mapping every surveillance tower along the US-Mexico border. What they found wasn't limited to remote desert terrain.[7]
Towers sit in residential neighborhoods. Entire towns (Nogales, Douglas, San Antonio) fall within scanning range. People walking their dogs, leaving for work, checking the mailbox. All of it captured.
In Calexico, California, a surveillance tower casts a literal shadow over a baseball field and residential homes. The tower site was leased from the city for $1 per year.[8]
"With any type of enforcement mechanism, there has to be methods of ensuring accountability, oversight, and transparency, and it seems these three things are missing," Pedro Rios, director of the US/Mexico Border Program for the American Friends Service Committee, told Cronkite News.[7]
The EFF's attorney Saira Hussain put it in terms that should worry everyone: "We know that what's often deployed at the border and what's normalized at the border in terms of surveillance eventually makes its way into the interior of the United States."[7]
A legal fellow at Just Futures Law was more direct: the border is "a testing ground for surveillance elsewhere" that has "been primarily used to surveill Black and brown folks in the US and abroad."[7]
Follow the Money (and the Rolodex)
Anduril was founded in 2017 by Palmer Luckey, the Oculus VR inventor who was pushed out of Facebook after funding a pro-Trump meme operation during the 2016 election. His backer: Peter Thiel, the billionaire behind Palantir, the other surveillance company that makes millions from ICE contracts.[2]
The connections between Anduril and the Trump administration are documented:[1]
- Trae Stephens, Anduril co-founder and executive chairman, served on Trump's 2016 transition team and was reportedly considered for a senior Pentagon position
- Palmer Luckey has hosted multiple Trump campaign fundraisers
- Michael Obadal, Trump's nominee for Under Secretary of the Army, worked at Anduril until June 2025 and faced scrutiny for refusing to divest his Anduril stock
Anduril's valuation now exceeds $20 billion. The company that started with 10 towers in San Diego is now the sole approved vendor for the largest border surveillance buildout in American history.
The Thiel-Palantir-Anduril pipeline is worth tracking. Palantir builds the data fusion software (ImmigrationOS) that ICE uses to target people. Anduril builds the physical surveillance infrastructure that feeds it data. Both companies share investors and political connections. Together they're constructing an end-to-end surveillance system: cameras on the ground, drones in the air, AI in the cloud, all feeding into enforcement databases.[2]
The Human Cost Nobody Talks About
There's a grim correlation that border advocates have documented for years: when you make one route harder to cross, people take more dangerous ones. More surveillance towers in accessible areas push border crossers into remote desert and mountain terrain where they die of exposure and dehydration.[2][7]
Migrant deaths from exposure surged in 2022-2023. The remains keep being found in the same areas where the towers force detours into increasingly lethal geography.[2]
Anduril's marketing materials highlight "humanitarian benefits": the company claims the towers help locate people in distress. But critics point out that creating the distress in the first place isn't much of a humanitarian argument.
Dave Maass of the Electronic Frontier Foundation told The Intercept that "surveillance towers have enriched influential contractors while delivering little security" and warned that the One Big Beautiful Bill would mean "more towers in public parks and AI monitoring the everyday affairs of border neighborhoods."[1]
What's Coming
The pipeline is enormous. With $6 billion in new border tech funding and no competitors allowed, Anduril is positioned to blanket the entire southern border (and potentially the northern border) with autonomous surveillance infrastructure.
Homeland Security documents reference "hundreds of new towers." The XRST extended-range model can see 7.5 miles out. At that range, you don't need many towers to cover a lot of ground. And a lot of neighborhoods.
The UK has already signed its own Anduril border contract, a Home Office deal worth over $20 million.[2] The technology built for the US-Mexico border is going international.
And the towers are just the visible part. Anduril is building autonomous drones, underwater vehicles, and weapons systems. The $249.9 million Pentagon award in 2024 wasn't for border cameras. The border is the proving ground. The product roadmap is military-grade autonomous surveillance for every domain.
What You Can Do
Support Border Community Organizations
The American Friends Service Committee, ACLU, and EFF are actively challenging unchecked border surveillance. The EFF's border tower mapping project provides critical transparency.
Contact Your Representatives
The One Big Beautiful Bill passed with the Anduril monopoly provision intact. Ask your congressional representatives whether they read that section before voting. Demand GAO audits of the program's privacy compliance.
Follow the Contracts
Federal contracts are public. Search SAM.gov and FPDS.gov for Anduril Industries. Track how the $6 billion gets spent. Public accountability starts with public information.
Watch for Mission Creep
Border surveillance technology doesn't stay at the border. Ring doorbells became a police surveillance network. License plate readers moved from highways to neighborhoods. When Anduril's towers show up in your area, it won't be announced.
The Bottom Line
A Thiel-backed defense startup founded by a Trump supporter built AI surveillance towers for the border. A Trump-aligned Congress wrote a law that only that company's towers can fulfill. The same law allocated $6 billion to buy them. The GAO says the program has zero privacy protections. The towers are pointed at people's homes. And nobody competed for the contract because competition was legislated away.
This is what a surveillance-industrial complex looks like when it has friends in Congress and a blank check from the taxpayer.
References
- The Intercept: Trump's Big Beautiful Gift to Anduril (July 9, 2025)
- Ohio Atomic Press: Anduril's Border Empire: How a Billionaire-Backed AI Firm Took Over US Immigration Enforcement
- dot.LA: Anduril Industries Is Getting Hundreds of Millions to Build Border Surveillance Tech
- Anduril: Deploys 300th Autonomous Surveillance Tower (September 2024)
- EFF: Customs & Border Protection Fails Baseline Privacy Requirements for Surveillance Technology (December 2024)
- EFF: US Border Surveillance Towers Have Always Been Broken (October 2024)
- EFF: CBP Is Expanding Its Surveillance Tower Program at the US-Mexico Border, And We're Mapping It (March 2023)
- EFF: Coalition to Calexico: Think Twice About Reapproving Border Surveillance Tower Next to a Public Park (May 2024)