How High-Powered Lasers Became Part of Donald Trump’s Border-Security Complex
Veronica Escobar, a four-term House member from Texas, went to bed early on February 10th. She represents Texas’s Sixteenth Congressional District, which includes most of El Paso, and serves on the House Appropriations Committee; the following morning, she was scheduled to attend a subcommittee hearing on the possible impacts of the then looming government shutdown on the Department of Homeland Security, and she wanted to get a good night’s rest. Around 11 P.M., Escobar was startled awake by a phone call. “My immediate concern is, ‘Is it my kids? Is it my mom? Has something happened?’ ” she recalled. It turned out to be something even more unexpected: an air-traffic controller from El Paso was calling to alert her that the Federal Aviation Administration had ordered the near-immediate closure of the region’s entire airspace for ten days—a move effectively unprecedented in the country since 9/11.
Escobar began calling her leadership team, and other officials in Texas and in the federal government. “There were just a million questions swimming through my mind,” she told me. Her first thought was that perhaps President Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of Defense, had decided to bomb cartel targets in the city of Juárez, across the border from El Paso—something that various Administration officials, including the President, had been threatening to do for months. “If my community was about to be put in harm’s way,” Escobar said, “we had very little time to act.”
But each conversation that night was more baffling than the last; no one seemed to know what was happening. “I began thinking, I don’t think that we are at risk—I don’t think there’s anything for the community to be afraid of,” she said. “Phone call after phone call, there’s one word that kept coming to the surface in my brain, and that was ‘incompetence.’ ”
The Pentagon, she soon learned, had lent Customs and Border Protection a high-energy laser, which the military had been developing to counter aerial drones. Without notifying the F.A.A., the agency had used it to shoot down what it suspected was a cartel drone smuggling drugs across the border. Instead, the target turned out to be a drifting party balloon. The F.A.A., fearing for civilian aircraft, had ordered the airspace closed. By morning, the closure had been lifted, but El Paso residents were now calling Escobar with panicked questions of their own: Should we flee? Are we at risk?
For anyone who has followed border security during the past two decades, a controversial shooting by C.B.P. is hardly surprising—in at least six incidents documented by the A.C.L.U. since 2010, Border Patrol agents have fired across the border, killing people in Mexico, including a father barbecuing in a park with his family, and a sixteen-year-old who was shot in the back eight times after someone on his side of the border fence allegedly threw rocks at an agent. But a high-energy laser used to target drones was new. While much attention has focussed on D.H.S.’s urban enforcement efforts, in cities like Chicago and Minneapolis, Trump and Republican congressional leaders have also turbocharged security investments along the nation’s northern and southern borders, delivering new weaponry, technologies, and infrastructure, including dozens of miles of new border wall, a first-term promise of Trump’s that, contrary to his long-standing campaign pledges, is now being fully paid for by U.S. taxpayers.
The numbers are staggering. Altogether, the so-called Procurement, Construction, and Improvements budget for C.B.P. totals some fifty-three billion dollars for the current fiscal year, with another twenty billion dollars available in its “operations and support” budget—a major increase from the roughly three billion dollars that the agency had been spending annually on construction in recent years. Indeed, that fifty-three-billion-dollar allotment is roughly equal to the entire 2024 defense expenditures of Hungary, Austria, the Czech Republic, Switzerland, Finland, Greece, Belgium, Romania, Denmark, and Norway combined.
In the wake of the killings of Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti, in Minneapolis, congressional Democrats refused to help fund D.H.S. unless Republicans agreed to reforms of the agency’s immigration-enforcement practices. The department’s funding ran out on February 14th, leading to a partial shutdown of the nation’s third-largest Cabinet department, and congressional negotiations appear to have made little progress in the days since—with Democrats demanding, among other things, that the department require agents to wear visible identification and body cameras, ban the use of masks, and end racial profiling. The irony is that, even as many parts of D.H.S. are shut down and staff at agencies like the Transportation Security Administration are working without pay, the immigration operations at the heart of the debate are funded separately and thus continuing undiminished. In fact, the border’s spending spree is only gathering steam.
According to the C.B.P., since Trump took office last year, the agency has issued about $11.4 billion in new border-wall contracts, part of a goal of hitting two hundred and fifty miles of additional barriers by September. Many of the largest new contracts, totalling just over three billion dollars, have gone to “smart wall” construction projects by a company known as BCCG A Joint Venture, an entity that shares an office-suite address in downtown Montgomery, Alabama, with a large-scale general contractor called Caddell Construction. Another six billion dollars in new border-security funding is set to flow to Fisher Sand & Gravel, a North Dakota company that helped Trump’s former campaign adviser Steve Bannon build a portion of supposedly privately funded border wall during the President’s first term; Bannon and three others were indicted, in 2020, by the Justice Department for defrauding hundreds of thousands of donors in connection with their “We Build the Wall” effort. (Bannon’s federal prosecution was preëmpted by a pardon from Trump in 2021; he pleaded guilty on state charges in New York in 2025, but received no jail time.)
Earlier attempts by D.H.S. and the Border Patrol to build “smart” border walls have ended poorly. An effort led by Boeing, launched in 2006 and known as the Secure Border Initiative (SBInet), ran months behind schedule and its tech was pooh-poohed by the Border Patrol agents who had to use it; by 2008, only twenty-eight miles of the prototype virtual fence had been erected, and cost estimates to secure the whole border had soared to thirty billion dollars. When the Obama Administration finally shut down the project, in 2011—with just over fifty miles operational—Representative Bennie Thompson, then the ranking member of the House Oversight Committee, called it a “grave and expensive disappointment.”
But to peruse the federal-contract database for C.B.P.’s flood of spending is to see just how profitable the border-industrial complex has become since the start of Trump’s second term. Three separate contracts, totalling as much as four hundred and forty million dollars, have been awarded to the Silicon Valley defense darling Anduril Industries, which provides D.H.S. with a network of some three hundred autonomous surveillance towers that it estimates cover about thirty per cent of the southern border. In February, Wired reported a new billion-dollar D.H.S. purchasing agreement for the Peter Thiel-founded software company Palantir, which will allow Palantir, a maker of cutting-edge data integration and analysis tools, to largely bypass competitive bidding for new government projects. (Some Palantir employees have begun to question how their work is being used by ICE.)
In some ways, the torrent of money is exactly as anticipated. In September, 2024, Tom Homan, who had previously been Trump’s acting head of ICE, allegedly accepted fifty thousand dollars in cash in an undercover F.B.I. sting operation, in which agents posed as businessmen seeking lucrative border-security contracts in a second Trump term. (For reasons that remain unclear, the case seems to have disappeared since Trump’s election, and Homan was promptly named the President’s new border czar. Homan denies any wrongdoing.)
Many of ICE’s largest contracts, meanwhile, have gone to CoreCivic and the GEO Group, for-profit companies that ICE contracts to run detention facilities. A third company, Acquisition Logistics L.L.C., is contracted to run Camp East Montana, a new detention facility in El Paso, which is eventually expected to house five thousand beds. The facility happens to be on the military base Fort Bliss, where the Pentagon has been testing that high-energy anti-drone laser. The site, which was formerly used to intern Japanese Americans during the Second World War, has become a hub of harrowing reports of inhumane conditions, including a case involving a detainee who a witness reported was choked to death by guards. (D.H.S. denies any claims of inhumane conditions, and a spokesperson said that the detainee who died was attempting to kill himself when staff intervened to help him.) The ICE contract to run Camp East Montana is worth as much as $1.3 billion. Acquisition Logistics, which was founded in 2008, is based out of a residence in Henrico County, Virginia. News reports from last summer, when the contract was first announced, pointed out that the company had no known experience operating detention facilities, and its largest government contract had previously been worth around seventeen million dollars.
The murkiness of Acquisition Logistics’ involvement in El Paso is hardly an exception among many of the companies profiting from the border-security gold rush. Contracts worth tens of millions of dollars list just six or eight words of brief descriptions, such as twenty-seven million dollars for Deloitte, for “Systems Division Program Management Support,” or a half-billion-dollar contract for the Beltway I.T. contractor CACI that’s described blandly as “Border Enforcement Applications for Government Leading-Edge Information Technology.”
The contracting database also shows ICE and C.B.P. working to field and equip a literal army’s worth of agents and officers: ICE has spent $1.1 million on Glock-19 duty weapons for its officers, more than eight hundred and seventy-six thousand dollars purchasing “5.56MM RIFLE SUPPRESSORS AND ACCESSORIES,” nearly a million dollars on “less than lethal chemical munitions,” and another four hundred and fifty-eight thousand dollars to purchase “red dot handgun sights” for its agents’ weapons. This is in addition to numerous contracts for the new hires themselves, including ninety-two thousand dollars in uniforms from a Nashville outfitter for a C.B.P. Academy class, part of a larger sixty-one-million-dollar workwear contract; as much as twenty-six million dollars for background checks by a Colorado-based company that has long helped with government hiring; and a twenty-five-million-dollar contract to a Florida company for “Pre And Post-Employment Medical, Drug, And Fitness Examinations” for C.B.P.’s new hires.
The U.S. border—particularly the southern border, with Mexico—has been heavily militarized since 9/11. For most of its history, in fact, the Border Patrol has been a place where America’s wars come home—where war-surplus machinery is repurposed for domestic policing. Some early border fences, which went up immediately after the end of the Second World War, were taken from Japanese internment camps; after the war, the Border Patrol received surplus airplanes to make patrolling easier.
Today, eight aerostats, high-tech tethered surveillance blimps, are deployed along the border, part of an airship fleet that includes hand-me-down “tactical aerostats” formerly used by the U.S. military in Afghanistan. A fifty-two-million-dollar contract supplies the department with so-called light-enforcement helicopters, and the aerospace company Northrop Grumman has been awarded a nearly nine-hundred-million-dollar contract to maintain its P-3 surveillance aircraft. C.B.P. also has its own fleet of unmanned five-ton MQ-9 Predator drones, similar to the armed platforms that the C.I.A. and the Pentagon have used to target terrorists overseas, from Pakistan to Africa, which the agency uses for “persistent surveillance” along the border. (Last summer, the drones were used in Los Angeles during a series of anti-ICE protests, leading to criticism by congressional Democrats and civil-liberties groups.) On February 26th, less than a month after the birthday-balloon mishap, the U.S. military shot down a C.B.P. drone using the same type of high-energy laser that originally caused the airspace closure in El Paso. The most recent incident both underscored the lack of apparent coördination about advanced border-security technologies and raised new safety concerns for the F.A.A., which expanded a no-fly zone over Fort Hancock, where the shootdown occurred. In a statement, a group of Democratic lawmakers said, “Our heads are exploding over the news that DoD reportedly shot down a Customs and Border Protection drone using a high risk counter-unmanned aircraft system,” calling the incident the result of Administration “incompetence.”
Escobar, the House member, told me that the El Paso-airspace incident has raised other questions about what C.B.P. is doing and where the money is going. Trump loves the physicality and toughness indicated by building miles of border wall, but the giant stretches of open border that the wall is meant to secure no longer represent the most pressing security needs. Instead, Escobar said, the need lies in renovating the overburdened and outdated ports of entry that handle daily trade, commerce, and travel between the U.S. and Mexico. “A vast majority of illegal drugs are coming into our country through our land ports of entry,” Escobar said. “One of the best investments that the federal government can make in border communities would be in renovating and modernizing our port-of-entry infrastructure.”
And yet the question of how all this money is to be spent is almost entirely absent from the current congressional-appropriations debate. Even as the shutdown negotiations focus on administrative and policy reforms to how C.B.P. and ICE operate nationwide, there’s still plenty of money for both agencies to spend. The C.B.P., for instance, has so far “obligated” just ten per cent of its supersized construction-and-procurement budget—leaving, as of late February, $47,592,145,788 still to go, a sum slightly larger than the G.D.P. of Estonia. “I am very concerned,” Escobar told me. “These contractors and these private entities are pocketing American taxpayer dollars, while their shareholders are making money hand over fist.” ♦