It is not a wall made of concrete. No barbed wire cutting through the dusty borderland. No, the new America does not build in stone, but in code. It erects its fences from algorithms, its watchtowers from camera eyes, its control from data streams— as invisible as the wind sweeping across the Sonoran Desert.
And right in the middle of it: Google.
Once, Google Cloud chief Thomas Kurian promised employees the company would not take part in surveillance along the southern border with Mexico. That is exactly what is happening now. The promise was a rhetorical cloud—briefly visible, then dispersed—the lure of the dollar, greed over conscience. The reality: Google is providing the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) with the infrastructure for an AI-driven surveillance regime that hardly ever sleeps.
In Arizona, outdated watchtowers—relics from before the era of sensors—are now being upgraded into a network of digital sentries. They don’t just “see,” they learn. Machine learning. Humans and vehicles are automatically detected, tracked, classified. Without a single human glance. IBM provides the image recognition, Equitus the surveillance algorithm. But the central hub, the beating heart of this cybernetic border, is Google’s cloud system “MAGE.” Data from up to 100 camera streams flows in real time into this platform. And Google stores. Google analyzes. Google prepares.
Google, not involved, yet right at the center.
“I am no one.” – “I am many,” seems to be Google’s new motto. Respect for such little respect, the mercenary would say. That’s how Google reads too, as it assures the public it is not involved in surveillance—while providing the very tools it relies on. It’s the philosophy of the invisible: responsibility is outsourced, ownership obscured through “partnerships,” moral boundaries neutralized by technical interfaces. “CBP (U.S. Customs and Border Protection) can buy our products like any off-the-shelf product—like a printer or a cellular network,” a Google spokesperson said.
But a printer is not a neural network. And a cloud platform is not a screwdriver. It is the space where the logic of the state and the language of the machine merge—into silent repression. In the past, people said: don’t build walls. Today, we build networks. Border patrol agents are replaced by camera lenses, conversation by code, law by access. In this new border regime, it no longer matters where you are—but what you appear to be in the frame. Are you a “human in motion”? Are you carrying a duffel bag? Walking “in caravan style”?
That’s enough to be tagged. Filtered. Archived. Translated into metadata. Because the system doesn’t want faces—it wants patterns. The fact that Google now enables all of this, after years of denials, fits seamlessly into an era where responsibility exists only on paper. Cloud services are outsourced, purchased via resellers and subcontractors. The supply chain of the digital is as opaque as the night on a screen. And so corporations can say: we’re not involved. While their servers hum. While their code decides who gets seen and who doesn’t. The border today is a state of mind. Its lines run through invisible systems, through those towers in Arizona, which are now supposed to be “intelligent.” But it’s an intelligence without memory, without doubt, without ethics. Just calculation. Just signal. Just alert. Border communities pay the price—with their privacy.
But it’s more than that. They pay with their place in the world. With their definition of what it means to be human. Because when machines decide what constitutes a threat, we lose what makes us human. And once you’ve been stored as a threat—you are never innocent again. Perhaps this is the future of surveillance. No loud assault on freedom. No bang. No order. Just a quiet siphoning of reality. Line by line, into a database. Until no one knows anymore who owns the border—the state or the machine. Google or the law.
Or no one at all.
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