[News] The U.S. Border Patrol and an Israeli Military Contractor Are Putting a Native American Reservation Under “Persistent Surveillance”

[Anti-Imperialist News]

https://theintercept.com/2019/08/25/border-patrol-israel-elbit-surveillance/ 



  The U.S. Border Patrol and an Israeli Military Contractor Are Putting
  a Native American Reservation Under “Persistent Surveillance”

Will Parrish - August 25, 2019
------------------------------------------------------------------------

_On the southwestern end_ of the Tohono O’odham Nation’s reservation, 
roughly 1 mile from a barbed-wire barricade marking Arizona’s border 
with the Mexican state of Sonora, Ofelia Rivas leads me to the base of a 
hill overlooking her home. A U.S. Border Patrol truck is parked roughly 
200 yards upslope. A small black mast mounted with cameras and sensors 
is positioned on a trailer hitched to the truck. For Rivas, the Border 
Patrol’s monitoring of the reservation has been a grim aspect of 
everyday life. And that surveillance is about to become far more intrusive.

The vehicle is parked where U.S. Customs and Border Protection will soon 
construct a 160-foot surveillance tower capable of continuously 
monitoring every person and vehicle within a radius of up to 7.5 miles. 
The tower will be outfitted with high-definition cameras with night 
vision, thermal sensors, and ground-sweeping radar, all of which will 
feed real-time data to Border Patrol agents at a central operating 
station in Ajo, Arizona. The system will store an archive with the 
ability to rewind and track individuals’ movements across time — an 
ability known as “wide-area persistent surveillance.”

CBP plans 10 of these towers across the Tohono O’odham reservation, 
which spans an area roughly the size of Connecticut. Two will be located 
near residential areas, including Rivas’s neighborhood, which is home to 
about 50 people. To build them, CBP has entered 
<https://www.prnewswire.com/il/news-releases/us-customs-and-border-protection-tohono-oodham-nation-agree-on-border-security-solution-by-elbit-systems-of-america-300875152.html> 
a $26 million contract with the U.S. division of Elbit Systems, Israel’s 
largest military company.

Tohono O’odham people used to move freely across these lands, Rivas 
says, but following years of harassment by Border Patrol agents, many 
are afraid to venture far from their homes.

“Now we won’t be able to go anywhere near here without the big 
U.S.-Israeli eyes monitoring us, watching our every move,” she says.

Fueled by the growing demonization of migrants, as well as ongoing fears 
of foreign terrorism, the U.S. borderlands have become laboratories for 
new systems of enforcement and control. Firsthand reporting, interviews, 
and a review of documents for this story provide a window into the 
high-tech surveillance apparatus CBP is building in the name of 
deterring illicit migration — and highlight how these same systems often 
end up targeting other marginalized populations as well as political 
dissidents.

    The U.S. borderlands have become laboratories for new systems of
    enforcement and control.

The towers on Tohono O’odham land are part of a surge in wide-area 
persistent surveillance systems across the borderlands. Elbit Systems of 
America has already built 55 integrated fixed towers in southern 
Arizona, which company executives say cover 200 linear miles. According 
to information provided by a CBP spokesperson, the agency has also 
deployed 368 smaller surveillance towers, known as RVSS towers, in areas 
ranging from south of San Diego to the Rio Grande Valley, as well as 
along parts of the U.S.-Canadian border.

Civil liberties advocates and academics have pointed out the heightened 
abuses and increased migrant suffering that have resulted from the new 
state-of-the-art surveillance gear. According to Jay Stanley, senior 
policy analyst with the American Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, 
Privacy, and Technology Project, the spread of persistent surveillance 
technologies is particularly worrisome because they remove any limit on 
how much information police can gather on a person’s movements. “The 
border is the natural place for the government to start using them, 
since there is much more public support to deploy these sorts of 
intrusive technologies there,” he said.

In February, Congress allocated $100 million for integrated fixed towers 
and mobile surveillance systems, a sign that the towers may soon expand 
to new locations.

According to Bobby Brown, senior director of Customs and Border 
Protection at Elbit Systems of America, the company’s ultimate goal is 
to build a “layer” of electronic surveillance equipment across the 
entire perimeter of the U.S. “Over time, we’ll expand not only to the 
northern border, but to the ports and harbors across the country,” Brown 
said in an interview with The Intercept. “There’s a lot to be done.”

ARIVACA, AZ - NOVEMBER 15: A U.S. Border Patrol surveillance camera 
overlooks a remote area of the U.S.-Mexico border on November 15, 2016 
near Arivaca, Arizona. Nearby, armed civilian paramilitaries with 
Arizona Border Recon, made up mostly of former U.S. military servicemen 
and women, staged a reconnaissance and surveillance operation against 
drug and human smugglers. The group, which claims up to 200 volunteers, 
does not consider itself a militia, but rather a group of citizens 
supplementing U.S. Border Patrol efforts to control illegal border 
activity. With the election of Donald Trump as President, border 
security issues are a top national issue for the incoming 
Administration. (Photo by John Moore/Getty Images)

A Border Patrol surveillance camera overlooks a remote area of the 
U.S.-Mexico border on Nov. 15, 2016, near Arivaca, Ariz.

Photo: John Moore/Getty Images


      Building the Virtual Wall

Long before President Donald Trump called for the construction of a 
“big, beautiful wall” along the U.S.-Mexico border, there was the idea 
of a “virtual wall.” In 2006, Congress authorized the construction of 
700 miles of fencing to be accompanied by a vast buildup of surveillance 
equipment and border guards in more remote terrain.

A key component of that effort, known as SBINet, was canceled after five 
years and more than $1 billion in expenditures. In the wake of that 
failure, CBP turned to Elbit, based in Haifa, Israel, awarding it a $145 
million contract in 2014 to develop the integrated fixed towers in 
southern Arizona. In addition to fixed and mobile surveillance towers, 
other technology that CBP has acquired and deployed includes blimps 
<https://www.cbp.gov/frontline/frontline-november-aerostats> outfitted 
with high-powered ground and air radar, sensors buried underground, and 
facial recognition software 
<https://fcw.com/articles/2019/02/21/cbp-facial-recognition-border.aspx> 
at ports of entry. CBP’s drone fleet has been described 
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/border-patrol-drones-being-borrowed-by-other-agencies-more-often-than-previously-known/2014/01/14/5f987af0-7d49-11e3-9556-4a4bf7bcbd84_story.html> 
as the largest of any U.S. agency outside the Department of Defense.

The surveillance has had an acute impact on borderland communities, 
including on the Tohono O’odham reservation. Drones fly overhead, and 
motion sensors track foot traffic. CBP checkpoints monitor people 
traveling between the reservation and cities such as Tucson and Phoenix. 
Vehicle barriers, surveillance cameras, and trucks have appeared near 
burial grounds and on hilltops amid ancient saguaro forests, which are 
sacred to people on the reservation.

Nellie Jo David, a Tohono O’odham tribal member who is writing her 
dissertation on border security issues at the University of Arizona, 
says many younger people who have been forced by economic circumstances 
to work in nearby cities are returning home less and less, because they 
want to avoid the constant surveillance and harassment. “It’s especially 
taken a toll on our younger generations.”

Border militarism has been spreading worldwide owing to neoliberal 
economic policies, wars, and the onset of the climate crisis, all of 
which have contributed to the uprooting of increasingly large numbers of 
people, notes Reece Jones, a University of Hawaii-Manoa geography 
professor who studies borders and migration.

“The build-up started in the 1990s, but particularly after the 
declaration of the war on terror, funding began flowing into the border 
security sector in all these different places around the world,” Jones 
says. The number of fortified borders worldwide soared from 15 to 70 
between 2000 and 2015, he added.

This militarization has, in turn, created new profit opportunities for 
technology and defense firms. In the U.S., leading companies with border 
security contracts include long-established contractors such as Lockheed 
Martin in addition to recent upstarts such as Anduril Industries, 
founded by tech mogul Palmer Luckey to feed the growing market for 
artificial intelligence and surveillance sensors — primarily in the 
borderlands.

Elbit Systems has frequently touted a major advantage over these 
competitors: the fact that its products are “field-proven 
<https://elbitsystems.com/media/Advanced-Border-Security-Solution.pdf>” 
on Palestinians. The company built surveillance sensors for Israel’s 
separation barrier <https://www.haaretz.com/1.5113359> through the West 
Bank, which has been deemed illegal under international law, as well as 
around the Gaza Strip and on the northern border 
<https://www.israeldefense.co.il/en/content/sensor-system-be-deployed-along-israel-lebanon-border> 
with Lebanon and Syria.

Elbit is also one of the main contractors on a new kind of underground 
wall, 
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/checkpoint/wp/2018/03/06/israeli-official-bets-advances-in-anti-tunnel-technology-will-secure-gaza-border> 
still under construction, around the blockaded Gaza Strip. Elbit’s 
drones patrol the Mediterranean Sea 
<https://www.timesofisrael.com/elbit-wins-drone-contract-for-up-to-68m-to-help-monitor-europe-coast/> 
as part of the European Union’s bid to seal off access to migrants from 
North Africa, and it has provided its technologies to militaries in 
Australia, Africa, Asia, Central America, and South America.

Elbit’s contract to deploy IFTs on the Tohono O’odham reservation, which 
the company announced 
<https://www.prnewswire.com/il/news-releases/us-customs-and-border-protection-tohono-oodham-nation-agree-on-border-security-solution-by-elbit-systems-of-america-300875152.html> 
on June 26, follows several years of contentious debate within the 
tribal nation, with those living near tower construction sites voicing 
strident opposition. Two years ago, CBP released a study claiming that 
integrated fixed tower construction wouldn’t cause archaeological, 
environmental, or community harm. The agency also decreased the number 
of proposed towers and redesigned their bases so they wouldn’t extend 
underground. The Tohono O’odham legislative council unanimously approved 
the towers on March 22, citing the importance of helping Border Patrol 
agents stem cross-border drug trafficking.

In an interview 
<https://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-arizona-tribe-border-patrol-trump-wall-20190509-htmlstory.html> 
with the Los Angeles Times, Verlon Jose, then-tribal vice chair, said 
that many nation members calculated that the towers would help dissuade 
the federal government from building a border wall across their lands. 
The Tohono O’odham are “only as sovereign as the federal government 
allows us to be,” Jose said. A Border Patrol spokesperson told the 
newspaper, however, that the IFTs did not eliminate the need for a wall.

The Tohono O’odham Nation’s current chair and vice chair did not respond 
to requests for comment on this story.

In a statement to The Intercept, CBP spokesperson Meredith Mingledorff 
said Elbit’s integrated fixed towers enhance Border Patrol agents’ 
safety at a low cost. “IFTs are a ‘force multiplier’ that enables one 
agent to monitor various different sites remotely from a secure 
location,” she said. “They are low cost of maintenance and allow for 
greater efficiency of law enforcement operations, as we can better 
deploy resources depending on the type of incursion that is detected by 
the technology.”

elbit-1566616918

Joel Friederich, vice president of public safety and homeland 
security at Elbit Systems of America, discusses the company’s latest 
border surveillance products at a company testing facility in Marana, 
Ariz., in April 2019.

Photo: Griselda Zetino/KTAR News 92.3/KTAR.com


      Elbit’s Showcase

On a sweltering afternoon in early April, Elbit Systems of America 
executives showcased their latest border surveillance products at a 
company testing facility in Marana, Arizona, roughly 20 miles northwest 
of downtown Tucson. The event centered around a live demonstration of 
the IFT command and control system, known as TORCH. The system, which 
Elbit originally developed for the Israel Defense Forces, is used to 
monitor people’s movements along Israel’s border and separation walls. 
Now, it is also used by the Border Patrol at command centers across 
southern Arizona.

The event also served as a showcase for Elbit’s high-level political 
support. U.S. Sen. Martha McSally’s deputy state director was on hand, 
as was Ron Colburn, a former national deputy chief of the Border Patrol 
and current Elbit adviser. Colburn is perhaps best known for an 
appearance on Fox News <https://heavy.com/news/2018/11/ronald-colburn/> 
last November defending the Border Patrol’s use of tear gas and pepper 
spray on migrant caravan participants near Tijuana, who had attempted to 
cross into the United States. Pepper spray “is natural,” Colburn said, 
before adding, “You could actually put it on your nachos and eat it.”

Joel Friederich, Elbit Systems of America’s vice president of public 
safety and homeland security, stood near a wall-sized monitor flanked by 
a pair of Elbit engineers as reporters and invited guests looked on. On 
the screen, a satellite map was populated with clusters of yellow and 
pink dots. Several smaller surrounding images displayed live feeds from 
the various video cameras and radar sensors adorning a demonstration 
tower on site. “This can be zoomed in for many, many miles,” Friederich 
explained.

An engineer clicked on one of the yellow dots, zooming in on one of the 
video feeds. Suddenly, several cars inching across U.S. Interstate 10 
came distinctly into view. He zoomed in further, and the screen settled 
on a patch of shrubs adjacent to a roadway, close enough that the bright 
green, swaying tips of the creosote bushes were visible, though they 
were well over a mile away. The operating system uses artificial 
intelligence to assign an icon representing a human, vehicle, or animal, 
allowing Border Patrol agents to determine if something moving across 
the desert is a potential “item of interest,” Friederich noted. That 
item could include “anyone carrying a weapon or a backpack, or anyone in 
a large group.”

For Elbit, the holy grail of border surveillance is to ensure that no 
person can escape TORCH’s ability to track them across time and space in 
a given area. If one of the “items” ducks into a bush, the system can 
track them using a long-range infrared camera. For night operations, the 
towers have laser illuminators. A pick-up truck that can be remotely 
operated with a surveillance tower and 6-mile camera range is also able 
to feed data to TORCH in case someone ducks behind a mountain or into a 
ravine. The company is currently marketing the truck to CBP.

In 2016, Israel became the first country to deploy autonomous vehicles 
in a border area, which were also created by Elbit 
<https://www.foxnews.com/tech/robot-patrol-israeli-army-to-deploy-autonomous-vehicles-on-gaza-border>.

    “The idea is that at the very moment you step near the border, Elbit
    will catch you. Something similar happens in Palestine.”

Leading Democrats have argued for the development of an ever-more 
sophisticated border surveillance state as an alternative to Trump’s 
border wall. “The positive, shall we say, almost technological wall that 
can be built is what we should be doing,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi 
said in January.

But for those crossing the border, the development of this surveillance 
apparatus has already taken a heavy toll. In January, a study 
<https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08865655.2019.1570861> 
published by researchers from the University of Arizona and Earlham 
College found that border surveillance towers have prompted migrants to 
cross along more rugged and circuitous pathways, leading to greater 
numbers of deaths from dehydration, exhaustion, and exposure.

Maren Mantovani, a Palestinian activist and international coordinator of 
Stop the Wall <https://stopthewall.org/>, a coalition that opposes 
Israel’s walls in the Palestinian territories and elsewhere, has tracked 
Elbit’s activities for nearly two decades. The company’s business 
success reflects the central role borders are playing in an emerging 
global surveillance society, she says. “Walls are not only a question of 
blocking people from moving, but they are also serving as borders or 
frontiers between where you enter the surveillance state,” she said. 
“The idea is that at the very moment you step near the border, Elbit 
will catch you. Something similar happens in Palestine.”

At the 13th annual Border Security Expo in San Antonio, Texas, two weeks 
prior to the event in Arizona, Friederich said in an interview with The 
Intercept that Elbit was preparing to bid on a contract to build 
integrated fixed towers on the U.S.-Canadian border and was eying 
opportunities in the Rio Grande Valley.

According to Brown, the Elbit senior director, the company’s border 
surveillance work will proceed indefinitely regardless of the 
construction of Trump’s border wall. “Border security has always been a 
three-legged stool — manpower, infrastructure, and technology,” he said. 
“Infrastructure being the wall. Technology being the towers, the mobile 
systems, the ground detection such as sensors. We’re going to keep busy 
no matter what.”


      Mission Creep

CBP is by far the largest law enforcement entity in the U.S., with 
61,400 employees and a 2018 budget of $16.3 billion — more than the 
militaries of Iran, Mexico, Israel, and Pakistan. The Border Patrol has 
jurisdiction 100 miles inland 
<https://www.aclu.org/other/constitution-100-mile-border-zone> from U.S. 
borders, making roughly two-thirds of the U.S. population theoretically 
subject to its operations, including the entirety of the Tohono O’odham 
reservation.

The agency has received considerable criticism for its often-brutal 
treatment of migrants. But a large percentage of its operations involve 
routine police work. Between 2013 and 2016, for example, roughly 40 
percent of Border Patrol seizures 
<https://www.gao.gov/assets/690/688201.pdf> at immigration enforcement 
checkpoints involved 1 ounce or less of marijuana confiscated from U.S. 
citizens. Yet not as much attention has been paid to how the agency uses 
its sprawling surveillance apparatus for purposes other than border 
enforcement.

In 2017, as companies built prototypes for Trump’s border wall in San 
Diego, CBP stationed one of its RVSS towers nearby to monitor political 
opposition, citing the “emerging threat of demonstrations,” records 
show. The tower deployment lasted for eight months beginning in 
September 2017, according to a federal contract tender 
<https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6335897-RVSS-San-Diego.html> 
posted online. The only significant demonstration to occur was a 
peaceful rally that greeted Trump in March 2018 as he conducted a 
photo-op tour of the wall prototypes.

Making use of the border surveillance tower to monitor political 
protests was a seamless transition, according to the contract tender. 
“CBP concluded that the RVSS relocatable tower solution was a logical 
choice since placement of this RVSS tower was essentially an extension 
of the existing RVSS system in place along the border in San Diego, and 
the tower would also provide surveillance of two areas at one time,” it 
stated.

SIERRA VISTA, AZ - OCTOBER 30: The new MQ-9 Predator B, an unmanned 
surveillance aircraft system, unveiled by the U.S. Customs and Border 
Protection (CBP), takes off at Libby Army Airfield at Ft. Huachuca 
October 30, 2006 in Sierra Vista, Arizona. CBP will use the new MQ-9 
Predator aircraft to patrol the southern border of the United States in 
order to stop the illegal entry of thousands of Mexican nationals and 
drug runners who use the vast expanses of the Sonoran desert to cross 
into southern Arizona, daily. The new unarmed plane flew briefly for the 
press to show off its surveillance capabilities by pilots of the 
contractor, General Atomics Aeronautical Systems. Agents of CBP will 
start training on the use of the aircraft very soon. The Predator will 
start full scale flight operations along the Mexico-Arizona border 
today. (Photo by Gary Williams/Getty Images)

The MQ-9 Predator B, an unmanned surveillance aircraft system unveiled 
by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, takes off at Libby Army Airfield 
at Ft. Huachuca in Sierra Vista, Ariz., on Oct. 30, 2006.

Photo: Gary Williams/Getty Images

CBP also frequently “shares” its aircraft, including surveillance 
drones, with other U.S. law enforcement agencies. According to flight 
logs 
<https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6336985-CBP-Flight-Logs.html> 
The Intercept obtained via the Freedom of Information Act, between July 
2016 and August 2017, CBP conducted 15 drone flights for state and local 
police spanning 90.2 hours and an additional 53 flights for federal 
police agencies covering more than 200 hours. The logs provided by CBP 
failed to specify the locations of these flights, but additional 
documents obtained via public records requests suggest that CBP drone 
flights included surveillance of Dakota Access pipeline protests.

In a statement to The Intercept, a CBP spokesperson confirmed that North 
Dakota law enforcement used the agency’s drone at Standing Rock, 
claiming that it helped protect local police equipment from threats. 
“The Unmanned Aerial System (UAS) provided a video feed to the local 
command center, giving the sheriff’s department and state police 
situational awareness of the protest while minimizing the threat to 
their aviation personnel and assets,” the spokesperson wrote.

During the Standing Rock protests, police and private security personnel 
regularly justified surveillance by casting pipeline opponents as 
instigators of violence 
<https://theintercept.com/2017/06/03/standing-rock-documents-expose-inner-workings-of-surveillance-industrial-complex/>.

For its part, Elbit has also marketed its surveillance equipment for use 
against protesters on at least one occasion, according to records The 
Intercept obtained via freedom of information requests. In November 
2016, a company representative offered 
<https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6335896-Urgent-Request-for-UAS-Capability.html> 
a system of wide-area persistent surveillance sensors to police 
monitoring Dakota Access pipeline opponents. Elbit’s description of its 
product, known as GroundEye 
<https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6335899-GroundEye.html>, touted 
it as “a paradigm shift in defense and security surveillance,” owing to 
its “ability to move ‘Back-In-Time,’ to simultaneously track and trace 
the movements of one or more objects.”

A spokesperson for the North Dakota Department of Emergency Services 
said the agency ultimately opted against purchasing the GroundEye 
system, though she declined to state a reason.

    “Technologies that are sold for one purpose, such as protecting the
    border or stopping terrorists … so often get repurposed for other
    reasons, such as targeting protesters.”

The ACLU’s Jay Stanley says that CBP’s repurposing of the surveillance 
tower and drones to surveil dissidents hints at other possible abuses. 
“It’s a reminder that technologies that are sold for one purpose, such 
as protecting the border or stopping terrorists — or whatever the 
original justification may happen to be — so often get repurposed for 
other reasons, such as targeting protesters.”

That potential is further underscored by a March 2018 email exchange, 
obtained via open records requests 
<https://shadowproof.com/2019/05/20/border-patrol-museum-demonstrators-targeted-in-crackdown-on-immigrant-rights-protests/>, 
that shows a high-ranking Border Patrol officer referring to political 
opposition to Trump border policies as a “threat.” Border Patrol Agent 
in Charge Christopher M. Seiler, of the agency’s Rio Grande Valley 
sector, emailed more than 30 other supervisory agents to invite them to 
a “Large Scale Protest Response Seminar.” The leader of the seminar was 
Paul Laney, the former sheriff of Cass County, North Dakota, who served 
as the leading architect of the militarized police response at Standing 
Rock.

“The current political climate, uptick in demonstrations and social 
media campaigns, along with the immigration debate almost ensure that 
RGV will have large scale protests,” Seiler wrote. “These protests pose 
a significant threat to the border, law enforcement, and our communities.”

Indigenous people from the Tohono O'odham ethnic group take part in a 
protest against US President Donald Trump's intention to build a new 
wall in the border between Mexico and United States, on March 25, 2017, 
in the Altar desert, in Sonora, in the border with Arizona, northern 
Mexico. / AFP PHOTO / Pedro PARDO (Photo credit should read PEDRO 
PARDO/AFP/Getty Images)

Indigenous people from the Tohono O’odham tribal land take part in a 
protest on March 25, 2017, against President Donald Trump’s intention to 
build a new wall on the U.S.-Mexico border.

Photo: Pedro Pardo/AFP/Getty Images


      Tohono O’odham Under Occupation

The impacts of the U.S. border on Tohono O’odham people date to the 
mid-19th century. The tribal nation’s traditional land extended 175 
miles into Mexico 
<https://psmag.com/social-justice/a-closed-border-gate-has-cut-off-three-tohono-oodham-villages> 
before being severed by the 1853 Gadsden Purchase, a U.S. acquisition of 
land from the Mexican government. As many as 2,500 of the tribe’s more 
than 30,000 members still live on the Mexican side. Tohono O’odham 
people used to travel between the United States and Mexico fairly easily 
on roads without checkpoints to visit family, perform ceremonies, or 
obtain health care.

But that was before the Border Patrol arrived en masse in the mid-2000s, 
turning the reservation into something akin to a military occupation 
zone. Residents say agents have administered beatings, used pepper 
spray, pulled people out of vehicles, shot two Tohono O’odham men under 
suspicious circumstances, and entered people’s homes without warrants.

“It is apartheid here,” Ofelia Rivas says. “We have to carry our papers 
everywhere. And everyone here has experienced the Border Patrol’s abuse 
in some way.”

Nellie Jo David says the constant surveillance has profoundly disrupted 
the cultural fabric of the Tohono O’odham people, alongside other 
federal government intrusions like the Barry M. Goldwater Air Force 
Range, built adjacent to the reservation in the 1940s.

“The towers are just one more target on our culture and way of life,” 
David says. “We can’t really have the same ceremonies if there are going 
to be eyes on us, coming from an operational control room with likely a 
white male agent looking into what it is to be O’odham.”

Although the Tohono O’odham tribal council has supported the integrated 
fixed towers, the majority of people living near future construction 
sites have vocally opposed them. Two of the towers are slated for the 
district of Gu-Vo, or “Big Pond,” where Rivas resides, the westernmost 
of 11 districts on the reservation. The Gu-Vo governing council passed a 
resolution against the towers in 2017, citing firm opposition to 
residents placed under persistent surveillance and a desire to protect 
sacred burial sites, ceremonial areas, and harvesting grounds.

In the process of opposing the towers, Tohono O’odham people have 
developed common cause with other communities struggling against 
colonization and border walls. David is among numerous activists from 
the U.S. and Mexican borderlands who joined a delegation to the West 
Bank in 2017, convened by Stop the Wall, to build relationships and 
learn about the impacts of Elbit’s surveillance systems.

“I don’t feel safe with them taking over my community, especially if you 
look at what’s going on in Palestine — they’re bringing the same thing 
right over here to this land,” she says. “The U.S. government is going 
to be able to surveil basically anybody on the nation.”

-- 
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