It seems Mexico may very well pay for an costly U.S. border wall in spite of everything, however actually not in the best way former president Donald Trump would have hoped.

Following a wide-ranging assembly with U.S. President Joe Biden this week, Mexican President Andres Manuel López Obrador agreed to spend some $1.5 billion over the subsequent two years investing in so-called “smart” border expertise. The settlement quantities to each a departure from the contentious Trump-era political bickering between the 2 nations and a continuation of border surveillance efforts, which digital rights activists informed Gizmodo may do extra hurt than good to weak border communities.

Though neither president supplied concrete particulars on the place the brand new funds could be allotted, earlier good border and good wall pushes typically confer with a patchwork of facial recognition, drones, sensors, license plate readers, dog-like robots, DNA collection, and different rising surveillance applied sciences that each one try to maintain fixed tabs on anybody getting into or leaving the U.S.-Mexico border. Though these so-called good options seemingly provide a lovely various to sprawling bodily limitations—significantly amongst Democratic lawmakers—they’ve concurrently drawn intense scrutiny from lecturers and civil liberties teams who warn the applied sciences are ripe for abuse.

Gizmodo reached out to the White House for extra particulars on Mexico’s new good border funding however hasn’t heard again. The two presidents did launch a joint statement, nonetheless, the place they mentioned they have been, “committed like never before to completing a multi-year joint U.S.-Mexico border infrastructure modernization effort for projects along the 2,000-mile border.”

In an interview with Gizmodo, Surveillance Technology Oversight Project Executive Director Albert Fox Cahn spoke critically of the funding, which he claimed would seemingly depend on inaccurate and invasive applied sciences.

“Wasting billions of dollars on invasive tech will do nothing to address the realities of immigration,” Fox Cahn mentioned. “Rather than trying to turn the southern border into a high-tech fortress, we need to meet our legal obligation to protect those fleeing violence abroad. Past technologies have not only been biased and error-prone, but they have put Americans in harms ways, like when Customs and Border Protection’s facial recognition data was hacked just a few years ago.”

Tuesday’s assembly wasn’t simply restricted to high-tech options both. According to CBS News, Biden and López Obrador additionally agreed to broaden the overall variety of work visas issued by the U.S., create a working group for labor migration pathways and employee protections, and proceed joint patrols for human smugglers alongside the shared border. They additionally reportedly mentioned growing the variety of refugees admitted to the U.S.

The agreements and cooperative tone of the assembly drew a stark distinction to the Trump period, the place the previous U.S. president often antagonized the Mexican authorities and other people and vied, in the end pressuring Mexico into paying for the multi-billion dollar project. Ironically, now Mexico actually is paying for the wall, albeit within the type of largely substituting mortar with information. Some consultants have argued conventional bodily partitions are infective in comparison with the extra strong monitoring applied sciences at the moment being deployed by Customs and Border Protection and different legislation enforcement companies.

The dream of good, digital border partitions brimming with the newest new tech has ushered in a booming market stuffed with startups much less averse to pursuing controversial protection contracts. Possibly essentially the most well-known, or infamous, of these keen startups is Anduril Industries, the brainchild of former Occulus founder and well-known shoe hater Palmer Luckey. During the final 12 months of Trump’s presidency, Anduril received a five-year contract to deploy a whole bunch of its looming AI-powered surveillance towers scattered all through the border. Anduril didn’t instantly reply to Gizmodo’s request for remark.

Biden, who vowed to finish the development of the Trump-era bodily border wall throughout his presidential marketing campaign, has been pilloried by activist teams who’ve accused him of reneging on that promise and persevering with to expand controversial surveillance applied sciences. A coalition of greater than 40 rights teams together with Fight for the Future, Mijente, and S.T.O.P pushed back towards Biden final 12 months in an open letter opposing the president’s efforts to broaden border surveillance tech funding as a part of the U.S. Citizenship Act of 2021. Expanded border surveillance, in keeping with these teams, represents a, “continuation of the Trump administration’s racist border policies, not a break from it.”

“The harms of border technology go far beyond the border and disproportionately impact Black, indigenous, and people of color communities,” the group wrote. “Border enforcement policies have long served as a testing ground for military-grade surveillance at the border and far into the interior.”

Other civil liberties teams just like the ACLU warn unchecked use of those applied sciences may expose sure border teams to unequal ranges of monitoring.

“Warrantless use of these technologies comes at an unacceptably high cost,” the ACLU mentioned in a 2019 statement. “They allow the government to track, surveil, and monitor individuals indiscriminately and with precise detail. Individuals in the border zone should not be subject to near-constant surveillance that intrudes on the most intimate aspects of their lives.”