Nearly four years ago, U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials outlined a proposal for a line of surveillance towers along the Canadian border in Vermont and New York. Since then, VTDigger has found, the agency has been quietly making good on its plans.
The federal government has built surveillance towers in recent years on at least three of the sites it identified to state and local officials, and to the public, in 2021, including one in Derby, Vermont, and two in the lakeside New York community of Champlain.
There is almost certainly more border surveillance infrastructure in the region. Agency records describe at least five existing U.S. Customs and Border Protection towers in the federal immigration enforcement jurisdiction covering Vermont and parts of New York. That jurisdiction is called the Swanton Sector, based in the northern Vermont town of the same name.
The agency said in 2022 that it was considering building five additional towers in the Swanton Sector in the future, according to records obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital privacy and free speech advocacy organization.
Overall, the feds plan to install more than 1,000 new towers across the country’s northern and southern borders by 2034, The Intercept reported earlier this year. The plans come as national leaders on both sides of the political aisle, including president-elect Donald Trump, have pitched tough border enforcement policies in recent years.
In 2021 Swanton Sector plans, officials said the towers would allow them to patrol more of their jurisdiction, which spans about 300 miles and also includes the New Hampshire-Canada border, without employing additional personnel or vehicles.
“The increasing frequency and nature of illegal cross-border activities, as well as the geographic area over which these activities occur, create a need for a technology-based surveillance capability that can effectively collect, process, and distribute information,” federal officials stated in the “purpose and need” section of the 2021 documents.
But the plans drew pointed criticism from some of the state’s top leaders, including all three members of its congressional delegation at the time, largely over concerns that the government had not properly taken into account nearby homeowners’ privacy.
TJ Donovan, the state’s attorney general at the time, blasted the proposal in comments saying that the government had failed to justify a need for the new infrastructure.
