Kevin Cohen, the CEO and co-founder of Tel Aviv-based startup RealEye, opens his pc, able to introduce the instruments that he believes will maintain America’s borders safer.
The display fills with images of individuals younger and previous, from all ethnicities, genders, and backgrounds.
“We’re basically aggregating information from hundreds of thousands of sources online, not only to classify someone as a potential danger or threat but also to indicate the probability of them meshing into various nefarious networks,” says Cohen. “We can take 50,000 individuals and within literally seconds, I can give you the insights and the indexing of their behavior.”
RealEye has developed two AI-driven platforms, Masad and Fortress, that present real-time vetting and “semi-active” monitoring of immigrants coming into a rustic both legally or in any other case, with a historical past of unlawful or suspicious actions.
These instruments draw not simply on legal data (which may very well be as innocuous as site visitors violations), but in addition digital footprints left on social media and the darkish internet.
Cohen pulls up the profile of a person named Yosef, and immediately the person’s historical past seems like bullet factors on the display.
“We can see that this specific individual funnels money to Hamas and other operatives,” says Cohen. “We know this guy is no good.”
In just some days, Donald Trump will probably be inaugurated for his second time period as US president. He’s vowed that on Day One, his precedence will probably be “the largest deportation operation in American history,” and there may be “no price tag.”
Trump’s plans to safe our Southern border embrace every thing from a proposed hotline heart for residents to name in recommendations on undocumented migrants to constructing a large immigration detention heart on a 1,402-acre plot on the Rio Grande.
Trump has additionally indicated his intention to proceed development of a 30-foot-high fence throughout the US-Mexico border. The truth is, he’s contemplating declaring unlawful immigration a nationwide emergency to unlock funds for border wall development.
In December, Trump even filed an amicus temporary in help of a authorized effort to cease the Biden administration from promoting border wall supplies.
A court docket order put a cease to Biden’s efforts. Additional emboldened, Trump will probably additionally revisit plans he’d thought-about in his first time period, like floating obstacles, which had been briefly examined within the last yr of his presidency.
In 2023, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott picked up on the concept, of developing 1,000 toes of sphere buoys in a piece of the Rio Grande. Regardless of makes an attempt by the Biden administration to cease it, claiming the floating obstacles violated the federal Rivers and Harbor Act, the Fifth Circuit Courtroom of Appeals dominated final summer time they might stay.
Together with these bodily barrier methods, Synthetic Intelligence-based methods corresponding to these discovered with RealEye will probably type a big a part of each securing our Southern Border and Trump’s deportation technique.
The Division of Homeland Safety has already been allotted $5 million in its 2025 price range to open an AI workplace, and DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas has known as AI a “transformative technology.” Sam Altman, the OpenAI CEO who donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund, predicted that President Trump “will lead our country into the age of AI.”
One other AI firm making ready for a busy yr is Bavovna AI, a Ukrainian startup who’ve developed autonomous, AI-powered drones. Though drones have been used on the US border since 2005, they’ve been more and more sabotaged by Mexican cartels with GPS-jammers.
However Bavovna’s drones — already battle-tested in Ukraine’s battle with Russia — can traverse advanced landscapes with out GPS or any visible odometry, thus evading detection.
Like RealEye’s Cohen, Bavovna’s co-founder and director Pramax Prasolov, is tight-lipped about their relationship with the upcoming administration, apart from saying they’re “exploring opportunities to support border security operations.”
However on Christmas Eve, Prasolov hosted a particular demo flight take a look at in Tampa, Florida, whose company included high-ranking officers from the Division of Protection and the US. Air Pressure.
“These UAVs are not just tools for surveillance but solutions for maintaining operational superiority in contested environments,” Prasolov says. It’s solely a matter of time earlier than “electronic warfare” turns into “essential to secure U.S. borders,” he says.
AI is nothing new to the border; throughout Biden’s presidency, Democrats pushed for “smart border” applied sciences like digital towers, which promised a extra “humane” different to Trump’s border wall.
Final fall, the bipartisan Rising Revolutionary Border Applied sciences Act was handed by the Home compelling the DHS to discover how one can finest make the most of AI, machine studying, and nanotechnologies in border safety applications.
The Trump administration clearly seems on board. They “plan to increase the use of AI surveillance systems along the border,” says N. And Trump is taking off the protection bumpers.
Biden signed an Govt Order in 2023, vowing a “safe, secure, and trustworthy” growth of AI; Trump has promised to nullify it when he takes workplace.
There are plans already in place to enhance on the prevailing AI, like a proposed $101 million to improve and preserve surveillance towers. “These towers . . . detect and identify unauthorized crossings, and distinguish between humans, animals, and vehicles,” says Sahota. “Under a Trump administration, this initiative is expected to expand radically, turning his promise of a physical wall into a digital one.” The truth is, Customs and Border Safety plans to finish a community of greater than 1,000 surveillance towers by 2034.
There will even be a full introduction of “robodogs,” first unveiled by the DHS in 2022. These four-legged military-grade machines, developed by Philadelphia-based Ghost Robotics, “are designed to navigate challenging terrains, including sand, rocks, and human-made environments like stairs, making them well-suited for the diverse landscapes encountered along the border,” says Sahota. Though they’re at present nonetheless being examined by the DHS, Trump is enthusiastic sufficient concerning the expertise to have a minimum of one robodog on safety patrol at Mar-a-Lago.
There have been considerations that the canine may very well be weaponized, particularly after some fashions had been launched with sniper rifles. The final firm that tried one thing related, tech startup Brinc, confronted public backlash in 2021 over drones they manufactured geared up with tasers.
However Ghost Robotics CEO Gavin Kenneally assured a Home Oversight Committee in 2023 that their expertise would solely be used for patrolling, not violence. (Ghost Robotics didn’t reply to requests for remark.)
A number of the different AI being launched isn’t fairly so dystopian, nevertheless it’s no much less advanced. RealEye’s vetting system, as an example, goes past current DHS methods, which focus totally on biometric indexing.
That is inadequate, says Cohen, to intercept dangerous actors — corresponding to terrorists or cartel members — who’re exploiting the migration system to enter the US illegally.
“You have somebody’s fingerprint and that’s it,” explains Cohen, who says his agency has partnered with intelligence companies in Israel, Taiwan, the Philippines, and Japan. “There’s no tracking of their digital presence…[to gauge] who these individuals are before they came into the country.”
Machine-learning applied sciences are additionally much better suited to establish patterns and anomalies that may be ignored by border patrol brokers — overwhelmed by the surge in Biden-era migrants and whose present staffing crunch has been known as “unsustainable” by a DHS report in 2023.
“Some AI systems…can analyze communication intercepts in multiple languages to identify potential security threats,” says Sahota. “AI can also…identify…unusual movement patterns near the border or irregular travel itineraries can be flagged for further investigation.”
Though many of those instruments are nonetheless being field-tested, there have already been success tales.
In 2023, an AI mannequin recognized the bizarre journey patterns of a truck making common crossings on the U.S./Mexico border, and when police investigated, they found 75 kilograms of narcotics hidden within the automobile.
However the rise of AI in border safety isn’t giving everybody consolation. Sahota calls it a double-edged sword.
“While AI offers vast potential to streamline operations and secure borders, its misuse—intentional or not—could lead to dangerous outcomes,” he says. “There’s a slippery slope where AI can be weaponized, eroding civil liberties, violating privacy, and fostering systemic bias. Under the Trump administration, the aggressive expansion of AI in border security could turn these tools into mechanisms for mass surveillance and control.”
Marina Shepelsky, the CEO, co-founder, and immigration legal professional at New York-based Shepelsky Regulation Group, worries that AI vetting might have built-in biases.
“They can vet and deny people who have criticized Trump,” she says. “Or anyone who has posted some religious Muslim thoughts, or anyone who has posted ‘communist’ thoughts on social media.”
Cohen, nevertheless, thinks considerations about AI being abused are misdirected. “The ‘special interest aliens’ we’re going after are technically felons,” he says. “We’re not targeting individuals that are just trying to become breadwinners for their family or make a better life.”
For Cohen, making life tough for immigrants with legal intentions could be very a lot private. As a young person, his household briefly moved from Israel to Florida, and so they lived subsequent door to Mohammed Atta, who would turn out to be a ringleader of the September 11 assaults.
“I’ve never stopped thinking about it,” he says. “That’s why we’re doing this, to keep guys like him . . . from making it into the country. We have to be smarter than them, and find more creative ways to make sure everybody crossing the border is who they say they are.”
