BORDERING FROM ABOVE: AIRCRAFT, ENFORCEMENT, AND TERRITORIAL
ANXIETY AT THE US-MEXICO BORDER
by
SAMUEL E. MCLAUGHLIN
A THESIS
Presented to the Department of Geography
and the Division of Graduate Studies of the University of Oregon
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of
Master of Arts
December 2021
THESIS APPROVAL PAGE
Student: Samuel E. McLaughlin
Title: Bordering From Above: Aircraft, Enforcement, and Territorial Anxiety at the US-
Mexico Border
This thesis has been accepted and approved in partial fulfillment of the requirements for 
the Master of Arts degree in the Department of Geography by:
Shaul Cohen Chairperson
Alexander B. Murphy Member
and
Krista Chronister Vice Provost for Graduate Studies
Original approval signatures are on file with the University of Oregon Division of 
Graduate Studies.
Degree awarded December 2021
ii
© 2021 Samuel E. McLaughlin
iii
THESIS ABSTRACT
Samuel E. McLaughlin
Master of Arts
Department of Geography
Title: Bordering From Above: Aircraft, Enforcement, and Territorial Anxiety at the US-
Mexico Border
The invention of powered flight altered both mobility across territorial borders 
and states’ ability to govern or enforce those borders. This thesis examines the 
incorporation of three types of aircraft—airplanes, helicopters, and drones—into the US 
apparatus of enforcement at its border with Mexico, through qualitative analysis of 
newspaper archives, pilot histories, and interviews with humanitarian aid activists. A 
close study of the roles and functions of aircraft within the broader system of border 
enforcement illuminates the technologically-provoked anxiety that motivates border 
intensification, the close but complex links between public representations and bordering 
practices, and the importance of larger political-economic circumstances in determining 
the means of enforcement. 
iv
CURRICULUM VITAE
NAME OF AUTHOR: Samuel E. McLaughlin
GRADUATE AND UNDERGRADUATE SCHOOLS ATTENDED:
University of Oregon, Eugene, OR
Pomona College, Claremont, CA
DEGREES AWARDED:
Master of Arts, Geography, 2021, University of Oregon
Bachelor of Arts, summa cum laude, Politics, 2016, Pomona College
AREAS OF SPECIAL INTEREST:
US-Mexico Border Enforcement
Technology and Territory
Political Geography
PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE:
Graduate Employee (teaching assistant), Univ. of Oregon, 2019 – 2021 
Mechanic, Flagstaff Bicycle Revolution, Flagstaff, AZ, 2018 – 2019
Naturalist/Backpacking Trips Coordinator, Point Reyes National Seashore 
Association, Point Reyes Station, CA, 2017
Reporter, Moab Sun News, Moab, UT, 2017
Field Instructor, Elements Wilderness Program, Huntington, UT, 2016
GRANTS, AWARDS, AND HONORS:
Doug Foster Community-Building Award, Department of Geography, University 
of Oregon, 2021 (as member of the Associated Graduate Students in 
Geography executive committee)
Mather Award, Department of Geography, University of Oregon, 2021
Rippey Research Grant, Department of Geography, University of Oregon, 2021
v
Everett G. Smith Graduate Fellowship, Department of Geography, University of 
Oregon, 2020
John A. Vieg Prize, Politics Department, Pomona College, 2016
John Dye Award, English Department, Pomona College, 2016
Phi Beta Kappa (Gamma Chapter of California), inducted 2015
ID1 (Critical Inquiry Seminar) Paper Prize, Pomona College, 2012
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My thanks first to my advisor, Dr. Shaul Cohen, and my second committee 
member, Dr. Alexander Murphy, for their guidance and encouragement throughout this 
project and my time at the University of Oregon. 
I’d also like to thank my friends and colleagues in the Geography department, 
many of whom listened patiently to my early ideas. I’m especially thankful for my fellow
representatives of the Associated Graduate Students in Geography, who worked hard to 
sustain a sense of community during a uniquely challenging time.
I first began thinking about the US-Mexico border in Dr. Murphy’s Political 
Geography course, and I developed the specific foundations of this project in Qualitative 
Methods with Dr. Leigh Johnson. My thinking was greatly influenced by seminars with 
(chronologically) Dr. Peter Walker, Dr. Daniel Buck, and Dr. Laura Pulido, and by my 
fellow students in those courses. 
This project would not have been possible without the interviewees who shared 
their time and their stories with me. I also received key assistance from Annette Hekking,
the Archives and Collections Manager at the Border Patrol Museum and Memorial 
Library Foundation. My work was partially supported by a Rippey Research Grant from 
the Department of Geography. The 2020 Rocky Mountain Interdisciplinary History 
Conference was an excellent venue to present an early version of some of this research, 
and I am grateful for the insightful feedback I received from panelists and participants.
Finally, thank you to my parents, who have offered exceptional patience, 
encouragement, and support from afar. 
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chapter       Page
I. INTRODUCTION…………………………………………………………………..      1
II. BACKGROUND…………………………………………………………………..      8
Literature Review……………………………………………………………..      8
Unfinished borders…………………………………………………….     8
Borders and territory……………………………………………….….    11
The US-Mexico border context……………………………………….    17
Borders and technologies of powered flight………………………….     28
Methods……………………………………………………………………….    32
III. AIRPLANES……………………………………………………………………..     46
First flights and the promise of authority…………………………………….     47
Aerial anxiety and early enrollment………………………………………….     52
Regional identity and the launch of Border Patrol aviation………………….     61
Full institutional incorporation……………………………………………….     68
Fixed-wing aircraft at the border today……………………………………….    74
Conclusion…………………………………………………………………….    76
IV. HELICOPTERS…………………………………………………………………..     79
Helicopters in the modern borderlands………………………………………..    80
Autogiros: the false start………………………………………………………    84
Initial adoption in California………………………………………………….    86
Demobilization and surplus…………………………………………………..     90
Surplus state capacities and militarization…………………………………….   93
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Chapter       Page
Representational power……………………………………………………….   100
Contesting official representations…………………………………………...    107
Disorderly spaces and governance by force………………………………….    116
Conclusion……………………………………………………………………    118
V. DRONES………………………………………………………………………….    120
Drone development and the border………………………………………….     121
Initial testing and acquisition………………………………………………..     126
Perceptions of drones in the borderlands…………………………………….    132
Assessments of drone efficacy………………………………………………     138
Signaling strength and disavowing responsibility…………………………..     141
The weight of the border-industrial complex……………………………….     146
Conclusion…………………………………………………………………..     150
VI. CONCLUSION………………………………………………………………….    154
Major findings……………………………………………………………….    155
Limitations and future directions of research………………………………..    158
Parting thoughts……………………………………………………………..     163
REFERENCES CITED………………………………………………………………   165 
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LIST OF FIGURES
Figure       Page
1. A Border Patrol airplane in use in the 1940s………………………………………..    66
2. A Piper Super Cub in flight…………………………………………………………    67
3. Aircraft and ground vehicles coordinated by radio…………………………………    73
4. When radio communication was inadequate, pilots and ground agents might meet
     to confer on dirt roads or other improvised airstrips……………………………….    74
5. Two views of an autogiro……………………………………………………………   85
6. One of the Border Patrol's first helicopters, on the beach in Chula Vista Sector
    (now San Diego Sector) in its first year of operations………………………………   88
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CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
In March of 2021, as a new surge of migrants from Central America reached the 
border between Mexico and the United States, Republican legislators did what US 
officials of all parties have reliably done for 40 years: they traveled to the border, with 
reporters following, and took turns flying above it in helicopters.
House Representative Dan Crenshaw of Texas led the charge on March 6th, 
tweeting videos of himself soaring over stretches of border wall in a Texas Department of
Public Safety helicopter (Lee 2021). Other Texas lawmakers soon followed. “Reps. Jodey
Arrington and Brian Babin will lead more than a dozen Texas House lawmakers,” Fox 
News reported on March 17th (Shaw 2021). Their “land, sea and air trip” also included “a 
helicopter tour of the land border.” Nearly a month later, the frenzy of aerial tours had not
fully abated: House Representative Kevin Hern of Oklahoma released new footage from 
his own helicopter ride above the border on April 11th (Forbes Breaking News 2021). 
On one level, lawmakers riding in helicopters appears to be little more than simple
political theater. “There’s photo ops in boats and photo ops in helicopters,” one resident 
of McAllen, Texas told KENS-5 News. “But as we have seen in the last four years and 
probably even before that, it has not solved what they want to say is a crisis” (Bolton 
2021). In this view, the helicopters are little more than elaborate, expensive props for 
political grandstanding.
But flying above the border has a more complicated history all its own. The line 
on the ground has, for over a century, been enforced from the sky. Patrolling the border 
by aircraft has grown from an ad hoc and unsanctioned reaction to a novel, disruptive 
1
technology into a well-established component of an ever-expanding bordering regime. 
Whether they realized it or not, the legislators clambering aboard helicopters to peer 
down at the border this year were participating in a long tradition of technologically-
enabled governance from above that connects the ‘cowboy’ traditions and regional 
identity of the early Border Patrol, the global reach of the US military, and the corporate 
contractors who profit from the illiberal politics of enforcement at home and abroad.
In this thesis I examine the enrollment of powered aircraft—planes, helicopters, 
and drones—into the US border enforcement apparatus along the international boundary 
with Mexico, and their historical and contemporary functions within that context. This 
thesis addresses three primary research questions: First, how have the functions of 
aircraft in US-Mexico border enforcement evolved with time and technological 
succession? Second, how have public representations of the US-Mexico border 
influenced the incorporation of aircraft into bordering, and how have those aircraft, in 
turn, contributed to public representations of the border? And, third, in what ways does 
the use of aircraft in bordering reflect the larger political-economic circumstances 
shaping the evolution of the US border enforcement apparatus? None of these questions 
have been satisfactorily addressed by prior research. Although there have been some 
efforts to document the uses of aircraft along the border today and the history of their 
adoption, these have generally been narrow in scope: focused on a single category of 
aircraft, lacking important context, or both. Building on the work of Butler (2001), 
Williams (2007), and Simonsen (2018), who argue that technological change in general 
and powered flight in particular have deeply influenced how national territory is 
envisioned and effectuated, I draw from historical newspaper archives, the unofficial 
2
internal histories of Border Patrol aviators, and interviews with humanitarian aid workers 
in the US borderlands to offer a broader perspective on how aircraft can help us 
understand the making and re-making of the US border regime. Aircraft are a 
paradigmatic example of how technological developments that threaten the perceived 
integrity of political space are reclaimed by the state and repurposed for the reproduction 
of that space, providing a new premise and new legitimacy for the exercise of state 
capacities and circulation of corporate capital that might otherwise be idled.
To be sure, the US-Mexico border or the larger US bordering regime cannot be 
completely understood by concentrating on aircraft. The origins, evolution, and 
consequences of our border system are too complex to grasp through a single lens: as de 
León aptly puts it, “The system in place has too many moving parts traveling at 
sometimes blinding speed” (2015, p. 9). Still, there is value to critically examining the 
ways in which technological mobility in the vertical dimension has influenced the 
development of that system. Technology, Andreas writes, has often been seen as the 
‘silver bullet’ for the tensions that inhere in contemporary borders, which are expected to 
facilitate the frictionless movement of legally sanctioned capital and authorized persons 
while remaining impervious to illicit economic flows and unauthorized individuals  
(2009, p. 80; see also Sparke 2006, p. 154). Scrutinizing the technological solutions to 
border ‘problems’ provides greater insight into how those ‘problems’ are produced and 
reproduced through political action, media representation, and infrastructural buildup. Put
another way, studying the means of border enforcement can shed light on the ostensible 
motives behind it. “[T]he appearance of a new technology can trigger or reinforce a 
motive by making the desired end possible or acceptably inexpensive,” Headrick argues. 
3
“Conversely, a motive can occasion a search for appropriate means” (1981, p. 10). And 
while technological change may be seen as a solution, it can also be interpreted as a new 
threat, thus providing both the impetus and the means for escalating enforcement. Given 
the wide-reaching consequences of escalating enforcement for the US-Mexico border 
region (Andreas 2009), it is important to study the means by which enforcement is 
enacted—including aircraft.
To the best of my knowledge there has been no previous effort to critically survey 
the role of aircraft in US enforcement at the border with Mexico. Some recent academic 
work has concentrated on drones (e.g. Koslowski & Schulzke 2016, Shaw 2016, Chaar 
López 2018), but as Chandler points out, these studies tend to treat drones in isolation, 
without significant consideration of the greater context of aerial surveillance and 
enforcement (2020, p. 3). Activists in the border region have helped document the uses of
helicopters in contemporary enforcement (No More Deaths/Coalicion de Derechos 
Humanos 2016), and some former Border Patrol pilots have attempted to write the history
of aviation in their agency (Parker 1983, Broyles & Haynes 2010, Broyles et al. 2020). 
One of my major goals for this project was to synthesize and supplement these accounts 
and provide a more holistic perspective than is offered by any one of them alone. 
On a broader theoretical level, this work addresses the spatiality, materiality, and 
visibility of power at the edges of state space. Aircraft are one version of the 
technological translations required to transform political ideals into socio-spatial 
divisions. Each one of these translations—what Painter refers to as “networked socio-
technical practices” (2010, p. 1116)—is a potentially productive site for deepening our 
understanding of the ways in which the political goal of control over space is realized. 
4
The control of space and of human movement through it are enduring ambitions with 
consequences too broad to adequately survey here. To quote Netz, “Properties, prisons, 
borders: it is through the prevention of motion that space enters history” (2004, xi). 
Territory itself is a ‘political technology’ (Elden 2010b) built on the back of numerous 
other technologies, from the extraordinarily complex to the very simple. All are 
consequential. “The things we call ‘technologies’ are ways of building order in our 
world,” Winner writes. “The issues that divide or unite people in society are settled not 
only in the institutions and practices of politics proper, but also, and less obviously, in 
tangible arrangements of steel and concrete, wires and semiconductors, nuts and bolts” 
(1986, pp. 28-29). At the physical margins of the state, these ‘tangible arrangements’ are 
often the primary basis for assertions of sovereign power. 
And on a pragmatic level, this research matters because what happens along the 
US-Mexico border rarel—if ever—remains confined there. The US border enforcement 
regime has been a model for border apparatuses around the world, and the US is 
frequently an active partner in the proliferation of hardened borders (Miller 2019). 
Understanding how aerial enforcement has evolved in the US context provides a basis for
comparative study across border regimes and border spaces. Moreover, the Department of
Homeland Security is increasingly active in the ‘interior’ of the US: providing security at 
the Super Bowl (Miller 2014), beating and abducting Black Lives Matter protesters in 
Portland during the summer of 2020 (Kanno-Youngs 2020, Levinson et al. 2020), 
conducting secretive aerial surveillance operations over other cities and protests (Stanley 
& Morrow 2020), and more. Even more recently, a Customs and Border Protection 
helicopter flew low over an anti-pipeline protest in Minnesota, a deliberate and well-
5
documented tactic (see Ch. IV) to harass protesters with rotor wash and debris (Brown & 
Richards 2021). Considering the domestic and global ‘mission creep’ of the US border 
enforcement apparatus, it is worth revisiting the political justifications and material 
conditions that allowed that apparatus to take root in its original site. 
In Chapter II, I begin with a review of key geographic understandings of borders, 
territory, and US border enforcement. Following that, I detail my major sources for this 
research (and the constraints created by the COVID-19 pandemic), along with the 
interpretive frameworks and tools employed to make sense of those sources. Together 
these form the background of the project. Chapters III, IV, and V correspond to the three 
main types of aircraft employed historically and currently by border enforcement 
agencies: fixed-wing aircraft (airplanes), rotary-wing aircraft (helicopters), and remotely 
piloted aerial vehicles (drones).1 The order of these sections follows the order in which 
these technologies were adopted for border enforcement. Each chapter addresses at least 
two of my three primary research questions. In Chapter III, I analyze how the US 
responded to the challenge that powered flight posed to its territorial authority, and how 
‘aerial anxiety’ helped to justify the eventual adoption of airplanes as part of an 
increasingly complex technological assemblage for border enforcement. In Chapter IV, I 
focus on the reconfiguration of surplus state capacities that enabled the adoption of 
helicopters, arguing that those helicopters have been used to reinforce public 
representations that legitimize the violence of ‘illiberal governance’ in the borderlands. In
Chapter V, I discuss the historical role of the borderlands in the development of drones, 
skeptically reassess the material efficacy of drone surveillance today, and emphasize the 
1 On the exclusion of blimps from this list and this thesis, see p. 43. 
6
border-industrial complex’s growing role in sustaining the escalation of enforcement. I 
conclude by reviewing the major themes and continuities that emerged from these 
chapters, acknowledging the limitations of this project, and sketching out some potential 
directions for future research. I stress the importance of the underlying political-
geographical vision of the world that drives bordering: the tools of enforcement have 
changed substantially, but the ideological determinants of their deployment have been 
little altered since the first biplanes took flight above the border in San Diego and El Paso
in 1911. 
7
CHAPTER II
BACKGROUND
Literature Review
Academic literature on aerial border enforcement is quite limited. But much of the
necessary context for understanding this specific topic can be gleaned from the sprawling
literature on borders, territory, and enforcement more generally. This review is in no way 
a comprehensive survey of the full range of border studies. Kolossov and Scott note that 
“the field is much too broad and variegated for any single or totalizing attempt at 
documentation” (2013, p. 2), and this review is limited to English-language literature that
often has a regionally selective focus on North America and Europe (Kuus 2020, p. 
1189). Nonetheless, there are certain intellectual trends and specific contributions that are
particularly relevant to this project and merit discussion here.
Unfinished borders
One of the more substantial shifts in border studies of the past century was the 
move from regarding borders as static entities to understanding them as processes. 
Although the boundaries of all kinds of phenomena have always interested geographers, 
border studies as a distinct field of inquiry owes its origins to the emergence of the 
modern sovereign state system, which divided the world’s surface into discrete, non-
overlapping political-territorial units (Jones 2009, p. 181; see also Murphy 1996). Early 
20th-century work in the field of political geography largely accepted this premise of 
spatial fixity and emphasized the importance of eliminating ambiguity from borders. This
impulse complemented the larger political project of delimitation and demarcation (Jones 
2009, p. 181; Kolossov 2005, p. 608). Until approximately the mid-20th century 
8
geographers tended to treat borders as static or given entities, and concentrated their 
efforts on describing and categorizing idealized border ‘types’ (defined by characteristics 
like morphology, position, or age). Other research focused on the functions and impacts 
of these presumed-static borders at varying scales (Kolossov 2005, pp. 611-612). But in 
the latter half of the 20th century, the premise of fixity gradually began to yield under 
critical interrogation. A more complex understanding of borders emerged, in which 
borders came to be recognized as “never finished or fixed, even if they appear to be” 
(Jones 2009, p. 180). This approach focuses attention upon ongoing processes of 
‘bordering’—a term that reminds us, as Kolossov and Scott write, that “borders are not 
only semi-permanent institutions but are also non-finalizable processes” (2013, p. 3, 
emphasis mine). My work is rooted in this conception of ‘bordering’ as a prolonged and 
unfinished process. For years after its inception the US-Mexico border remained 
unmarked along much of its length, in part because its exact location upon the physical 
landscape was unclear (St John 2011, Ch. 1; see also Cantú, 2018, pp. 47-49). Even the 
segments defined by supposedly objective physical landmarks have proven surprisingly 
mobile and recalcitrant (Mueller 1975). Human and non-human actors alike regularly 
disregard the border’s spatial authority to cross from one side to the other. What material 
force the border possesses is sustained by continual effort, but border enforcement as a 
task contains in itself no true end—only the promise of continued action. Yet this non-
finalizable process is continually and vigorously pursued by state (and to a lesser degree, 
non-state2) actors. My particular concern in this work is with the relationship between 
that ongoing process of bordering and technological change. 
2 On the phenomenon of ‘civilian’ or ‘volunteer’ border patrolling in the United States, see Doty 2007.
9
Partly in reaction to popular notions of a ‘borderless’ or deterritorialized world, 
border studies flourished in the last decades of the 20th century (Jones 2009, p. 182). That 
flourishing has in some cases led to a diminished focused on the traditionally understood 
political borders that were once the anchor of the discipline. While many authors 
continue to study these political divisions of space, others have sought to broaden the 
concept of border or boundary studies far beyond that initial premise (e.g. Jones 2009; 
Mezzadra & Neilsen 2013). Expanding the notion of what constitutes a border has in turn
prompted questions like “Where is the border in border studies?” (Johnson et al. 2011, p. 
61)—a question not easily answered even by the authors who pose it.3 In comparison 
with these more radical approaches to borders, boundaries, and the study thereof, my 
approach here skews toward the traditional, focusing on a single political division 
between two states. Though I recognize the value of alternative understandings of 
borders, I believe the persistent political relevance of state borders in particular makes 
them important objects of continued study. State borders are reinforced by incredible 
ideological and institutional inertia. This does not negate their status as processes in 
motion, as explained above, but we must be aware that “not all processes are equally 
fluid or changeable,” as Murphy puts it, “because institutional arrangements promoting 
fixity develop in their wake” (2012, p. 167). These institutional arrangements may be 
tangible, intangible, or somewhere in between: a border wall, the US Border Patrol, 
everyday language of state-based identification, newspaper coverage of one ‘border 
crisis’ after another, a map on a classroom wall. All of these “mundane arrangements” 
normalize and naturalize the existence of political borders (Mitchell 1991, p. 94). The 
3 Hernandez argues that the flourishing of ‘border studies’ (and the popularity of border metaphors) has 
also led to the emergence of a “borderlands academic complex”: “politically safe and institutionally 
supported” work which elides the actual violence of the US-Mexico border (2018, p. 156).
10
territorial arrangements of the modern state system have largely “achieved an objectified 
and reified status” (Murphy 2012, p. 167), and the ideological principles of that system 
continue to be extraordinarily influential among policy-makers and other state actors 
(Murphy 2013; see also Kuus 2020). It is for this reason that I choose to scrutinize a state 
border in particular for this work.
Borders and territory
Thinking about borders also requires thinking about territory. As Paasi writes, 
“[B]orders can be theorized reasonably only as part of the wider production and 
reproduction of territoriality/territory, state power, and agency” (in Johnson et al. 2011, p.
62). But scholars writing about territory do not always address their work to those 
researching borders, and vice versa, and the respective literatures sometimes advance 
more in parallel than in cooperation. Investigations into the meaning, making, and 
manifestations of territory have followed a broadly similar trajectory as research on 
borders, moving from a relatively static view in which state territory was treated as 
preexisting and comprising society (critiqued most prominently by Agnew, 1994), to a 
process-oriented view in which the production of territory at all scales is understood as 
unfinished and non-finalizable. Painter, for instance, writes, “Territory is not the timeless 
and solid geographical foundation of state power it sometimes seems, but a porous, 
provisional, labour-intensive and ultimately perishable and non-material product of 
networked socio-technical practices” (2010, p. 1116). Borders are by no means the only 
locations at which state territoriality is reasserted and reproduced. Still, they are 
exemplary locations for the deployment of the “considerable inputs of labour, expertise, 
and other resources” (Painter 2010, p. 1105) necessary to effectuate territory. This 
11
process-based understanding of territory influences my decision to frame border 
enforcement as the reproduction of territorial extents and limits, a key component of 
territory more broadly. 
The ways in which we conceptualize those extents and limits—along with borders
themselves—are influenced by intellectual changes and corresponding technological 
developments. In multiple works, Elden (2010a, 2010b, 2013, etc) argues that legal 
conventions (particularly treaties) and techniques of calculation and geometry were 
critical prerequisites for establishing what we now generally recognize as the finite, 
bounded, and well-mapped version of territory. He contends that ‘territory’ is a 
historically and geographically specific politico-spatial ideal, characterized by an 
abstract, calculative understanding of space made possible by advancements in 
mathematics and measurement, and reified in legal documents referencing these allegedly
‘absolute’ indicators of location. In this regard his work builds on Lefebvre (1991 
[1974]), adding nuance to the general idea of abstract space that Lefebvre introduced to 
geography (see also Brenner & Elden 2009). Although Antonsich has criticized Elden’s 
work for potentially overstating the magnitude of difference between this modern 
conception of territory and older conceptions of politically bounded space (2010, p. 423), 
Elden’s core insights are still significant. Crucially, Elden demonstrates that a concept of 
political space based on new legal conventions and scientific techniques developed 
largely in parallel with the growth of nationalism as a political impetus, making 
calculative and geometric notions of territory particularly important for the emergence of 
the modern sovereign state system and its expansive claims upon space.
“For mountainous regions, for deserts or tundra, or particularly for the abstract 
12
divisions of unknown places in the colonized world, such techniques were crucial,” Elden
writes (2010a, p. 809). Though he does not specifically link this assertion to the US-
Mexico border, the connection between cartographic calculation and coloniality is an 
essential one for understanding that border, because its creation was undeniably a 
continuance of the entwined processes of settler colonialism and “continental 
imperialism” (Karuka 2019) that defined the European conquest of the North American 
continent. The territorial definition of Mexico and the US was and is a product of what 
Hernandez calls the “long-historical matrix of power” and “continuum of violence” 
(2018, pp. 21, 24) that began centuries before either country existed as a political entity. 
There is a clear link between territory and coloniality. “Colonial occupation,” Mbembé 
writes, “was a matter of seizing, delimiting, and asserting control over a physical 
geographical area—of writing on the ground a new set of social and spatial relations” 
(2003, p. 25, emphasis mine). The impulse of territorialization, of “circumscribing places 
with territorial lines” (Karuka 2019, p. 32) preceded the modern US-Mexico border by 
centuries. Consider, as one example, the Spanish attempt to regularize and solidify the 
northern frontier of New Spain in the late 1760s and early 1770s by planning a cordon of 
evenly spaced forts along an arc from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific which largely 
prefigured (in its position) the eventual border (Weber 2009, p. 160; see also Daniel 1968,
Faulk 1968). The boundary between the two states could not have been ultimately created
without the rejection and suppression of preexisting Indigenous modes of territoriality, 
particularly those which prioritized mobility over settlement (Barr 2011). From a long-
historical perspective, both the border and the states that propagated it are recent 
intrusions—again, supporting Elden’s claim that our concept of bordered territory is by 
13
no means a universal or transhistorical way of organizing the world.
In addition to critically interrogating the origins and premises of ‘territory,’ over 
the past two decades scholars have begun to challenge the planar logic implicit in most 
cartographic representation. Put more simply, we have remembered that the world is not 
flat. Braun (2000) provided an important early intervention in this regard, analyzing how 
the mapping of subsurface geology—depth—became an important foundation for the 
legitimacy of the Canadian state. But the more influential work on territory’s vertical 
dimension has largely emerged from studies of conflict in the Middle East. Weizman, 
writing about the spatial divisions of Israel and Palestine (2002, 2004), and Graham, 
writing about the US subjugation and occupation of the city of Baghdad in Iraq (2004, 
2011), have been among the strongest voices arguing that control of what appears in the 
flattened perspective of a map as two-dimensional space actually entails enormous 
contestation of height and depth. This idea of “vertical geopolitics” (Graham 2004) has 
been echoed and expanded upon by many others (e.g. Adey 2010, Elden 2013, Massé 
2018, Campbell 2019), and productively incorporated into broader discussions of state 
territoriality as a volumetric phenomenon (Billé 2020). Some recent work has, following 
somewhat in the spirit of Braun’s inquiry, plumbed the state’s attempts to control and 
make knowable subterranean space, “a territory that is conceptually and physically 
difficult to monitor” (Sorrensen 2014, p. 331). This work on depth should not be 
neglected: there are parallels between the state’s extension of authority downward and its 
attempts to govern height (Billé 2020, p. 2). However, this thesis is primarily concerned 
with the link between military and/or police presence in the air (Neocleous 2013) and 
bordering. Both control of the air and control from the air have been key goals of aerial 
14
border enforcement, as I will discuss in greater detail in Ch. III. 
It is important to distinguish between the concept of vertical geopolitics or 
volumetric territoriality and the phrase “the vertical border,” which some observers have 
used to describe the ways in which the US relies on authorities in Mexico and other 
Central American states to assist in the deterrence of migration (e.g. CSRPC 2016, Varela
Huerta 2018, Cuffe 2021).4 This usage makes sense only within a conventional 
cartographic perspective where north is ‘up’ and south is ‘down.’ Although evocative and 
potentially useful to readers who have internalized that particular geographic 
understanding of the world, this usage privileges a flattened conception of political space 
and obscures the separate issues and tensions produced by states’ exploitation of 
volumetric verticality—that is, height and depth—along territorial borders. “Airspace,” 
writes Weizman, “is a discrete dimension absent from political maps. But it is a space of 
utmost importance […] allowing a vantage point on the terrain under it, denying that 
position to others” (2002, n.p.). As will be discussed in greater detail in Chapter III, the 
control of airspace has essentially always been entwined with ambitions to control the 
movement of populations across territory (Neocleous 2013, Killingray 1984, Satia 2014, 
Williams 2007)—suggesting that these two forms of the “vertical border” are not entirely 
unrelated. But the growing use of “vertical border” to describe multilateral counter-
immigration regimes in adjacent countries is, in my opinion, a misnomer and an 
unintentional obfuscation of the more literal politics of verticality. 
One final aspect of territory deserves mention here: the non-human (or more-than-
human) environment. Although Usher (2019) argues that theorists of territory have 
4 The term has also been used in the European context: see Soriano-Miras, 2017.
15
largely abandoned or disregarded this factor, the same cannot be said of border 
researchers, who have explored the ways in which the environment has been claimed as a
silent agent of the state for border enforcement in the North American southwest (notably
de León 2015) as well as how the unruly terrain of the borderlands resists state 
governance (Sundberg 2011; Boyce 2016). The US-Mexico border crosses highly varied 
environments: some sectors abut dense urban areas like El Paso/Ciudad Juarez or San 
Ysidro/Tijuana; other sectors traverse arid and effectively unpopulated deserts. Where the
waters of the Rio Grande mark the boundary, border-crossers may risk drowning; in the 
Sonoran Desert, heat exhaustion or heatstroke are the most obvious dangers—but winter 
can also bring snow and freezing temperatures. The actual boundary line is inconsistently
marked and fortified, “unevenly inscribed in the landscape” (Jones & Johnson 2016, p. 
188). In many areas, but particularly in rugged terrain the position of US-built barriers 
does not actually correspond to the precise legal location of the border (Ryman et al. 
2017, Kapoor & Brocious 2020). While this thesis primarily concentrates on human 
agency in the borderlands, it would be a mistake to disregard the non-human or more-
than-human forms of agency that influence border politics. 
Unfortunately, many of these critical perspectives on territory and borders have 
not spread outside geography as widely as geographers might hope. For instance, Fall 
(2010) provides one disappointing example, critiquing an article by economists (Alesina 
et al. 2006) that received widespread popular media attention for lauding a supposed 
correlation between geometrically straight borders, ethnic homogeneity, and economic 
success. The “reification, naturalization, and fetishization” of neatly demarcated, 
geometrically uncomplicated political-territorial borders thrives on such naive work (Fall 
16
2010, p. 146). And academics are hardly the worst offenders in that regard. As previously
mentioned, Murphy (2013) shows that the normative power of the tripartite nation-state 
ideal (Agnew 1994), including a simplistic, zero-sum conception of territorial integrity, 
remains a significant driver of state policy-making and (in some cases) interstate conflict.
Jones and Johnson (2016) echo this assertion and apply it even more specifically to 
borders. They describe ongoing global border militarization as “part of a broader trend by
sovereign states, their agents, and their intermediaries that re-articulates sovereign 
authority at borders and within state territories” (p. 195). Scholarly insights into the 
nature of territory have—so far—had little appreciable impact on the way it is effectuated
and reproduced at state borders. This should not preclude us from continuing to scrutinize
borders and territory; it simply means we should not be surprised to find that the larger 
discourse around state space remains fixated on the static and ahistorical version of 
borders and territory that geographers have mostly forsworn.
The US-Mexico border context
I turn now from the broad topics of borders and territory to US-Mexico border 
studies more specifically. Though I have already highlighted some of the relevant work in
this particular field, I want to provide a more substantial overview of the notable 
contributions that have influenced this thesis. As with borders and territory generally, the 
scholarship on the US-Mexico border is far too broad to easily summarize. The US-
Mexico border region was in fact a foundational site for the larger field of border studies: 
the Association of Borderland Scholars was founded in 1976 to connect researchers 
studying that region, and this professional integration spurred the growth of comparative 
border studies in other locations and the eventual founding of the Journal of Borderlands 
17
Studies (Stoddard 1986). To narrow my focus, I concentrate here primarily on major 
works by scholars who have studied border enforcement in the US-Mexico context.5 
Precedents for the modern US border enforcement regime date back at least to the 
19th century, immediately following the confirmation of a new border in 1853.6 In 
contrast to the predominantly exclusionary tendency of today’s regime, 19th century 
border enforcement was largely intended to prevent specific, racially defined groups of 
people from leaving the US. In 1850s Texas, the Texas Rangers were mobilized to pursue
fugitive and free Black Americans attempting to reach Mexico, where slavery had already
been legally abolished (Audain 2014, Baumgartner 2020, Swanson 2020; see also Kelley 
2004, Lack 1985). Texans even employed the Rangers to illegally extradite fugitives from
Mexico back to the United States. During the 1870s and 1880s, in the areas that would 
become Arizona and New Mexico, the US military pursued Native Americans who had 
adapted to the border by using it as a tool of strategic retreat (Smith 1976, Thrapp 1967; 
see also White 1991). The governments of the US and Mexico negotiated early bilateral 
enforcement agreements that allowed for the free passage of troops into and out of each 
other’s territory when in pursuit of Native Americans (e.g. Davis 1882). Although these 
actions have not generally been framed as forms of border enforcement, I contend that 
they are key precedents. Unfortunately, the constraints of this project preclude further 
discussion of the historical geography of early border enforcement—though it is an 
important topic.
5 Although border enforcement often takes the form of immigration enforcement, it is important to 
remember that not all border enforcement is focused on immigration, and not all immigration 
enforcement occurs at borders. See p. 34 for more on this distinction.
6 While the majority of the contemporary border was established by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 
1848, a significant section was amended by the Gadsden Purchase in 1853. Additional but relatively 
minor modifications continued into the 20th century.
18
St John (2011) provides an excellent overview of the earliest period of what is 
more generally recognized as border enforcement. Her work begins with the creation and 
definition of the border following the conclusion of the US invasion of Mexico, and 
extends to the beginning of formal US federal regulation in the early 20th century. In 
addition to providing valuable insight into the prolonged process of marking the border 
on the ground, St John emphasizes the early influence of war abroad on the US approach 
to domestic border policing, a subject which I address (from a different perspective) in 
Ch. IV. Her historical survey provides essential context on the origins of the system in 
place today.
Similarly, Lytle-Hernandez (2010) chronicles the formation and evolution of the 
US Border Patrol in the early 20th century. Her work is an effective complement to St 
John’s, and though less directly oriented toward geographical questions, vital for 
comprehending the growth of the border enforcement apparatus. She narrates the 
agency’s history with critical attention to race, citizenship, and notions of belonging. 
Lytle-Hernandez acknowledges that border enforcement predates and exceeds the 
establishment of the official Border Patrol. Despite this, she takes essentially a single-
agency focus, which somewhat limits the scope of her work. As I have found in studying 
the adoption of aircraft, the task of patrolling the border was not always undertaken by 
the Border Patrol. (I discuss this further in the next section of this chapter). 
Whereas both of the preceding studies emphasize the first half of the 20th century, 
Dunn (1996) focuses on the period between 1976 and 1992. His work is among the most 
widely cited on the subject of border enforcement because he details the fiscal and 
material expansion of the US enforcement apparatus, framing that growth as a domestic 
19
application of the counterinsurgency doctrine that dominated US foreign policy in the 
same era. In this work, he uses the framework of ‘militarization,’ and frequently cites 
helicopters as one concrete example of that tendency (e.g. pp. 38, 43, 58, 66, etc). (He 
does not, however, provide a detailed explanation of how those helicopters were 
employed.) Dunn’s book is primarily based upon institutional sources, like congressional 
records of appropriations and debates. Consequently, it offers substantial insight into the 
bureaucratic and ideological dimensions of escalating enforcement, though somewhat 
less insight into the enactment of that escalation in place and its consequences for 
individuals and communities in the borderlands. Despite its acknowledged limitations, 
this book remains a touchstone in the field of US border enforcement studies.
The framework of ‘militarization’ has been criticized for implicitly maintaining an
intellectually unsupportable distinction between military and police actions. Neocleous 
(2013), using air power as a lens, argues that the spatial and ideological divide between 
those categories has always been blurrier than we would now care to admit. Jones and 
Johnson similarly argue that state borders are paradigmatic sites for the collapsing of the 
distinction between foreign and domestic policy or war and policing (2016, pp. 189-192; 
see also Heyman & Campbell 2012). ‘Border militarization’ is a misleading term, 
because military actions have often been intended to create, maintain, or redraw borders, 
and borders and borderlands have often served as testing grounds for some of the very 
technologies that are later construed as evidence of ‘militarization,’ such as drones (Chaar
López 2018). In Ch. IV of this thesis I reconsider ‘militarization’ and suggest that we can 
more productively understand the phenomenon as a reallocation of idled state capacities
—a notion I borrow from Gilmore’s examination of prisons as a geographical solution to 
20
a political problem (2007), and which I connect to Corva’s expansive idea of “illiberal 
governance” (2008). 
Dunn himself abandoned ‘militarization’ as a defining lens for his second book on
the border (2009), in which he scrutinizes the origins of one of the most defining shifts in 
US border enforcement: the implementation of “prevention through deterrence,” the 
strategy of hardening urban crossing areas to deflect migrants into remote and largely 
unpopulated areas (primarily southern Arizona and southern Texas; see Slack et al. 2016) 
where reaching safety can requires days of trekking across hot and unforgiving terrain. 
This policy demands analysis through a geographic lens, because its most consequential 
effect was to relocate the primary corridors of northward migration, in what has been 
described as ‘squeezing a balloon’ (Madsen 2007) or a ‘funnel effect’ (Rubio-Goldsmith 
et al. 2006), and can generally be seen as a spatial displacement of a political problem. 
Studying this policy requires attention to both its spatial impacts and its particular 
geographic origins: Dunn emphasizes the local context that spawned Operation Blockade 
in El Paso in 1993 (swiftly rechristened Operation Hold-the-Line for public relations 
purposes). Although that operation became the prototype for the new border-wide 
strategy (formalized initially in Meissner 1994), it was itself a product of local disputes 
about the visibility and intrusiveness of apprehension efforts. 
This is a crucial reminder that although we may speak of ‘the border,’ it is in some
ways illogical to regard it as a unified thing. The US-Mexico border divides six Mexican 
states (Baja California, Sonora, Chihuahua, Coahuila, Nuevo Leon, and Tamaulipas) from
four US states (California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas) as well as the Tohono 
O’Odham Indian Reservation. Though ostensibly governed by a unified federal policy, 
21
border enforcement varies significantly along the length of the line because of these 
political and geographical variations—some regions are intensely policed and subject to 
escalating violence, while others experience comparatively benign modes of enforcement
(Slack et al. 2016). Land ownership adds another wrinkle: much of the border in Arizona 
crosses federally owned land, for instance, whereas in Texas private properties abut the 
borderline. And, as just mentioned, a 70-mile stretch of border crosses the Tohono 
O’odham Indian Reservation, where the Tohono O’odham Nation possesses legal 
sovereignty.7 Dunn (2009) focuses on just one of these local political contexts; Nevins 
(2010) and Hernandez (2018) are among the many scholars who have explored others. 
With the case of Operation Blockade, the transformation of a local initiative into federal 
policy marked the beginning of the most intense escalation of legal enforcement in the 
border’s history. 
The effects of escalating enforcement since the mid 1990s have been documented 
by many authors, including in popular nonfiction (e.g. Urrea 2004). On the academic 
side, Nevins (2010) shows how discourses of crime and illegality were mobilized to 
legitimate the new enforcement strategy of the 1990s. He connects the dramatic 
transformations in the day-to-day operations of the Border Patrol to the deeper history of 
the border as a marker of personal and collective identity, consistent with Lytle-
Hernandez’s work (2010). Andreas (2009) considers the economic impacts of increased 
border enforcement, demonstrating that continued border hardening has reinforced, rather
than curtailed, flows of illicit drugs and unauthorized migrants across the border. His 
work certainly reinforces the contention that border enforcement is a non-finalizable 
7 Haney (2016) argues that this sovereignty extends upward to include airspace. That subject has been 
further analyzed by Knight (2019). However, I have not yet encountered any scholarship on the 
intersection between indigenous airspace sovereignty and US border aviation. 
22
process, because his analysis concludes that escalation inevitably reproduces its own 
justifications. It feeds accumulation by exploitation, and sustains rather than suppresses 
the illicit economies that owe their origins to the border itself. Heyman (2010) examines 
the impact of enforcement on the construction and consciousness of class relations, 
concluding that the geography and practices of state enforcement also sustain major 
social inequalities.8 
But the most vivid account of the concrete, personal impacts of “prevention 
through deterrence comes from de León, who argues persuasively that the US 
enforcement strategy is a deliberate attempt to enroll the natural environment into the 
project of border enforcement as a lethal weapon against migrants (2015). The policy of 
“prevention through deterrence” outsources violence to the deserts of the southwest, de 
León contends, allowing enforcement agencies to force migrants into danger while 
posing as humanitarian guardians. This is the most significant theoretical contribution of 
his book and it builds upon the notion of ‘necropolitics’ first introduced by Mbembe 
(2003) as an expansion of Foucault’s ‘biopolitics.’  De León’s analysis of this institutional
violence is crucial to understanding the specific border regime of the US, and is also 
applicable to other scenarios where dangerous environmental conditions are used as 
scapegoats for deliberate policy decisions—especially the European Union’s enforcement
and deterrence efforts in the Mediterranean Sea (Lo Presti 2019). As Cantú writes, 
paraphrasing de León, “Violence does not grow organically in our deserts or at our 
borders. It has arrived there through policy” (2018, p. 258).
Prevention through deterrence is premised on the deliberate enrollment of 
8 Vitale, though only considering the border briefly, argues the same point: “US border enforcement has 
been primarily about the production of whiteness and economic inequality,” he writes (2017, p. 139).
23
geography as a weapon and the simultaneous denial of institutional agency in the 
resulting outcomes for individuals. From this stance, the natural environment is framed as
uncontrollable. But, as Mendoza (2018) describes, attempts to bring portions of that 
environment under greater control have also provided cover for exclusionary intentions. 
“[A]rguments for environmental control have consistently worked to the detriment of 
human migrants, hardened racial divisions, and reinforced social hierarchies,” she writes 
(p. 119). An “immigrant versus nature narrative”—separate from the one that underpins 
the policy of prevention through deterrence—has often been parlayed into anti-immigrant
rhetoric on the premise of environmental protection (p. 122). In some areas, like Organ 
Pipe Cactus National Monument, federal land managers work actively in cooperation 
with CBP: “[T]he Border Patrol can describe the [National] Park Service as a willing 
partner in its drug interdiction and immigration control efforts, and the Park Service can 
describe the Border Patrol as an ally in conservation” (Warren 2017, p. 866). As both 
Mendoza and Warren note, the alliance between border enforcement agencies and land 
conservation advocates is not without historical precedent: the mid-20th century US 
environmental movement traded in fears of overpopulation and mass human movement, 
providing environmentalist justifications for immigration restrictions (Mendoza 2018, p. 
122, Warren 2017, p. 866). The continuing influence of the “immigrant versus nature” 
logic is evident in the April 2021 lawsuit filed by Arizona Attorney General Mark 
Brnovich against the federal government, in which he argued that President Joe Biden 
could not stop constructing a border wall without first accounting for the environmental 
impacts that would be caused by increased migration (Brnovich 2021). Migrants are thus 
simultaneously blamed for becoming victims of the unmanageable environment, if they 
24
die while crossing, and for degrading the managed environment, if they arrive safely. 
Analysis through the lens of more-than-human geographies has helped 
demonstrate “how nonhuman actors […] are constitutive of boundary making” (Sundberg
2011, emphasis in original), and how the state has tapped the landscape to help 
implement enforcement. Yet as Sundberg acknowledges and Boyce (2016) reminds us, 
just as often as the state has attempted to turn geography to its own purposes, the more-
than-human elements of the borderlands have resisted control. “[M]any of the 
environmental conditions intended to present an obstacle to unauthorized crossing 
generated considerable difficulties for the United States’ own operations and personnel,” 
Boyce writes (p. 249). Part of the failure of the technologically advanced ‘SBInet’ 
developed and deployed by Boeing in the 2000s “was a reading of national territory as 
two-dimensional (2D) and easily susceptible to visual penetration” (p. 252). This failure 
to comprehend the reality of borderlands environments was one of the major factors 
leading to the project’s demise in early 2011. Other attempts to technologically command
the borderscape have been similarly unsuccessful (Chaar López 2018, pp. 120-121). 
However, these failures often provide the impetus for new rounds of capital investment, 
technological development, and securitization (Boyce 2016, p. 258)—another 
demonstration of the non-finalizable quality of border enforcement. Boyce briefly 
discusses how unmanned aerial vehicles have been viewed as one solution to this 
problem of inhospitable terrain (pp. 255-256); in this thesis I will demonstrate that the 
ambition to defy uncooperative geography and command terrain from above extends 
much farther back in the history of US border enforcement. 
Tools of geographic research and inquiry have proven particularly important in 
25
documenting the consequences of escalating enforcement and a weaponized environment.
The best-known effort is the recovered remains map maintained by the humanitarian 
organization Humane Borders and the Pima County Medical Examiner’s Office, officially
titled the Arizona OpenGIS Initiative for Deceased Migrants. The map continues to be 
updated with points marking the location of every known recovered migrant body or set 
of remains in the state since 1981. The accompanying database allows for sorting of cases
by date of recovery, estimated date of death, and cause of death, among other attributes. 
GIS has enabled documentation and communication of the effects of border policy in 
ways not previously possible. At the same time, the proliferation of GPS technology 
allowed humanitarian aid organizations to more effectively provision known crossing 
routes with water drops, food, and other emergency supplies. (As B.—a longtime 
humanitarian aid activist from the Tucson, AZ area, and one of my interviewees for this 
project—explained to me, locating migrant trails on the basis of landmarks and visual 
observations was limiting: “Because there was no consistency, the efficiency and the 
effectiveness just wasn't there. […] Once you actually had a waypoint and a GPS, to 
know, ‘OK, I'm standing in the exact same spot this person was last week or a month ago’
[…] it just changed things dramatically” [Personal communication, October 29, 2020].) 
Geographers have also begun using more sophisticated techniques to analyze the 
movement of migrants and the impacts of enforcement. Chambers et al. (2019) use a 
combination of terrain data (slope and exposure), surveillance tower locations, and agent-
based modeling to estimate the increased caloric expenditures required for migrants to 
avoid camera or sensor detection in highly-trafficked crossing zones. They argue that 
CBP’s persistent surveillance of less-arduous routes amplifies the lethal effects of 
26
prevention through deterrence, driving migrants onto the most physiologically taxing 
routes through already-dangerous areas. Although such modeling is not infallible, it 
offers a new way to scrutinize the geography of enforcement. 
Of course, we must remain aware that the tools geographers use for critical 
analyses of bordering are also available to the agencies of enforcement. The US 
Department of Homeland Security maintains its own Geospatial Management Office and 
Geospatial Information Infrastructure. CBP regularly makes use of GPS, GIS, and other 
geospatial tools to support its work (“Enhancing Situational Awareness…,” 2015). Thus, 
while tools of geography have proven to be effective in analyzing and politically 
challenging the escalation of border enforcement, they are also integral components of 
that very escalation. Palmer and Rundstrom argue that “historically consistent structural 
patterns of policy and behavior within a given institution” are frequently the most 
significant determinants of how novel geospatial tools are put to use (2013, p. 1154). 
“Rather than revolutionizing institutions and setting them on new trajectories into 
uncharted territory, technological change can often occur in a manner remarkably 
consistent with institutional history,” they observe (ibid). Although this conclusion may 
seem obvious, it is a necessary reminder. While geographers may use these technologies 
for more incisive critiques of bordering institutions, those institutions are using many of 
the same technologies to target and intensify their enforcement activities. 
Intensification has been one of the most important trends in border enforcement 
for decades. The other trend that deserves attention is expansion. The US-Mexico border, 
Andreas observes, is “both more blurred and more sharply demarcated than ever before” 
(2009, p. 141). At the same time that the border has been physically reinforced on the 
27
ground, it has become only one component in an increasingly extensive bordering regime
that connects both adjacent and discontinuous territories around the world (Miller 2019). 
The simultaneous intensification and expansion of border enforcement may appear 
almost paradoxical. Ehrkamp summarizes this incongruity well: “[B]orders are 
meaningful and fixed (and frequently deadly) when migrants attempt to traverse them 
[…], but the same borders are infinitely malleable when states create new, transnational 
spaces of enforcement aimed at curtailing migrants’ ability to reach their anticipated 
destinations” (2020, p. 1207). As previously mentioned, some observers have used the 
misnomer “vertical border” to describe the phenomenon of powerful states like the US 
enlisting neighboring countries to act as the ‘front lines’ of border enforcement. Both 
intensification and expansion reflect the fundamental incompleteness and unachievability
of the border. Border hardening in place and the creation of new, transnational legal 
geographies of deterrence might be interpreted as evidence of the waning power of state 
territoriality (Brown 2010). But I contend that they more reflect what Murphy (2013) 
terms the “continuing allure” of territory—the enduring normative appeal of bounded 
political spaces, which motivates state actors to defend an imagined territorial sanctity 
even when the costs of doing so begin to appear irrational and unjustifiable. 
Borders and technologies of powered flight
The literature on the connection between aircraft and bordering is not nearly as 
extensive as the broader field I have been surveying thus far. Butler (2001) coined the 
term “technogeopolitics” to describe his investigation of international competition for 
control of commercial air trade routes in the early 20th century. He argues that despite the 
general lack of attention given to technology’s role in geopolitics, technological change 
28
significantly influences the course and conduct of international affairs and must be seen 
as a relevant factor in competition for territory, resources, and legitimacy. Aircraft are, to 
Butler, just one particularly salient example. Williams (2007) builds on Butler’s 
foundation to consider “vertical technogeopolitics” (p. 509, emphasis mine) and explores 
the uses of military air power to create and secure the borders of Iraq through successive 
Western interventions. Williams notes that these interventions often deny Iraq its own, 
independent, aerial sovereignty, and Satia (2014) further connects the contemporary use 
of air power there to the longer history of colonialism in Iraq, arguing that a British 
perception of the country’s terrain as vast and inscrutable underwrote the ideological and 
pragmatic legitimacy of ‘governing from the air’ in then-colonial territory. In this regard 
her work connects closely with that of Killingray (1984), who identified early a link 
between technologies of powered flight and colonial governance. Those ideas have been 
productively expanded by Neocleous (2013), who (as previously mentioned) contends 
that colonial uses of air power reveal the falsity of the police-military distinction. 
Neocleous’ work, however, is not as closely attentive to bordering specifically. In 
contrast, Simonsen (2018) returns more closely to the model set by Butler (2001) and 
focuses on questions of territory and territoriality ‘at home.’ Her study examines how the 
incorrigible mobility of aircraft in the early 20th century affected perceptions of territory 
and borders in Great Britain, and particularly how the nation’s self-image as a guarded 
island was troubled by the sudden appearance of planes that had little regard for either 
borders or the state’s naval power. 
It is worth noting that the studies I have mentioned so far have largely focused 
either on the very early period of aviation when the technology was a novelty or on recent
29
‘foreign’ conflicts like the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The domestic significance of
aircraft and aerial policing (Neocleous’ argument notwithstanding) appear to have 
received less attention from geographers, and ‘air power’ still generally carries the 
military connotation of bombing, strafing, or other attacks against ground targets, rather 
than encompassing the psychological and political power offered by surveillance from 
above. The uses of aircraft to secure borders outside of war zones have not drawn 
considerable academic scrutiny.
Some researchers outside of academia have helped to fill in the picture. Most 
notably, Part I of The Disappeared Report (2016), a collaborative project by the 
organizations No More Deaths/No Mas Muertes and La Coalicion de Derechos Humanos 
to record Border Patrol abuses, describes the helicopter intimidation tactic known as 
‘chase and scatter.’ This tactic and its context will be discussed at greater length in 
Chapter IV. For now, I mention it only to note that this report did not appear in an 
academic journal. The sincere effort of numerous dedicated border scholars not 
withstanding, the material realities of border enforcement are not always well-represented
in academic literature.
Drones have drawn more scholarly attention in recent years. But the shadow of 
the US military’s lethal drone strike operations looms large over existing scholarship, and
literature concentrating primarily on the military uses of drones abroad (e.g. Adey et al. 
2011, Dunn 2013, Gregory 2011a, Gregory 2011b, Shaw 2016, Wall & Monahan 2011) is
not of great help in understanding the functions of unarmed surveillance drones operating
within a state’s own territory. Some insights are applicable only in modified form—for 
instance, Gregory’s concept of the geographically-distributed “kill chain” (2011b, p. 196)
30
is not directly transferable to CBP’s unarmed drones, but the general concept of a 
“dispersed and distributed apparatus” (ibid) operating behind and through any single 
drone is useful. Much of what has been written about drones in border enforcement (e.g. 
Jones & Johnson 2016, Marin 2016, Shokh 2016, Pedrozo 2017, Koslowski & Schulzke 
2018) tends to treat them as a wholly novel technology without considering longer 
histories of border aviation. The most thorough account to date is Chaar López’s 
dissertation, which considers drones as both “technologies of rule” and “media 
infrastructures” (2018, p. 6)—but not as the product of a century-long process of 
technogeopolitical evolution. Chandler writes that drones are often presented to the 
public “as a novelty, distinct from the numerous iterations that presage contemporary 
unmanned aircraft” (2020, p. 3). Although Chaar López’s work does not completely 
replicate that pattern, it and most of the other extant literature on drones in bordering 
would benefit from deeper connection to literature on other uses of aircraft for 
surveillance, coercion, and control. In this thesis, I hope to help establish some of the 
deeper context for the use of drones along the border, in order to clarify what is truly 
novel about their use and what is a continuation of earlier aerial bordering practices.  
The goal of distinguishing continuity from change extends across my research 
questions. As I argued above, analysis of the role of aircraft in bordering has not 
effectively connected the different technological platforms that have served as the basis 
for aerial enforcement. Nor have such analyses effectively incorporated first-hand 
recollections that offer granular insight into the most recent impacts of aerial enforcement
practices. Although aircraft have occasionally been treated as prima facie evidence of a 
changing bordering regime (e.g. Dunn 1996, mentioned above), there remains more that 
31
we can learn through critical reflection on their material and ideological significance. By 
attending to what has and has not changed in aerial bordering practices, we can cut 
through some of the ‘noise’ that surrounds border enforcement policy today and refocus 
on the political-geographical motivations that have driven technological succession. 
While the techniques, practices, and technologies developed for use in domestic 
bordering are exported around the world (Miller 2019), the border with Mexico retains its
hold on the US political imagination (Massey 2016). It has been mythologized and 
fetishized since it was established (Grandin 2019, Dunn 2009), and it remains a 
paradigmatic site for studying state attempts to control individual mobility through space.
That goal, for over a century, has motivated attempts to enforce the border from the air 
using technologies of powered flight. 
Methods
This thesis was planned, researched, and written during the COVID-19 pandemic 
while I was residing in Eugene, Oregon. The pandemic complicated the task of writing 
about the border. During the spring of 2020 the University of Oregon suspended all 
university-sponsored travel without a clear timeline for resumption. In addition to this 
official temporary prohibition, the personal and public health risks of traveling between 
Oregon and border communities made in-person fieldwork during the summer of 2020 
inadvisable. Thus, some of the methods traditionally employed by geographers in this 
field, such as participant observation and face-to-face interviewing, were not feasible 
within the constrained timeline of master’s-level research. 
As previously mentioned, this thesis addresses three primary research questions: 
First, how have the functions of aircraft in US-Mexico border enforcement evolved with 
32
time and technological succession? Second, how have public representations of the US-
Mexico border influenced the incorporation of aircraft into bordering, and how have 
those aircraft, in turn, contributed to public representations of the border? And, third, in 
what ways does the use of aircraft in bordering reflect and reveal the larger political-
economic circumstances shaping the evolution of the US border enforcement apparatus? 
These questions are linked by my interest in the interplay between the material and 
discursive production (and reproduction) of territorial division.
My thesis focuses on the general task of ‘border enforcement’ rather than on the 
Border Patrol because that task—which I define as attempting to control the movement of
persons and things across the boundary between the US and Mexico through the exercise 
of legal and/or coercive force—has never been the exclusive task of that agency. The 
Border Patrol is certainly the most well-known, but through the border’s history it has 
been enforced variously by the US Army, federal customs inspectors (or “river guards,” 
along the Rio Grande), and the Mounted Chinese Inspectors who patrolled on horseback 
looking for Chinese immigrants crossing from Mexico following the passage of the 
Chinese Exclusion Act (Lytle-Hernandez, 2010). Additionally, the Border Patrol itself has
at different times been under the charge of the Bureau of Immigration, the Immigration 
and Naturalization Service, the Department of Labor, the Department of Justice, and the 
Department of Homeland Security (U.S. Customs and Border Protection, “Timeline”). 
The first deployment of aircraft to the border preceded the establishment of a designated 
Border Patrol (see Ch. III), and since that time flight operations along the land border 
have been variously conducted by the Army Border Air Patrol, the Customs Patrol 
Service, the Coast Guard (then an arm of the Department of the Treasury), the Border 
33
Patrol, the National Guard, and the Air and Marine Operations branch (formerly Office of
Air and Marine) of Customs and Border Protection. This is to say nothing of the private 
corporations that now fulfill an increasing proportion of border enforcement activities 
(Miller 2014, 2019; see also Rumford, pp. 67-68 in Johnson et al. 2011). Emphasizing the
shared purpose of these various actors and agencies helps to cut through this institutional 
convolution and see continuities that extend beyond the ‘official’ period when Border 
Patrol pilots flew Border Patrol planes. 
I also use ‘border enforcement’ rather than ‘immigration enforcement’ because, 
although there is obviously substantial overlap between the two, not all efforts to give the
border material force in the world have been directed at or premised upon immigration. 
Generally, I conceptualize border enforcement as the governance of mobility, which 
includes the mobility of non-human things.9 Significant resources have historically been 
devoted to preventing unauthorized goods or materials from moving across the border. 
Alcohol and drugs are two of the most obvious examples, and as this thesis will 
demonstrate, both served as justifications for the enrollment of technologies of powered 
flight into the border enforcement apparatus of the US. Controlling the movement of 
animals, plants, and diseases have also been motives for the creation of border 
enforcement infrastructure (Mendoza 2018), but these were not, so far as I have found, 
significant drivers of aerial enforcement specifically. 
In this research I employed three remotely accessible sources of primarily 
qualitative data: historical newspaper archives, the internal histories of Border Patrol 
pilots, and a limited number of interviews with active members of borderlands 
9 Immigration enforcement also involves the governance of mobility, but farther away from the border 
more often takes the form of the policing of status, involving different mechanisms and practices.
34
humanitarian aid groups. Other minor supplementary sources include miscellaneous US 
federal government documents, historical monographs (Hinkle 1967, 1970) documents 
and photographs from the collection of the National Border Patrol Museum (a 
nongovernmental organization) in El Paso, Texas, and personal communications with 
former members of the US Air Force 553rd Reconnaissance Wing. U.S. Customs and 
Border Protection officials did not respond to my inquiry, but my work was intentionally 
not dependent on their participation. Although all of these sources provided important 
insights into the role of aviation in border enforcement, there are also some significant 
disadvantages to this all-remote approach, which I will discuss later in this section.
My choice to focus on newspaper archives was informed by Anderson’s account 
of the role of print-capitalism, and the newspaper in particular, in solidifying national 
imaginaries. Newspapers “provided the technical means for ‘re-presenting’ the kind of 
imagined community that is the nation,” Anderson writes (1991, p. 25). Their reach and 
presumed simultaneity help to convince individuals that the nation is a meaningful entity. 
We can logically extend this argument to the nation’s territorial manifestation: the nation-
state and its borders. Myers et al. make an explicit connection between the national 
political discourses of mass media and geographical understandings, noting that 
newspapers tend to reduce complicated geographical realities to what O’Tuathail and 
Agnew call “controllable geopolitical abstractions” (quoted in Myers et al. 1996, p. 23). 
Thus we encounter “near-identical commonsense geographic representations in the pages 
of ostensibly competing newspapers” (Dittmer 2010, p. 283). The US-Mexico border is 
one of those “commonsense geographic representations” or “geopolitical abstractions” 
which is normalized and thus reinforced by newspaper coverage treating it as given fact. 
35
Dunn (2009, pp. 111, 121) and Andreas (2009, pp. 8-9) have previously noted the 
powerful connection between media representations and public understandings of the 
border and border enforcement, while Gilmore (2007, Ch. 3) has described more 
generally how political ‘problems’—like the supposed problem of border enforcement—
are constructed with the unwitting or intentional cooperation of the media. 
“[I]n order to make critical use of newspapers as sources of information,” Cloke et
al. note, we must acknowledge that “language in the news is used to suggest ideas and 
beliefs as well as ‘facts’” (2004, p. 71). I regard these articles as particular and partial 
representations of events and conditions which influence popular geographic 
understandings. At the same time, they can contain factual information that is of use in 
reconstructing the fragmented record of border enforcement operations. The reporting 
analyzed here is thus valuable both for the information it intended to convey and for what
it reveals about the narratives offered by border enforcement authorities or agencies. 
The two largest databases of newspaper articles I used were the historical archive 
of the Los Angeles Times (1886-1922; 1923-1995) and the historical archive of The New 
York Times (1857-1922; 1923-present). Both are particularly amenable to efficient 
research because they include scans of individual articles searchable by key words or 
phrases. In addition, they contain most original illustrations and photographs, some of 
which proved to be particularly helpful (e.g. Henry 1919, Arnold 1938). Although neither
newspaper was published by a community immediately adjacent to the border, and thus 
likely do not capture the day-to-day minutiae of borderlands life, as newspapers with 
national circulation they can help us understand how the border was represented to and 
potentially perceived by the nation at large (see Schudson 1990, pp. 428-431).
36
I also searched two databases that group transcriptions of articles from numerous 
sources: Gale OneFile News and LexisNexis University. These transcriptions do not 
include the original accompanying images, which makes them less rich in interpretive 
possibility. They also do not extend as far back in time—just to the 1980s. However, they
include reporting from papers based closer to the border, as well as wire reports, US 
Congress press releases, and CBP press releases. All together, these archives provided 
some local perspective as well as examples of how events at the border are reframed for 
audiences far from it.
I queried all of these databases using combination keyword searches (e.g. “border 
patrol” AND “plane/helicopter/drone”). Many results were not relevant to this project. 
News coverage of World War II combat operations in Europe often included the 
individual words ‘border,’ ‘patrol,’ and ‘plane,’ for instance. Reviewing thousands of 
potential matches, I ultimately selected approximately 350 articles for closer analysis. 
These ranged in length from single-paragraph reports to lengthy multi-page features, and 
in date from 1911 to 2019. Some directly addressed the use of aircraft on the border; in 
others the topic appeared only incidentally. These archives proved to be particularly 
useful for understanding the origins of aerial enforcement in the pre-World War II period,
which are not extensively documented on CBP’s website or in the internal histories 
produced by Border Patrol pilots (to be discussed below). 
I used the qualitative data analysis software MAXQDA 2020 to sort, code, and 
annotate these articles. ‘Coding,’ in the analysis of qualitative data, refers not to computer
programming (a more popular usage) but to “a procedure for organizing the text [...] and 
discovering patterns within that organizational structure” (Auerbach & Silverstein 2003, 
37
p. 31). Coding is based on the ‘grounded theory’ tradition in sociology, and the process 
involves identifying repeating ideas in a set of texts or other materials which can then be 
thematically grouped to support more abstract theoretical assertions (Watson & Till 2010,
p. 128; see also Herbert 2010, p. 73). The use of a program like MAXQDA is, as Dittmer 
(2010) notes, not strictly necessary, but allows for rapid collation of thematically related 
excerpts from across hundreds of individual documents. 
This approach could productively be extended to additional archives, given more 
time and fewer restrictions on travel. Newspaper archives that are less comprehensively 
digitized but more spatially proximate to the border might well offer additional insights 
or complications to the materials surveyed here. 
My second major source for this research was a recent self-published internal 
history of Border Patrol aviation, Flying for the Border Patrol: 1940-2005 (Broyles et al. 
2020). This is the most substantial record of aerial border enforcement in the US to date 
and was, coincidentally, self-published by the author/editors the same year I began 
working on my research. (I only learned of the book midway through my research.) I 
characterize it as an internal history because five of the six editors and virtually all of the 
interviewees whose oral histories comprise the bulk of the work are former agents of the 
Border Patrol.10 The final editor (Broyles) is an Arizona-based writer, journalist, and 
researcher who conducted many of the interviews for the book. This work spans more 
than 700 pages in two volumes, and provides rich detail about the Border Patrol’s aerial 
enforcement activities through the recollections of pilots, mechanics, agents, and 
administrators. It is a follow-up to two previous works in the same vein: Prop Cops 
10 Although this usage of ‘internal history’ varies slightly from that elaborated by Nanay (2017), I believe 
it is applicable in this context. 
38
(Parker 1983) and Desert Duty (Broyles & Haynes, 2010).11 (The editors describe it as “a 
companion book.”) All three emphasize the perspectives of institutional insiders and 
provide little context—social, political, economic, or otherwise—for the stories of the 
interviewees. Although some brief historical background is included, it is hardly more 
than perfunctory. The focus is almost entirely on the individual experiences of pilots with 
minimal reflection on the larger systems at work. 
That does not mean that the book is entirely apolitical. For the most part, the 
interviewees rarely discuss border policy. When it is mentioned, it is generally alluded to 
only as something that altered their day-to-day routine, e.g. in the form of budget cuts. 
But that may be an editorial choice: the interviews were “recorded, transcribed, and then 
edited” (Broyles et al. 2020, p. 707), and the extent of that editing is unknown. At most 
we can attempt to infer the editors’ attitudes. I will note here a handful of passages across 
Flying for the Border Patrol and its ‘companion’ works that seem relevant to that end.
Parker’s Prop Cops, the original model for the more recent work, ends with an 
abrupt turn into the author’s political opinions. Claiming that a supposed “loss of control”
at the border (a narrative thoroughly critiqued by Andreas [2009]) is the fault of “foreign 
governments,” “minority groups,” and “misguided ‘humanitarians’” with “bleeding heart 
theories,” Parker implies that unauthorized migrants are responsible for unemployment in
the United States and warns that they might also be undercover Soviet revolutionaries 
(1983, “Afterthoughts” & “As of 1983”).  Desert Duty moves away from Parker’s 
unsupportable assertions, noting that US immigration laws “have at times been 
nonexistent, at other times defied logic, and at other times been outright racist or 
11 Hinkle’s monographs (1967, 1970) might also plausibly be included in this category.
39
unenforceable” (Broyles & Haynes 2010, p. 4), but also argues that agents could 
“effectively control the border […] if America’s lawmakers and voters sustain the support
to let them” (p. 10), a sentiment which echoes the ‘loss of control’ narrative clearly 
present in Parker. Flying for the Border Patrol does not reprint Parker’s sensationalist 
anti-immigrant screed, but it does conclude with a poem in which one of the book’s 
primary authors “ponder[s] the stupidity of the evolutionists […] who don’t believe that 
our God was the creator of the universe” and then describes Ciudad Juarez as a slum 
distinguished by “the absence of God” (p. 701). In highlighting these excerpts I do not 
intend to discredit the compilers of these books, who have put significant effort into 
documenting agents’ activities and produced a substantial record of an under-
acknowledged component of border enforcement. But I believe these passages 
demonstrate that these books are selective records compiled by individuals who 
personally identify with border enforcement as a politically and morally righteous task, 
and it is important to keep that context in mind when studying them.
Unlike the newspaper archives, most of the initial analysis of these volumes was 
done not with MAXQDA but with Post-it notes and a pencil. The volumes lack an index, 
and so after reading and manually annotating the book I created my own basic thematic 
index to allow for easier cross-referencing between related anecdotes that often appear 
many chapters apart. This index somewhat resembles the code set used for analysis of the
newspaper archives, but the themes included reflect the specific contents of the book—
again, following the general principle of beginning with simple repeated ideas or topics 
and building toward progressively more abstract connections. 
The editors’ decision to concentrate on the period when Border Patrol pilots flew 
40
Border Patrol planes means that the pre-World War II period is largely neglected and the 
post-2005 period is examined only in unfavorable comparison. The editors seem to 
harbor a lingering resentment for the absorption of Border Patrol aviation into Customs 
and Border Protection’s Office of Air and Marine—the transition is one of the most 
persistent topics throughout their work, and almost exclusively presented as a mistake 
(e.g. pp. 106, 256, 304, 350, etc). The volumes are thus not very useful for 
contextualizing the uses of aircraft along the border after 2005. 
My third major source for this work was a set of interviews with 10 people 
regularly engaged in the direct provision of humanitarian aid—water, food, and other 
emergency supplies—in the US borderlands. These interviews were intended to help me 
better understand the roles and functions of aircraft in the borderlands over the last 5 to 
10 years, and in particular, those functions that may not be captured by official sources or
documentation. I asked the people I interviewed about their observations, recollections, 
and perceptions of the aircraft used in border enforcement today, but our conversations 
frequently ranged into broader discussions of bordering. These individuals have spent 
extensive time near the border while participating in activities like water drops, volunteer 
search and rescue, or recovery of remains. Through that work they have had many 
chances to witness border enforcement operations, including the use of aircraft. All of my
interviewees have been engaged in such work since at least 2013, and some have done it 
for decades. They are members of multiple organized humanitarian aid groups, many of 
which trace their origins to the Sanctuary Movement of the 1980s (see Caminero-
Santangelo 2009; Perla & Coutin 2012; see also Warren 2015, p. 187). Some work 
essentially full-time providing humanitarian aid or other migration-related assistance; 
41
others are retired and volunteer regularly. Of the 10 interviewees, 6 work primarily in 
southern Arizona, 2 work primarily in southern California, 1 works primarily in Texas, 
and 1 had experience in all three of those states. Despite multiple inquiries, I was unable 
to identify any groups or individuals performing comparable work in New Mexico. The 
geographic distribution of my interviewees partly reflects the proliferation of 
humanitarian aid efforts in Arizona as a response to the spatial displacement of migration 
since the 1990s (see pp. 21-23 above). Although some of my interviewees are semi-
public figures or sometimes speak to media outlets as representatives of their respective 
groups, not all are. I have chosen to maintain the anonymity of all interviewees to 
emphasize their observations and reflections rather than their organizational positions. 
Because of the constraints created by the COVID-19 pandemic I conducted all of 
these interviews over Zoom or telephone. Each lasted approximately one hour. In one 
case I spoke to two interviewees on a single call; in all other cases I interviewed only one 
person at a time. For all but two interviews, I recorded the audio from the conversation 
and later manually transcribed it in MAXQDA. Once I had transcripts of the interviews I 
followed essentially the same coding process described above for the newspaper archives,
though with a different code set. For the two interviews that were not recorded, I took 
notes in a word processor during the interview, captured as many direct quotations as I 
could, and coded that mixed notes-transcription document alongside the other interviews.
There are some significant disadvantages to conducting interviews remotely. For 
one, the context of an individual’s surroundings is mostly lost. At most, I was able to see 
a portion of someone’s office in pixelated form. Additionally, the opportunities for 
networking and connection that are present when doing fieldwork in person—attending 
42
gatherings, talking to people in hallways or outside an event, or otherwise taking 
advantage of proximity to establish new contacts—are not possible when my only contact
with an interviewee is a Zoom call. Networking by email and phone from multiple states 
away without in-person opportunities to build trust and rapport is challenging. I am 
grateful to the interviewees who shared their experiences with me regardless.
Additional sources for this project included US federal government documents 
pertaining to CBP operations, particularly that agency’s drone program; a handful of texts
and photographs from the collection of the National Border Patrol Museum in El Paso, 
Texas, including a lecture and instructional notes, pilot recruitment notices, and some 
descriptions of qualification and training standards; all three volumes of The Disappeared
Report (No More Deaths/Coalicion de Derechos Humanos, 2016-2021), which 
documents governmental abuses in the borderlands; current reporting on the border (and 
on the Department of Homeland Security, when relevant) from a variety of journalistic 
sources; and email communications with former members of the US Air Force 553rd 
Reconnaissance Wing, whose collective memory and record-keeping were key to 
disproving a rumor about the origins of pilotless flight on the border (see Ch. V). 
Many potential perspectives and sources are not represented in this project. Most 
importantly, this is not an observational or ethnographic account of how migrants 
themselves have experienced the aerial surveillance and enforcement regime of the US-
Mexico border. Although potentially valuable, such a study would require significantly 
more complex and cautious negotiations of access and safeguards to privacy, given the 
vulnerable position of unauthorized migrants in the US today. Particularly under 
conditions of remote research, I was not equipped to undertake that project. Nor does this
43
thesis include the perspective of current Air and Marine Operations pilots. An in-depth 
study of pilot training and culture could provide significant insight into how high-level 
policy is translated to action. But that would require either collaboration with (and, 
therefore, supervision by) Customs and Border Protection officials or the deliberate 
circumvention of their information restrictions. Again, I was not equipped for that task.
Omissions notwithstanding, this research provides a more comprehensive view of 
the role of aircraft at the southwestern land border than has previously been available, 
and situates that role in broader context. My work combines a critical perspective on 
borders and bordering with careful attention to the material composition of the border 
enforcement apparatus. 
The three main chapters of this thesis that follow each concentrate on one type of 
powered aircraft: airplanes (fixed-wing aircraft), helicopters (rotary-wing aircraft), and 
drones (remotely piloted or ‘unmanned’ aircraft). These three types are presented in the 
chronological order of their adoption for border enforcement. All three types remain in 
use today, although helicopters have almost entirely superseded planes in operations 
along the land border. 
Some readers may ask: What about blimps? Hinkle writes that in 1920, the Army 
Border Air Patrol (see Ch. III) attempted to deploy a lighter-than-air twin-engine airship 
in El Paso, but “it made no patrol flights” (1970, p. 44). Lighter-than-air craft were 
already near-obsolete at that time, Hinkle notes, adding, “The only reminder of those 
flying gas bags is the Goodyear blimp that is still used today for advertising” (ibid). The 
Los Angeles Times did in fact report that the US Customs Service once conducted a week-
long test of the Goodyear Blimp’s surveillance capabilities over Texas’ Gulf Coast 
44
(Houston 1986). However, I have encountered no other records of mobile blimps being 
used for border enforcement, nor any evidence that this initial trial led to further tests.
Tethered blimps carrying radar, cameras, and other surveillance equipment—
officially known as aerostats—have been employed along the border since the 1980s. 
This thesis does not consider aerostats in depth. Although aerostats look like aircraft, in 
practice they function as grounded infrastructure. CBP’s largest aerostats, known as the 
Tethered Aerostat Radar System, “spend their service lives hovering over a fixed 
location” (Long 2014). Smaller, ‘tactical’ aerostats are relocatable but must be trucked 
into place (ibid).12 Because they are tethered to a static mooring point or a wheeled 
delivery vehicle, aerostats do not provide the mobility advantages of planes, helicopters, 
or drones across rugged terrain. Aerostats provide a vertical advantage to observers, but 
they function more like a taller version of the steel watchtowers of the 1930s (Rak 1938, 
title page & p. 59) than aircraft. Therefore, I have chosen to exclude them from this 
research. 
In the next chapter, I turn to the advent of aerial enforcement. At a time when 
powered flight was a technological novelty, airplanes threatened the territorial sanctity of 
the state. Yet airplanes also promised to extend the state’s reach and its effective authority
over territory. Both of these seemingly contradictory qualities were at the heart of early 
public arguments that the US needed planes to patrol its southwestern border. 
12 According to a February 2021 statement by US Rep. Henry Cuellar, CBP will discontinue its use of the
smaller ‘tactical’ aerostats because of excessive operating costs (Reagan 2021). But in another example
of institutional convolution, the system may continue operating through a private contractor. 
45
CHAPTER III
AIRPLANES
The first powered aircraft used for enforcement along the US-Mexico border were
fixed-wing airplanes. Officially, Border Patrol flight operations began in 1941. But the 
first attempts at aerial enforcement began at least thirty years earlier. This developmental 
period in border aviation has not been comprehensively documented. Broyles et al. 
(2020) skim past the pre-1940 era, and Parker writes that prior to 1941 any use of aircraft 
for patrolling the border was only “occasional and unofficial” (1938, Ch. 1), a 
characterization that I will show is not wholly accurate. In this chapter, I begin by 
surveying the earliest attempts to incorporate aircraft into border enforcement prior to 
World War II in order to address my first research question (see p. 2) about the evolving 
functions of aircraft. By synthesizing previously unconnected sources I demonstrate that 
aerial enforcement was a persistent goal for decades before its enactment. Drawing on 
historical newspaper articles, I explain how aircraft were perceived as both threatening 
and reinforcing the existing geography of the state. Using internal histories of Border 
Patrol aviation, I then analyze how the strongly regional identity of the agency influenced
its acquisition of specific types of airplanes in the post-war era. Together, these sections 
address my second research question, about the degree to which aircraft functions were 
influenced by public representation, and to a lesser extent my third research question, 
about the relationship between aircraft usage and broader political-economic 
circumstances. Finally, to contextualize the current use of airplanes, I draw on my 
interview data to briefly discuss the diminished role of fixed-wing aircraft in the 
technological arsenal of border enforcement today.
46
First flights and the promise of authority
The first time US federal aircraft arrived at the border with Mexico, the Border 
Patrol did not yet exist. It was 1911, and revolution in Mexico threatened to spill over the 
still-permeable boundary line. In response to the turmoil the US government increased its
military presence at the border (St John 2011, p. 123). Among the reinforcements 
deployed that year were biplanes. Powered flight had only been achieved in 1903; 
sustained and controlled flight followed in 1905. The time between these milestones and 
the attempts to repurpose airplanes for border enforcement is noticeably brief. 
“For the first time in history,” the Los Angeles Times reported, “aeroplanes are to 
be used in policing an international boundary line” (“Aeroplanes to Patrol Border,” 
1911). The planes were manufactured by the Wright brothers and Glenn H. Curtiss, early 
luminaries of American aviation. The aircraft would ostensibly serve as surveillance 
units, the paper explained, “to scout far over the border into Mexico and report every 
condition of the country”—not a task that most would consider part of border 
enforcement today, but also not unprecedented in the history of US attempts at fixing and 
governing its southern territorial edge. Like the US Army expeditions that had pursued 
the Chiricahua Apache into Mexican territory 25 years prior (see Ch. II, p. 18), the planes
were supposed to help control mobility across the border by crossing it themselves. But, 
as the New York Times reported, their deployment would also serve as a more general test,
“to determine the military value of these machines” (“Wireless Guards Border,” 1911). 
As that phrasing suggests, airplanes had not yet definitively proven themselves useful for 
any kind of military operations, defensive border enforcement included. In fact, it was 
only later that same year, during the Italo-Turkish War over what is now Libya, that 
47
bombing and firing from airplanes were first attempted (Killingray 1984, p. 429). 
Whether or not the rudimentary Wright and Curtiss biplanes could provide a real 
advantage in guarding an international border was, therefore, an open question at the time
of their deployment. Unfortunately, I found no record of their accomplishments (or lack 
thereof) during that first deployment to El Paso and San Diego. A 1913 LAT report on an 
aviation meet in Owensmouth, CA13 suggests that the worth of biplanes remained 
uncertain two years later: the paper stated that the use of airplanes for border enforcement
would again be tested at that event (“Is Aviation Any Real Benefit…” 1913). 
Military deployments of airplanes to secure the border during the Mexican 
Revolution continued for roughly a decade after that first attempt. In 1916, the Army 
Signal Corps First Aero Squadron accompanied General Pershing’s “punitive expedition”
in retribution for Pancho Villa’s cross-border raid on Columbus, New Mexico. It was not 
a triumphant mission. The squadron’s commander, Captain Foulois, wrote, “In nearly 
every case, the aeroplanes were abandoned or destroyed and the pilots, after experiencing
all possible suffering due to lack of food and water, would finally work their way on foot,
through alkali deserts and mountains, to friendly troops, usually arriving thoroughly 
exhausted as a result of these hardships” (Glines 1991). Despite these repeated failures, 
Foulois remained proud of the squadron’s “scouting over country in which cavalry and 
infantry could not operate” (ibid). Nor did the underwhelming results of the 1916 
deployment deter military authorities from mustering aircraft once again in June 1919, 
when the Villistas attacked Ciudad Juarez. “This was the inception of the first United 
States Army Border Air Patrol of the United States-Mexico international border,” writes 
13 Now the Canoga Park neighborhood of Los Angeles
48
Hinkle, who was one of the patrol’s pilots (1970, p. 6). The 1919 deployment was not 
much more successful than that of 1916. As Hinkle (1967, 1970) describes at length, the 
DeHaviland DH4 two-seater planes were still mechanically unsophisticated and 
dangerous to the pilots and observers.14 His two monographs are largely dedicated to 
describing the crashes, forced landings, and rescues of aircrews. At least some of the 
time, pilots flew into Mexico mistakenly, not realizing they had crossed the border they 
were supposed to enforce (Hinkle 1967, p. 20). The Border Air Patrol also claimed 
authority to enter Mexico under the same 1882 bilateral agreement that had enabled 
pursuit of Native Americans across the border (idem, p. 26). But there was little practical 
reason for the Air Patrol’s presence: “The major threat had been dispelled by the time 
aerial patrol began” (Maurer 1987, p. 101). In consequence, training exercises mostly 
replaced actual patrols well before the operation was disbanded in the summer of 1921 
(Maurer 1987, p. 103; Hinkle 1970, pp. 36-43). 
While the Army Border Air Patrol was in part a response to violence in the 
borderlands and a state perception of a vulnerable, permeable border, it is important to 
note that it was also a product of the abrupt demobilization of the US military following 
the conclusion of World War I.  The ranks of the US Army Air Service “dropped from 
190,000 […] at the time of the Armistice to 81,000 at the end of January 1919, and 
27,000 […] at the end of June 1919,” when the Border Air Patrol began, Maurer notes 
(1987, p. 5). I will discuss the connection between military demobilization and the 
intensification of border enforcement at much greater length in Ch. IV. For the moment, 
suffice it to say that in this period it would have been illogical to speak of the Army 
14 According to Hinkle, pilots called the DH4 the ‘flaming coffin’ (1970, p. 7).
49
Border Air Patrol as evidence of the ‘militarization’ of border enforcement: enforcing the 
border was a task primarily undertaken by the military, in the absence of an independent 
state agency dedicated to that purpose. The ideological boundaries between military 
defense and civil policing have always been blurry at borders, and the name ‘Army 
Border Air Patrol’ is itself evidence of that blurring.
It is also important to consider the broader international context of military 
aviation at the time. After World War I, the development of military capabilities for 
aircraft occurred primarily under the auspices of colonialism (Neocleous 2013). 
Airplanes, Killingray writes, “offered highly mobile, fast instruments of warning and 
retribution which were generally invulnerable to lightly armed opponents” (1984, p. 431).
For British colonial occupations in Africa and the Middle East, air power thus appeared 
to be an economical substitute for costly and politically unpopular commitments of 
ground troops. Satia (2014) argues that aircraft also meshed neatly with preexisting 
British notions about these areas. For instance, Iraq, she argues, appeared in the British 
imagination as “apparently featureless, horizonless, protean and mirage-ridden desert” (p.
224). British intelligence officials operating there in the 1910s believed aerial 
surveillance would “offer vision beyond the mirages” and “extract truth from an 
essentially deceptive land” (p. 227-228). In other words, the supposed mutual suitability 
of aerial governance and colonial occupation was not simply a question of cost but of the 
attitudes toward peoples and landscapes held by the colonizing powers. “By the 1920s,” 
Neocleous writes, “every major power that sought to secure its colonies found aeroplanes
to be indispensable” (2013, p. 580).
The time in which aircraft were first deployed to the US-Mexico border was a 
50
period in which Anglo-American colonization of the borderlands was less complete and 
the violence of settlement more overt. Although the history of colonial claims to territory 
in the region is layered and complex (Adelman & Aron 1999; Barr 2011), the Treaty of 
Guadalupe Hidalgo inaugurated a new geographic expansion of American settlement 
after 1848. That expansion was opposed by the preexisting inhabitants of the area. 
“Mexicanos did not quietly submit to Anglo domination,” Dunn writes, “but rather 
contested the official definition of the border […] resisting Anglo control of the border 
region for some 70 years” (1996, p. 11).15 In response, “periodically intense, militarized 
efforts to pacify the region” occurred regularly until 1920 (ibid). This period of 
‘pacification’ was also a period of massive land dispossession for Mexican citizens 
caught on the northern side of the new border and for the indigenous peoples of the 
region (Dunn 1996, p. 7; Lytle-Hernandez 2010, p. 22). In this regard, the parallels 
between the US-Mexico borderlands and the other colonial spaces where air power and 
aerial policing were emerging should be evident. The borderlands were largely remote, 
poorly mapped (see Hinkle 1967, p. 11), and ineffectively controlled. It is thus logical to 
view the initial development of border aviation in the US alongside the evolution of aerial
enforcement in other colonial spaces on other continents. To the administrators of 
colonized spaces, airplanes appeared to hold significant—if unrealized—potential for 
maintaining a greater degree of effective governance over large swathes of mostly 
unsettled territory and preventing unauthorized mobility across newly-established 
borders. Though the effectiveness of aerial patrols was limited by the crude equipment 
available at the time, their usefulness as tools of enforcement in the geographic and 
15 This should not be taken to imply that all such resistance has ended. 
51
administrative peripheries of the state was becoming increasingly clear. 
Aerial anxiety and early enrollment
At the same time, aircraft threatened to destabilize territorial order. Butler argues 
that control of transportation and communication systems was historically essential to 
state authority over political and economic space—that is, to their effective sovereignty 
(2001, p. 639). But the invention of powered flight in the early 20th century challenged 
states’ ability to regulate mobility, transportation, and communication. Because airplanes 
and lighter-than-air aircraft like dirigibles could pass uninhibited over both natural and 
human-made impediments to other forms of travel, they appeared to be a “geography-
defying” technology (Butler 2001, p. 639). This is not to say that aircraft were wholly 
liberated from geography. They remained dependent on a network of airstrips, fueling 
stations, and other “static, hard and rigid things […] grounded infrastructure” that 
enabled their exceptional mobility (Adey et al. 2014, p. 7). Once aloft, though, airplanes 
could disregard existing territorial borders with ease. This prompted new diplomatic 
engagement and competition as states attempted to assert their authority over 
international flights (Butler 2001). “Incursions into the aerial environment,” Chaar López
writes, “opened up a new plane of enforcement for politics” (2018, p. 44). The energy 
and attention devoted to rule-making for air travel in the early 20th century reflect its 
disruptive potential.
Simonsen (2018) provides an excellent example of how aerial mobility conflicted 
with Britain’s territorial order at home in the earliest years of successful powered flight. 
Airplanes, Simonsen writes, “posed the question of how to configure a national territory 
in the sky,” particularly for a nation accustomed to seeing itself as an island secured by 
52
naval might (2018, p. 594). The topology of flight, defined by “the mobility and 
momentum of powered aircraft,” was a radical departure from “nationalized cartography”
rooted in “a flat discourse of sovereign territory” (pp. 604, 607). The state lacked the 
capacity to prevent aircraft from transgressing borders in the 1910s, and officials on the 
ground could do no more than “wait for the pilot to choose a place to descend and […] 
point out the borders in retrospect” (p. 612). These aerial transgressions were a 
substantial challenge to the state’s authority, and they motivated Britain’s participation in 
the diplomatic exchanges described by Butler (2001). 
In the US, a fear of similar aerial transgressions emerged alongside enthusiasm for
planes as a tool of border enforcement. The phenomenon is captured well in a 1919 LAT 
article and accompanying illustration that appeared a few months before the mobilization 
of the Army Border Air Patrol. “At the present time our 1500 miles is patrolled by a large
number of automobiles, more or less efficacious against the ordinary methods of 
smuggling, but as helpless as a lot of cripples against the swift and high-flying airplane,” 
the author asserted (Henry 1919). The article enumerates the alleged threats created by 
the “rapidly-increasing use of the airplane” and “hegira of aviators to Mexico” after 
World War I: the smuggling of opium, jewelry, and Chinese laborers; and the possibility 
of bombing raids on border cities. The illustration (under the provocative but 
cumbersome title “What Air Bandits on the Mexican Border are Doing and May Do if 
these Projected Aerial Patrol Plans Fail”) is even more imaginative, adding railroad 
sabotage, the destruction of mines, and cattle rustling to the myriad menaces of 
unchecked flight. In an inset, a biplane flies above the smoldering rubble of an American 
city. The author uses these frightening predictions to argue for the enrollment of aircraft 
53
into the federal border enforcement apparatus: “The only method by which such aerial 
outrages on law and order can be efficiently guarded against,” he wrote, “is the 
establishment of an aerial patrol from San Diego to the Gulf of Mexico by modern 
battleplanes equipped with machine guns” (Henry 1919). Planes appear here as an asset 
to the state but also, and more prominently, a danger to it.
I characterize this phenomenon as aerial anxiety—a specific, technologically-
provoked variant of what Krishna (1994) terms ‘cartographic anxiety.’ “This 
preoccupation with national space and with borders,” Krishna explains, “reveals an 
obsession to approximate a historical original that never existed”: the nation-state in its 
idealized form, “a pure, unambiguous community called the homeland” (1994, p. 517). 
Krishna’s analysis, developed in the post-colonial context of India but equally relevant 
for grasping the US “border obsession” (Massey 2016), names the political anxiety that 
arises when the difficulty of maintaining abstract, rigid boundaries inevitably reveals 
itself. Aerial intrusions across the southwestern land border were, on a practical level, 
depicted as a threat to safety or the national economy, as seen in Henry 1919 and as will 
be further shown below. But the symbolic significance of these intrusions outstripped 
their practical consequences. Even though the impacts of such intrusions remained 
largely unquantified and unverifiable, aerial anxiety persisted in a slow but steady stream 
of newspaper reports in the years between World War I and II. 
Most of these reports focused less on the sensational fears of bombing and more 
on the realistic worry of cross-border smuggling.16 Smuggling, as Andreas explains, has 
16 There was one incident in which a US border city was bombed by an airplane, but it occurred in 1929, 
a decade after the LAT’s illustration appeared, and it was done not by Mexican bandits but by a drunk 
american pilot, hurling “suitcases full of dynamite” at Mexican federal troops on behalf of Mexican 
rebels fighting for control of Naco, Sonora (Ellis 2019). Two of the homemade bombs landed on the 
Arizona side of the border, damaging a car and a store. An onlooker’s account appears in Rak, 1938, 
54
been “an integral dimension of cross-border economic exchange since the nineteenth 
century” (2009, p. 29). Smuggling was routine and mundane, but could also be framed as 
a threat to the nation’s territorial integrity, particularly when carried out by still-novel 
airplanes. In late 1919, the LAT reported that government officials had a “firm 
conviction” that “systematic smuggling by means of powerful airplanes” was happening, 
or if it wasn’t, would certainly be happening soon (“Use Airplanes for Smuggling”). The 
present and the future often blur in these reports: while admitting that “there is no way of 
knowing” whether airplane smuggling was actually a widespread problem, the paper’s 
correspondent insisted that “it is only a question of time.” Like Henry (1919), this report 
stressed the idea of launching a government “airplane patrol service” or “an army of 
airplanes”—apparently unaware that an aerial patrol was in fact already operating. Yet 
there was a note of skepticism: “Even with the operation of such a service it is considered
questionable whether smuggling by airplane could be guarded against except to a limited 
degree,” the reporter acknowledged. 
A similar mix of skepticism and obstinate belief appears in a 1921 report, which 
cited “the belief on the part of prohibition enforcement officers along the lower border” 
that significant aerial smuggling was taking place. The practice, the reporter wrote, “is 
said to be evident” (“Bootlegging in Air Practiced”; emphasis added). The unnamed 
unnamed officers proposed the by-now familiar solution of “a fleet of scouting airplanes 
to be used for patrolling the border and for giving chase to any suspicious machine.” 
Again, a slight note of pessimism tempers the fervor for flyers. The paper acknowledged 
that smugglers flying at night would be virtually undetectable.
pp. 156-157.
55
According to Customs and Border Protection’s official website, 1922 marked the 
beginning of aerial surveillance and enforcement along the border, using aircraft captured
from smugglers (“Timeline”). Their account does not mention aircraft again until the 
entry for 1932. The period in between is perhaps the least documented in the existing, 
fragmentary histories of border aviation. But newspaper coverage from that time suggests
that aerial smuggling and enforcement remained in the public consciousness. Continuing 
media attention on the alleged problem reinforced the idea of the border’s permeability to
illicit airborne cargo, and repeatedly suggested that more extensive use of airplanes could
solve this weakness. Again, the dual nature of aircraft as potentially destabilizing and 
reinforcing borders persists. But before detailing the continued manifestations of this 
aerial anxiety, it is worth noting that there is little evidence that cross-border smuggling 
by airplane was genuinely rampant in this period. Former Border Patrol pilot Parker 
quotes a retired Chula Vista sector chief, who stated, “[D]uring those years [the late 
1920s] there was a lot of air smuggling, and a lot of Border Patrol time was spent on it, 
but few cases of consequence were developed” (1983, “In the Olden Days”). The sector 
chief presents the few proven cases as evidence of a far-greater number (the ambiguous 
“a lot”) of assumed crossings—a logic that, though not always inaccurate, is primarily 
deployed to justify ever-greater enforcement (Boyce 2016, p. 258). Parker himself is 
more straightforward on the practice’s prevalence: “Smuggling of aliens by aircraft has 
not been established as ‘common’ in Service records,” he writes (1983, Chapter VIII). 
Smuggling of liquor and other contraband may have been more common than the 
smuggling of persons, but I emphasize that all the reports of aerial smuggling cited both 
above and below should be read as the construction, not merely the documenting, of a 
56
political-geographic problem.
The LAT reported in 1927 that southern California immigration enforcement 
officials were attempting to seize and commandeer a plane which had been used to fly 
Chinese immigrants into the country (“Sky Patrol to Guard Border”). Confiscated planes 
were apparently unsatisfactory, as just a month later the paper reported that federal 
officials were lobbying for greater numbers of patrol craft (“Border Plane Patrol 
Sought”). Again, dire projections accompanied the request: smuggling airplanes were 
supposedly “used extensively” and the government “powerless to combat them.” Note the
recurring themes of a vulnerable, permeable border and an allegedly ineffective state 
apparatus. “Smuggled Aliens Are Still a Vast Problem,” an NYT headline declared in 
1928, and the author of that article asserted that airplanes “engaged in the business of 
smuggling Chinese from Mexican points” into southern California were a major 
component of the problem.
That 1928 article also includes a statistic that, if even roughly accurate, suggests 
the still-fledgling state of border aviation. According to the NYT, agents of the Border 
Patrol covered 4.5 million miles on patrol in the preceding year. Only 250 of those miles
—less than the one-way distance from Tucson to El Paso—were covered by airplane. By 
comparison, agents drove 3.8 million miles and rode 70,000 on horseback (“Smuggled 
Aliens Are Still…”). The era of aerial enforcement had not yet arrived.
Yet aerial enforcement remained a persistent topic of press coverage. The practice 
was still described as ‘experimental’ in 1929. “[O]fficials are convinced that flying not 
only could give practical service in prohibition enforcement,” the NYT reported, “but that
planes hovering over the coast and the national borders would be a deterrent to 
57
smugglers” (“Flying Airplane Patrols Desired…” 1929). In a July 1932 feature article on 
the Border Patrol—brimming with Old West mythos, accounts of heroism, and 
descriptions of violent death—LAT author Bradford Fields stressed the importance of 
airplanes to the young agency. “Uncle Sam is preparing to engage in a battle to the death 
with that newest of public enemies, the aerial smuggler,” Fields wrote. “It is declared that
the border patrol is shortly to take to the air in a big way in a sky fleet of its very own.” 
The publication date corresponds with the formation of an unofficial Customs Service air 
patrol, which, according to CBP’s website, “enthusiastically patrolled the southern 
border” starting in 1932 (“Timeline”). This may be the ‘sky fleet’ to which Fields 
referred, conflating the Border Patrol and Customs Service because of their shared task of
border enforcement. Fields claimed that patrol agents could “ride or fly anything on legs, 
wheels, or wings […] Ability to fly anything from a jenny to a bomber counts more and 
more each year.” Yet, tellingly, he also notes that agents were “courageously combating 
[smuggling] on borrowed wings.” This phrase alludes to the fact that the agency’s flying 
operations continued to rely mostly on seized aircraft. It seems safe to say that Fields’ 
enthusiasm for the idea of airborne patrol exceeded its actual implementation. 
The statistics included in Fields’ article certainly suggest no significant increase in
aerial activity compared to that reported four years earlier by the NYT. Horse, boat, and 
airplane patrols reportedly totaled 51,513 miles in 1931 (Fields 1932). Considering that 
horse patrols alone reportedly exceeded that distance in 1927 (“Smuggled Aliens…” 
1928), it is unlikely that the agency’s planes contributed much to the 1931 total. 
Additional reporting by the LAT later in the same year that Fields’ article was published 
provides a probably more realistic evaluation: “If plans of Federal authorities do not go 
58
awry,” a November article began, with perhaps a hint of skepticism, “the government 
airplane patrol soon will be increased by two high-powered machines seized Monday 
[…] placing them at the service of the Federal border patrol and the prohibition service” 
(“Planes to Change Sides” 1932). According to CBP’s records, over 30 planes were 
seized in similar fashion that year. But a 1934 newspaper article stated that the Customs 
Service possessed only “several old planes in service” (“Two Planes Sent…”), which 
suggests that the seized planes were either not deemed airworthy or that federal 
authorities lacked the facilities and personnel necessary to make productive use of them.
From the mid- to late 1930s, the Coast Guard—then part of the Treasury 
Department, like the Customs Service, while the Border Patrol was housed in the 
Department of Labor—took over responsibility for all air operations along the land 
border (Coast Guard Aviation Association; “Timeline). A 1938 spread of LAT 
photographs titled simply “Border Patrol”—again, reflecting the blurring of agency and 
institutional boundaries—purported to show the Coast Guard’s air fleet in action. One 
image shows pilots loading a Thompson submachine gun, and another shows a Coast 
Guard Waco J2W-1 plane flying parallel to an alleged smuggler’s plane. “As the 
smuggler plane is overhauled by the Coast Guard ship, the law breakers make a sharp, 
diving turn toward the international boundary line,” the caption states. “But, with guns 
peering from the Coast Guard ship, the smuggler plane is forced to land” (Arnold 1938).
The maneuver matches a description given by the Coast Guard Aviation 
Association.17 But “there is no record of any achievements” by the Coast Guard planes, 
Parker writes (1983, Ch. 1). “[N]o actual air interceptions resulted from this utilization of
17 “At times the Coast Guard aircraft would spot aircraft coming across the border and force them to land 
for inspections […] If signaling did not get the desired response – showing the Thompson usually 
clarified the message.” (Coast Guard Aviation Association)
59
Coast Guard equipment,” Broyles et al. concur (2020, p. 9). The photograph in the LAT, 
though visually striking, raises practical questions: could a smuggler plane, a government
plane, and the third plane necessary to carry the press photographer really have aligned so
precisely without prior coordination? Though technically possible, the scenario is deeply 
implausible. According to Broyles et al., aerial intercepts were exceedingly rare because 
advance information was typically unavailable and patrol planes simply weren’t fast 
enough catch up with other aircraft (2020, p. 63). More likely—almost undoubtedly—the
scene was staged. If true, it certainly would not be the last time that border enforcement 
authorities arranged convenient displays to achieve favorable media representations.
Moreover, an article published a year prior suggested that the aerial smugglers 
supposedly pursued by the Coast Guard were already abandoning the game on their own. 
“Up-to-date smugglers for a time used airplanes,” the NYT reported, “but after 
government men seized five of them they gave up this method” (Berger 1937). The costs 
were too high, and limited roads on the American side of the border meant that planes 
often landed in view of ranchers, who were apparently quick to alert federal authorities 
(Berger 1937). That assessment was apparently not shared by all the NYT’s reporters, for 
in 1939 the paper declared, “The amount of bootleg goods delivered within the confines 
of our country by smuggling planes was enormous” (“Coast Guard Patrol”). I am inclined
to believe Berger’s detailed explanation of the practice’s limits over the unsubstantiated 
reiteration of aerial anxiety. 
Regardless of the veracity of the photograph of the Coast Guard plane “riding 
herd” on a smuggler’s craft, the 1938 LAT photo spread captures an important moment in
the evolution of aerial border enforcement. It encapsulates the dual potential of airplanes: 
60
their ability to defy state-defined geography when piloted by smugglers across the border,
and their capacity to reinforce that same geography when flown by federal agents on 
patrol. This is evidence of the slow and convoluted institutional adoption of aircraft for 
border enforcement, a process that advanced only sporadically from the 1910s to the end 
of the 1930s. And, crucially, it shows the functions that aircraft would fulfill in the 
decades to follow. The other photographs in the spread showed pilots observing “lone 
automobile parties along the border” for suspicious activity, flying at low altitude to get a 
closer view of “persons who may prove to be aliens,” and assisting with search and 
rescue efforts (Arnold 1938). The publicizing of these additional functions marks an 
important shift in the media portrayal of aircraft at the border. Though aerial anxiety and 
the interception of aerial smugglers had been a dominant theme up to this point, 
newspaper coverage after the late 1930s primarily focused on how aircraft contributed to 
enforcement efforts against terrestrial travel. In the articles I surveyed from the 1940s 
forward, aerial anxiety appeared far less frequently. The fear of aerial intrusion did not 
disappear entirely—in large part, the responsibility for addressing that fear was simply 
transferred from one agency to another. And the phenomenon still recurs today, as I will 
show later in this thesis. But media coverage helped to confirm a new role for aircraft: 
not just as a necessary response to airborne threats to the nation’s territorial sanctity, but 
also as essential components in a larger technological assemblage dedicated to halting the
movement of migrants on the ground rather than smugglers in the air. 
Regional identity and the launch of Border Patrol aviation
The 1940s were the beginning of the end of the awkward incubation period of 
border aviation. The Border patrol briefly experimented with autogiros—a largely 
61
forgotten type of aircraft combining a helicopter-like rotor with the forward-mounted 
propeller of a plane—between 1941 and 1945. (These will be discussed in greater detail 
in Ch. IV, as they were effectively the early predecessors to helicopters.) The autogiros 
were the first aircraft operated under the official auspices of the Border Patrol—though 
not, it should be clear, the first aircraft ever used for border enforcement. Like the planes 
deployed in 1919, the autogiros were surplus military equipment (McKinney 2011). After
World War II, additional surplus aircraft became available for border enforcement 
(Broyles et al. 2020, p. 13), continuing a pattern of technological surpluses transferring 
from one arm of the federal government to another. (I will also discuss this pattern more 
in the next chapter.) Though the fixed-wing, propeller-driven planes acquired from the 
Army were more reliable than the autogiros, none were considered ideal by agents of the 
time. “By 1950, Border Patrol had auditioned and employed eight different types of 
aircraft, some awful like the Autogiro and some satisfactory, like the [Stinson] L-5 
[Sentinel],” Broyles et al. explain, “but the Patrol was still looking for a hard-working, 
trouble-free plane for everyday tasks” (2020, p. 55). In particular, because pilots were 
required to first train as patrol agents on the ground, they wanted an airplane that could 
facilitate tracking unauthorized crossers from the air.
Tracking, which the Border Patrol typically calls ‘sign-cutting,’ is at once a 
practical skill and a highly mythologized element in the cultural and regional identity of 
Border Patrol agents. Rak described sign-cutting as a “very essential art,” and wrote that 
“no knowledge is surer of being useful” on patrol (1938, p. 23). The skill has often been 
touted as a link between eras, connecting the “country-bred Westerners” who formed the 
core of the early patrol (Rak 1938, p. 23) to its later officers, including those “reared in 
62
urban instead of rural areas” (“Signcutting and Aerial Observation,” n.d., p. 2). “Despite 
the vast gains made in technology, one of the stocks in trade for border law officers 
remains the ancient art of ‘sign cutting,’” Broyles and Haynes claim (2010, p. 13). 
Though not truly unique to the region, sign-cutting is often described as “an art of the Old
West,” (Hillinger 1959b), part of “the Border Patrol’s traditional image: the lonely agent 
on horseback, his head crowned by the telltale Smokey the Bear hat, patiently tracking 
through the rugged desert” (McDonnell 1986). It thus reinforces the ‘cowboy’ persona 
embraced by many agents in the southwest—“cowboy in a good way, in the traditional 
way,” as they understand it (Urrea 2004, p. 17).  The practice has acquired a romantic 
mythos that often serves to brush away questions about the context in which it is used. As
Warren writes, “Journalists and others have all too often focused on the shallow semiotics
of bandits and lawmen” (2015, p. 202). Agents of the Border Patrol are eager to assist 
with such romantic simplification: “Out of the tangled mess of immigration laws and 
policy falls our simple job of cutting for sign,” Border Patrol pilot Dennis Michelini 
wrote in a 2002 essay for the NYT. Sometimes—though not often—the ‘Old West’ 
rhetoric expands to acknowledge the presence of Native Americans, at least when that 
inclusion can serve to further romanticize the border enforcement apparatus. “At a time 
when all manner of high technology is arriving to help beef up security at the Mexican 
border,” the NYT reported during the rapid expansion of the Department of Homeland 
Security, “there is a growing appreciation among the federal authorities for the American 
Indian art of tracking, honed over generations by ancestors hunting animals” (Archibold 
2007).18 An instructional lecture for mid-century Border Patrol trainees, from the 
18 The Border Patrol operates a special unit of Tohono O’odham trackers called the Shadow Wolves. I 
have found little critical scholarship on this topic, and I agree with Miller’s observation that in news 
coverage of the group, “it doesn’t take the media long to fall into easy stereotypes” (2014, p. 110). 
63
collection of the National Border Patrol Museum in El Paso, relies on cruder racial 
stereotypes and states that sign-cutting talent was “a part of the Red Man’s natural 
equipment” (“Signcutting and Aerial Observation,” n.d., p. 3).19 While this lecture 
suggested that Border Patrol agents were unlikely to possess commensurate natural talent,
other members of the agency have at times been prone to exaggerating the ability of its 
trackers, claiming, for instance, that “old hands” could “track an [alien] across a plate of 
glass and never lose him” (McDonnell 1986; brackets in original) or “track an ant across 
a lava bed” (Hillinger 1959b). Such claims clearly have an element of intentional 
exaggeration. But they suggest the importance of the practice in establishing agents’ 
belonging within the organization’s ranks. As the instructional lecture put it, “The officer 
without this skill hasn’t reached his full stature” (“Signcutting and Aerial Observation,” 
n.d., p. 5). It is an indirect reflection of the agency’s “strong roots in the region” (Lytle-
Hernandez 2010, p. 198), and simultaneously of its “role in frontier making […] the 
frontier politics of managing and containing the Other” (Chaar López 2018, pp. 101-102).
Contrary to assertions that sign-cutting is an ancient art, Lytle-Hernandez 
characterizes it as a “pseudo-science” entangled with “[r]acialized notions of citizenship 
and social belonging” (2010, p. 48). “According to Border Patrol tracking lore,” she 
writes, “undocumented immigrants fit a specific profile that could be tracked north from 
the border by following the particular imprints that Mexicans made upon the land” (2010,
p. 49). Certainly, agents have long claimed to be able to infer identity from imprints. 
Critical analysis would be valuable, as there are troubling questions to explore about the border’s 
impact on indigenous communities from its inception to the present and CBP’s claims of harmonious 
cooperation with this select group of indigenous agents.
19 This lecture transcript is not dated. Based on some references to the agency’s staffing numbers (“fewer 
than 1,000 officers” assigned to the border), I estimate it is most likely from the 1950s.
64
“Peculiarities of walking manner,” reads the instructional lecture,” divulge information, 
such as; sex, age, physical condition and many other facts about the person being 
tracked” (“Signcutting and Aerial Observation,” n.d., p. 7). Urrea quotes a police officer 
from the Tohono O’odham reservation, who states, “Them trackers can probably tell you 
what color the guy’s hair was, and that he had eighty-nine cents in his left pocket. Then 
they can tell you the last time he got laid” (2004, p. 28). Again, the boundaries between 
the plausible, implausible, and potentially laughable blur, but such boasts are just an 
exaggerated version of the claim to a type of comprehensive knowledge unavailable to 
laypersons. Sign-cutters, Urrea writes, “read the land like a text […] They are landscape 
grammarians, got the Ph.D. in reading dirt” (2004, p. 29). From an outsider’s perspective,
the practice seems to exist somewhere in the nebulous intersection of science, art, and 
pseudo-science. Close study of the landscape combined with experience can reveal traces
not obvious to the casual observer, but such traces are frequently interpreted through the 
kind of racialized preconceptions noted by Lytle-Hernandez. 
Regardless of its scientific veracity, at mid-century sign-cutting was a marker of 
identity for Border Patrol agents, connecting them to the history and culture—as they 
perceived it—of the geographic region in which the majority of them operated. And this 
attachment to regional identity had a significant influence on the types of aircraft that 
were initially deemed appropriate and acceptable for aerial border enforcement. As 
Headrick writes, “[A] motive can occasion a search for appropriate means” (1981, p. 10). 
Agents wanted a plane that would allow them to perform the task of sign-cutting from a 
more advantageous position, not a vehicle intended to pursue or intercept smuggler 
planes. Their attention was focused on the ground.
65
Figure 1: A Border Patrol airplane in use in the 1940s. The two figures in dark hats and 
jackets are most likely Border Patrol agents. Courtesy of the National Border Patrol 
Museum, El Paso, Texas.
“In reality, the airplane is nothing more than a vehicle that permits putting a 
signcutter in the air and expanding the signcutting operation,” the lecture for trainees 
explained. “[A]erial observation and signcutting are in a sense synonymous” 
(“Signcutting and Aerial Observation,” n.d., p. 1). Seen from this perspective, aircraft 
were most useful where they could complement, rather than disrupt, the traditional 
Border Patrol activities practiced in the agency’s first few decades. And the specific plane
that best met agents’ criteria was the Piper Super Cub (see Figure 2, p. 68). “It was thin, 
frail, and had a cramped cockpit,” write Broyles et al., “but for over half a century it was 
the signature aircraft of the agency” (2020, p. 60). The main reason for the Super Cub’s 
66
favored status was that the aircraft handled well in the unusual flying conditions 
demanded for sign-cutting: slow (about 50 miles per hour) and low (routinely down to 50
feet above ground, and lower in exceptional circumstances). They were small, 
maneuverable, and minimalist (Siuru & Siuru 1990). Though pilots’ exact routines varied
from one sector or station to another, Broyles et al. write that sign-cutting was “daily faire
[sic] for ‘Cub pilots […] it uses techniques as old as Adam and Eve” (2020, p. 60). Again,
note the invocation of an ancient past to legitimate the adoption of a modern technology. 
An airplane capable of sustained low-speed, low-altitude flight allowed Border Patrol 
agents to preserve their ‘Old West’ regional identity as expert trackers and simultaneously
expand the area they could plausibly claim to surveil and comprehend. 
Figure 2: A Piper Super Cub in flight. Courtesy of the National Border Patrol 
Museum, El Paso, Texas.
67
 F  ull institutional incorporation 
By 1953, every Border Patrol sector in the southwest possessed at least one 
airplane. This was the period in which aircraft were seen not as a technological novelty or
a threat but as a core component of the border enforcement apparatus. Airplanes were no 
longer just geography-defying; they were also geography-defining. The same 
technological qualities that allowed airplanes to defy the geography of the state—their 
freedom from roads or harbors, and their ability to cross otherwise inaccessible terrain—
made them excellent assets for enforcing the imposed geography of the state. Airplanes 
extended the state’s reach into areas that had previously defied its effective control, and 
enabled the prosecution of individuals who transgressed the planar national boundary. 
The proliferation of aircraft within the Border Patrol took place during what 
Lytle-Hernandez calls “the chaotic decade” between 1944 and 1954 (2010, p. 169). 
During this period, US attempts at immigration control were essentially ineffective: 
“migrants continued to cross the U.S.-Mexico border without sanction and refused to 
accept the authority of the Border Patrol officers” (Lytle-Hernandez 2010, p. 143). This is
important context for the general shift I observed in press coverage: away from the 
Prohibition-influenced tales of flying smugglers, and toward a greater emphasis on 
migrant laborers. During the 1950s, in border sectors with large areas of unsettled terrain,
Border Patrol airplanes were primarily occupied with sign-cutting. Where the border ran 
close to agricultural land, pilots spent more time assisting ground agents with farm and 
ranch checks—watching from above as ground agents swept through agricultural fields 
looking for undocumented workers—which also required relatively low-altitude flying. 
These airplanes were almost never called upon to fulfill the aerial-intercept function that 
68
had been proffered as their purpose in earlier decades. 
But aerially-focused territorial anxiety did not vanish. The Border Patrol briefly 
experimented with portable radar units to detect incursions and guide interceptions in the 
1950s. By the accounts of participating pilots, those experiments were abject failures. 
“The radar vans were huge cumbersome rigs and weighed tons,” one pilot recalled. “In 
fifteen days of operation, the results were a great big ZERO” (Parker 1983, Ch. XVII). 
He described it as one of the few examples of Border Patrol flying that was not 
‘productive.’ We can also view the experiment as evidence of the continuing influence of 
aerial anxiety. 
Aerial anxiety and the desire for technological symmetry in the air are also 
evident in the founding of the Customs Aviation Program in 1969. At that time, the 
Border Patrol’s focus was on immigration control, or mobility across the ground. Every 
Border Patrol sector had at least one airplane of its own, but “Customs owned only one 
single-engine aircraft” (McPhail 1998, p. 7). The first priority of the new Customs 
Aviation Program was, in the government’s words, “border interdiction to counter the air 
drug smuggling threat along the Southwest border” (ibid). The creation of a program 
specifically focused on aerial interception demonstrates continuing state concern over the
ability of airplanes to defy territorial controls. 
The Customs Aviation Program is less well-documented than Border Patrol 
aviation of the same period. According to the brief history included in a General 
Accounting Office audit, the program expanded to 11 fixed-wing aircraft and 8 
helicopters by 1972 (McPhail 1998, p. 7). In a 2013 interview for RotorcraftPro 
magazine, a former pilot in the program claimed that a major expansion was planned 
69
around 1988: 350 new pilots and 70 new aircraft (“Meet a Rotorcraft Pro – Dean 
Springer”). This corresponds with the expansion described by Andreas, who writes that 
between 1986 to 1992, the Customs Service “tripled the size of its air fleet and increased 
its air program personnel sixfold” (2009, p. 52). Around the same time, though, the 
program’s mission started to shift, “from border interdiction to supporting foreign 
counterdrug operations” (McPhail 1998, p. 5). And program funding, flights, personnel, 
and total aircraft all decreased between 1992 and 1997 (ibid, p. 10). 
Although further information would be needed to fully contextualize the rise and 
gradual decline of Customs aviation, there is a clear temporal correlation between the 
program’s initial expansion and the beginning of the US ‘war on drugs.’ The Customs 
Aviation Program began the same year as ‘Operation Intercept,’ a highly publicized 
escalation of vehicle searches at border crossings intended to pressure the Mexican 
government to take more action against drug production and transportation (Andreas 
2009, p. 41). The program’s resources grew in parallel with the federal government’s 
expansion of its anti-drug campaigns. And, if it is true that by 1992 the US had “reduced 
air smuggling by an estimated 75 percent from 1982 levels” (Andreas 2009, p. 52), the 
program might have been a victim of its own success—that is, its decline post-1992 may 
reflect its diminishing relevance as traffickers abandoned light airplanes for other 
methods of cross-border transportation. It is also important to note that stopping aerial 
smuggling was primarily accomplished by expanding the US network of radar stations, 
which allowed authorities to track planes to their destination and catch them on the 
ground (ibid). Although the idea of stopping planes with other planes drove the Customs 
Aviation Program’s growth temporarily, the reality of the situation was that it was the 
70
“grounded infrastructure” (Adey et al. 2014, p. 7), not the federal airplanes, that seems to 
have had the greatest effect on smuggling practices. 
Clearly, there was still some official concern about aerial transgressions of the 
border. But such intrusions no longer appeared regularly in the press as a foundational 
justification for aerial enforcement. Instead, media coverage emphasized aerial sign-
cutting, and the increasingly complex technological assemblage deployed to catch 
migrants who had crossed the border the old-fashioned way. While Customs Service 
pilots attempted to “secure the volume” (Elden 2013), Border Patrol pilots after World 
War II established and maintained a focus on controlling the motion of migrants.
A 1950 LAT photo spread depicted Border Patrol pilot Ed Parker20 flying low 
above four alleged “line-jumping Mexican nationals,” who were shown walking toward a
waiting Jeep (“Mexican ‘Wetbacks’ Crossing Border…”).21 In 1959, the LAT ran a series 
of articles on the Border Patrol’s efforts (Hillinger 1959a, 1959b), which remained 
strongly focused on “policing unsanctioned Mexican immigrants” (Lytle-Hernandez 
2010, p. 199). One of these articles focused closely on the use of airplanes. “Illegal 
Border Crossers Spotted by Air Patrol,” the headline declared (Hillinger 1959b). 
Photographs showed a Piper Super Cub swooping low above a lone walker, alleged to be 
an “illegal entrant,”22 starkly silhouetted against a dirt road. The report credulously 
stressed the pilot’s ability to read sign from the air—“‘It’s like tracking an elephant in the 
snow with a nosebleed from where I sit,’ Purdue related”—and reiterated the ‘Old West’ 
20 Quoted elsewhere in this thesis as the author of Prop Cops, 1983
21 The same photograph appears in Broyles et al. 2020, p. 24. The LAT credits it as a ‘Times photo,’ while
Broyles et al. label it ‘Courtesy of the US Border Patrol.’ The provenance is unclear. I note this because
it further suggests the closeness between the newspaper and the state agency. 
22 This was the era in which immigration was aggressively reframed as a problem of criminality. See 
Lytle-Hernandez 2010, Ch. 9.
71
origin story of the practice (Hillinger 1959b). But the article also emphasized the wide 
variety of complementary technologies required to make the airplane’s notional 
advantages useful in practice. Consider the following passage, narrated by the reporter as 
a passenger in the patrol plane:
… at last we encountered the adventurer who matched his wits against the 
Border Patrol and lost. Purdue shouted in Spanish to the illegal immigrant 
below over the plane’s specially equipped loud speaking system: ‘Do not 
move from where you are! Immigration officers in a jeep are close at 
hand. They will be here in a few minutes.’ Purdue alerted a ground crew 
over the Border Patrol radio network. The jeep arrived. The man was 
driven to Border Patrol sector headquarters on the knoll above nearby San 
Ysidro. (Hillinger 1959b, p. 2)
This brief passage aptly captures the range of technologies and actors that collectively 
constituted the border enforcement apparatus of the time: the airplane, the loudspeaker, 
the radio, and the Jeep; the pilot, the patrol agents on the ground, and the administrators 
at headquarters; and the reporter, documenting and publicizing the whole process.
There were some instances in which pilots skirted the complexities of this 
apparatus by landing and apprehending migrants themselves. One pilot whose story 
appears in Broyles et al. even recalled a time when he “put one [migrant] sitting on top of
the other sitting in back of the Super Cub” (2020, p. 80). But such instances seem to have
been comparatively rare. Joint air-ground operations coordinated via radio became the 
normal practice for pilots (see Figures 3 & 4, following pages). From above, pilots could 
set the ground agents in Jeeps or cars on a course to intersect migrants’ direction of travel,
or direct those agents straight toward migrants if road conditions allowed. 
72
Figure 3: Aircraft and ground vehicles coordinated by radio. Note the antenna protruding
from rear of car. Courtesy of the National Border Patrol Museum, El Paso, Texas.
This pattern of operation would essentially hold until the 1980s, when helicopters 
became widely available to the Border Patrol (as will be discussed in Ch. IV). In the same
decade, minimum-altitude restrictions for fixed-wing aircraft, introduced in 1989 in 
response to a series of pilot crashes, curtailed the effectiveness of sign-cutting operations 
in airplanes. Pilots were required to maintain a minimum altitude of 500 feet above 
ground except during take-off and landing (Broyles et al. 2020, pp. 74 & 354-355). The 
restriction did not apply to helicopters, thus incentivizing the use of rotary-wing over 
fixed-wing aircraft for low-altitude flights. The heyday of fixed-wing flight for border 
enforcement, including enforcement against individual immigrants on the ground and 
organized smugglers in the air, lasted roughly four decades, from about 1950 to 1990.
73
Figure 4: When radio communication was inadequate, pilots and ground agents might 
meet to confer on dirt roads or other improvised airstrips. Courtesy of the National 
Border Patrol Museum, El Paso, Texas.
Fixed-wing aircraft at the border today
The federal reorganization that created the Department of Homeland Security 
further reduced the use of small, lightweight planes at low speeds and low altitudes. In 
October 2005, Border Patrol Air Operations was absorbed into what was then called the 
Office of Air and Marine and is now called Air and Marine Operations. The Customs 
Aviation Program was also merged into the same office. AMO and the Border Patrol now 
work as hierarchically equal agencies within the broader structure of DHS. Although 
AMO still operates small Cessna C-206 and C-210 airplanes, their pilots no longer fly the
74
former ‘signature aircraft’ of border enforcement, the Piper Super Cub (“Air and Marine 
Operations Assets,” 2021). “AMO aircraft are large, sophisticated, and fast, suitable for 
large scale insertions of agents, air pursuits of other aircraft, and surveillance from afar,” 
writes Hays (in Broyles et al. 2020, p. 580). The last of the Super Cubs was given to the 
USDA in 2011 (idem, p. 582).
When I spoke to humanitarian aid volunteers who work in the borderlands today, 
none described seeing fixed-wing CBP aircraft with any regularity. Anecdotally, at least, 
their recollections align with the diminished role of light airplanes along the land border 
described above. R., a long-term volunteer who has spent most of his time in California 
and Texas recalled that, over a decade ago, “planes would fly over us to check out what 
we were doing […] This was in the first year. but it was once in a while. It wasn’t all the 
time.” Such sightings have become rarer now, he said: “I don’t see those planes anymore.
I really haven’t seen any planes in years” (Personal communication, January 25, 2021). 
“You do see some fixed-wing,” Arizona-based K. told me. “Not a lot” (Personal 
communication, November 22, 2020). 
Another individual in Arizona reported seeing airplanes that might have been 
conducting border enforcement activities, but that she could not definitively identify:
There was this smallish, not real small like the Cessna planes or anything 
like that, but one of the smaller, regular airplanes, flying right along the 
border wall […] I don’t remember seeing any numbers or letters or 
markings, or definite markings. We were several miles from the wall. […] 
As soon as we got back into town, I was saying, ‘Hey, this plane was 
flying along the wall’ […] I don’t remember anybody finding out why it 
would be there or what it was, where was it coming from. […] It wasn’t a 
commercial airplane, and I don’t know if it was a private airplane or a 
government airplane or what.” (O., personal communication, October 22, 
2020). 
The approximate size described by O. could match some of the aircraft operated by 
75
AMO, or possibly even a drone, but there is not enough concrete information in her 
description to draw a strong conclusion. 
One other volunteer based in a more remote area of Arizona described a privately-
owned plane that seemed to be operating like a surveillance aircraft. “My understanding 
it it’s like an independent contractor,” K. explained. “It’s a fixed-wing plane, and he just 
does surveillance for Border Patrol. It seems like he goes out in the evening hours, close 
to dark, and will just fly these grids in different areas of the desert […] I don’t know what
kind of technology the plane’s equipped with” (Personal communication, November 7, 
2020). CBP did not respond to my inquiry asking if it ever contracts with private pilots to
conduct aerial surveillance.
I include these unclear observations because they highlight the uncertainty 
inherent in researching aerial enforcement via individual recollections. As early as 1919, 
government pilots knew that unpredictable flight schedules and flight patterns would 
work to their advantage (Hinkle 1970, p. 11), and the extent of fixed-wing surveillance 
along the border today may be greater than my interviewees recognized. That caveat 
notwithstanding, it is fair to say that since the heyday of the Super Cub, fixed-wing 
aircraft have lost their position of primacy in the aerial apparatus of border enforcement. 
Conclusion
In this chapter, I have provided a more complete account of the early years of 
border aviation than was previously available. From historical newspaper archives it is 
evident that less than a decade after the achievement of powered flight, state authorities 
saw airplanes as potential tools of border enforcement. Prior to World War II, newspapers
repeatedly emphasized the threat of aerial intrusions into state territory by foreign or 
76
criminal airplanes, a phenomenon that I characterize as an aerially specific manifestation 
of cartographic anxiety. This dual perception of airplanes as both threats to and 
reinforcements for bounded state territory persisted in the post-war period when airplanes
were fully incorporated into the institutional apparatus of border enforcement. That 
perceptual duality is reflected in the differing missions of Border Patrol Air Operations 
and the Customs Aviation Program. Institutional incorporation was also influenced by the
Border Patrol’s strong regional identity: the agency’s attachment to a romanticized, 
‘cowboy’ narrative of the ‘Old West,’ seen particularly in its emphasis on sign-cutting, 
significantly affected what type of airplane was considered useful for border 
enforcement. Finally, I showed that the advantages of airplanes for enforcing 
geographical order could only truly be realized when airplanes were embedded in a 
larger, technological assemblage, and suggested that the relative importance of fixed-
wing aircraft within that assemblage has diminished in the present day.
One theme that emerges from exploring the enrollment of fixed-wing aircraft and 
that I have not yet explored in this thesis is the relationship between military 
demobilization and the militarization of border enforcement. The connection was evident 
in the story of the Army Border Air Patrol of 1919-1921, which was created partially to 
provide new purpose for the Army Air Service after the end of the first World War. I 
alluded to similar connections in my discussion of the Border Patrol’s search for suitable 
aircraft in the 1940s and 1950s. In the following chapter, I will consider this theme in 
much greater detail as I contextualize the enrollment of helicopters into the border 
enforcement apparatus and shift my focus to the third of my research questions—how the
use of aircraft in bordering reveals the larger political-economic circumstances 
77
influencing the development of the US border enforcement apparatus. That question is 
pertinent to airplanes as well, but the process by which helicopters were introduced to 
enforcement provides a more compact and clear case study. 
Another emerging theme is the border enforcement ride-along (or fly-along). 
Multiple times in this chapter I mentioned reporters riding in Border Patrol airplanes. In 
the following chapter, I discuss how helicopter tours of the border became a political and 
journalistic institution in their own right. The next chapter also draws more heavily on 
my interviews to characterize the current uses of helicopters, and demonstrate how they 
have become an emblem of the false humanitarianism adopted by border enforcement 
authorities who disclaim responsibility for the effects of border policies. Together, these 
sections address the second half of my second research question—how the aircraft used 
for bordering have themselves contributed to public representations of the border. 
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CHAPTER IV
HELICOPTERS
By the 1980s, helicopters began to supplant fixed-wing airplanes as the primary 
aircraft of enforcement in many border sectors. In this chapter, I first provide some 
context on the prominence of helicopters in the border region today, based on the 
accounts of my interviewees. As with Ch. III, this initial section of the chapter is 
primarily intended to address my first research question. Second, I draw on the internal 
history of Border Patrol aviation previously referenced in Ch. III to describe the initial 
and expanding uses of rotary-wing aircraft for enforcement along the US-Mexico border 
in the wake of the Vietnam War. That internal history lacks critical reflection on what it 
describes, and therefore I aim to connect the stories contained within it to a more incisive 
analysis. Building on the background materials described above and the work of Gilmore 
(2007), I suggest an alternative theoretical framework for understanding transfers of 
technology between the military and border authorities, exemplified by the refurbishment
of surplus Army helicopters for border enforcement in the post-Vietnam period. This 
addresses my third research question, which was not a substantial focus of Ch. III. 
Finally, drawing on both media reports and the perspectives of my interviewees, I analyze
how border enforcement authorities use helicopters to construct a public image that 
legitimizes the escalation of enforcement while downplaying their active role in its 
consequences. I conclude with a brief discussion of ‘illiberal governance’ (Corva 2008), 
which provides a unifying perspective on the multiple uses of helicopters in bordering 
and connects my questions of public representation and the political-economic 
determinants of bordering practices.
79
Helicopters in the modern borderlands
In Ch. III, I noted that the humanitarian aid workers I spoke to had few 
recollections of government-operated fixed-wing aircraft. By contrast, all of the 
individuals I spoke to reported seeing and hearing helicopters regularly when working 
close to the border, and could describe the uses of those helicopters with some familiarity.
“I’ve been buzzed by helicopters numerous times,” B. told me. “To where they get
so low, to where you can see the [pilot] sitting there […] So they get extremely low” 
(Personal communication, October 29, 2020). “I’ve had helicopters fly low over me. I 
could send you a picture of one of them doing that,” K. offered (Personal communication,
November 22, 2020). She shared multiple cell phone photos of the helicopters she had 
seen in person.23 Both B. and K. spend most of their time in the zone south of Tucson, 
Arizona. Interviewees in California described helicopter activity that was initially 
obtrusive but gradually became less noticeable. “Before, they would do a lot more 
hovering around and hover and wait until someone would come up to us on foot,” J. 
recalled. This prolonged observation became less common with time. “They know who 
we are, so they probably recognize us at this point,” he surmised. Eventually, a 
helicopter’s presence can become routine. “When it first started happening, it was a little 
upsetting,” J. said. But now, “we take it fairly lightly.” “We’re used to it,” A. confirmed 
(Personal communications, October 13, 2020). 
But not all interviewees felt that these encounters faded into the background. K., 
asked if helicopters flying overhead ever felt routine or normal, simply answered, “No” 
(Personal communication, November 22, 2020). W. said that the experience gave him 
23 The photos show an Airbus LUH-72 ‘Lakota’ helicopter, which is flown by the National Guard in 
support of CBP, rather than by CBP’s own Air and Marine Operations branch. As described on p. 34, 
this kind of institutional convolution has been the historical norm in border enforcement.
80
greater insight into the experiences of migrants:
It gives me just a little taste of how that thing functions as an instrument of fear 
and intimidation. Otherwise, you understand Border Patrol is limited by the 
landscape and how they can move through it, and if you’re close to a road or far 
from a road and the assumptions you might have about your security at any one 
particular moment, and then the helicopter can just come out of nowhere, really 
fast. (Personal communication, November 7, 2020)
This observation closely parallels what Butler (2001) wrote about aircraft in the early 20th
century: they give the impression of being geography-defying, unaffected by the rugged 
terrain of the borderlands and its obstacles to human mobility.  Like W., G. stated that 
being unexpectedly ‘buzzed’ by a low-flying helicopter provided some insight into the 
experience of migrants: 
Those instances, when the helicopters come almost out of nowhere, and are right 
above you, so close that they’re kicking up gravel and it feels kind of dangerous, 
those moments are really intense and are way scarier than other forms of 
surveillance for us […] When they’ve mistaken us for migrants, we’ve gotten a 
sense of what that’s like. And it’s terrifying. (Personal communication, September
7, 2021). 
The abrupt arrival of a helicopter is likely to be most alarming or intimidating to first-
time migrants who have never experienced it before. Volunteers who traverse the 
borderlands regularly year after year may gradually become more accustomed to aerial 
enforcement operations. Similarly, some guides, G. noted, have crossed “hundreds of 
times” and thus may become “more comfortable with the everyday violence and 
surveillance that exists,” possibly including the experience of helicopter overflight. But, 
like W. and K., he suggested that the experience never truly becomes routine. “Even in 
my many years out there, and the couple dozen times I’ve been buzzed by a helicopter, 
it’s still really scary and unpredictable,” he said. “Even more so as someone who doesn’t 
have the kind of citizen protection that I have” (Personal communication, September 7, 
81
2021). Helicopters, he noted, rarely operate in isolation: their presence often heralds the 
arrival of agents on foot, or on ATVs, who may “ambush” migrants as they attempt to 
avoid the aircraft and its rotor wash. Whether because of the sheer physical presence of 
the aircraft, or the knowledge of what its presence portends, the helicopter retains the 
power to evoke significant fear in the borderlands.
Multiple interviewees suggested that the patterns they observed in their local area 
might not necessarily hold true in other sectors of the border. For instance, J., who 
primarily works near or just east of San Diego, believed that helicopters might be more 
common elsewhere:
I think that there’s more helicopter use probably in areas like far eastern 
California and then Arizona and New Mexico and Texas, just because there’s a lot
less towns along the border and a lot less infrastructure where Border Patrol can 
drive along. And the areas out in Arizona, there will be valleys out there like 40, 
50 miles long, that you can’t access in a vehicle—if you even can—for hours 
upon hours. (Personal communication, October 13, 2020) 
The relationship between existing infrastructure (particularly roads) and the feasibility of 
border enforcement has also been noted by Boyce, who writes, “[I]n areas like Arizona’s 
Altar Valley, where there are only two paved roads and roughly 900 square miles of 
difficult, mountainous terrain, agents were unable to physically access many areas—let 
alone identify or track unauthorized movement” (2016, p. 249). In such areas, the 
geography-defying capabilities of helicopters are of more obvious value to authorities 
who wish to maintain surveillance and control. The presumption of local geographic 
variation in helicopter deployment and tactics is certainly plausible.
And W., who provides aid to migrants in the area near Ajo, Arizona, also noted the
influence of military airspace on CBP flight operations. The state of Arizona contains 32 
areas of militarily restricted airspace, so designated because they host “live-fire ranges, 
82
dog fight arenas, UAS activity, tethered balloons, or other uses incompatible with GA 
[general aviation] flights” (Arizona Pilots Association 2020). The largest is the Barry M. 
Goldwater range, which covers approximately 1.7 million acres. The Air Force, Air 
National Guard, and Marine Corps all use this range for training, including strafing and 
bombing practice in some zones. On its western side, the range abuts the border for a 
linear distance of nearly 40 miles. On its eastern side, the range is separated from the 
border by Cabeza Prieta Wildlife Refuge, Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, and 
the Tohono O’odham Reservation. Urrea notes that “the deadly area of the bombing 
range” is also a natural migration corridor, “hemmed in on either side by the ABC 
[Antelope, Baker, Copper] mountains and the Gilas” (2004, p. 213). W. believes the 
proximity of this militarized airspace was one reason that CBP’s aerial presence in his 
general area was relatively less intense: 
Of course the Border Patrol does have more access to the bombing range than 
most people, certainly than we do, but I think they still are limited at certain times
[…] It does seem that the Border Patrol helicopter does not fly around there freely
the way we see it flying in other places” (Personal communication, November 7, 
2020)
Generally, interviewees in southern Arizona reported the most frequent and 
closest interactions with helicopters. Interviewees in the San Diego area reported less 
frequent interactions. One interviewee in south Texas, C., was familiar enough with 
helicopter operations in that region to note a distinct pattern of activity. “You can tell, if 
there’s a helicopter about, that they’re onto a group,” he said, suggesting that CBP only 
mobilizes its helicopters when it detects or observes a relatively sizable group of migrants
traveling together. But he also added, “I don’t see it that often” (Personal communication,
February 2, 2021). These anecdotal observations are not, on their own, sufficient to 
83
generate a comprehensive map of the varying intensity of aerial enforcement activity. 
They suggest significant regional variations influenced by infrastructure and terrain. At 
the same time, they clearly demonstrate that helicopters are by far the most commonly 
observed type of government aircraft across the borderlands today. 
Having established the prominence of helicopters at the border, I now turn to the 
process by which these aircraft were enrolled into the apparatus of border enforcement. 
As in the case of fixed-wing aircraft, full incorporation of this technology did not happen 
all at once. In fact, it began with a technological dead-end. 
Autogiros: the false start
Technically, helicopters were not the first rotary-wing aircraft flown for border 
enforcement. In the early 1940s, the Border Patrol briefly experimented with autogiros, 
training three agents to fly the awkward and unreliable machines. Though largely 
forgotten now, autogiros24 were an important predecessor to the helicopter, proving that 
airplanes were not the only possible form of powered, heavier-than-air flight (Leishman 
2004). Forward propulsion was provided by a front-mounted propeller, while an 
unpowered top-mounted rotor provided the lift (see Figure 5, next page).25 
Autogiros possess the ignominious distinction of being not only the first official 
aircraft of the Border Patrol but the first aircraft to result in a Border Patrol fatality. The 
agency’s chief lobbied for the aircraft as early as 1934, and in 1940, the Patrol acquired 
three military-surplus Kellett autogiros. The “overwhelming maintenance requirements” 
meant that the autogiros typically only spent half as much time in the air as they did 
under repair (Broyles et al. 2020, pp. 9 & 11). Pilots reported that the autogiros were “not
24 Also sometimes called ‘gyroplanes’
25 In contrast, on a helicopter the top rotor is powered and provides both lift and propulsion. 
84
well suited for the terrain or the climate” (McKinney 2011, p. 45). The experiment was 
interrupted by World War II—two out of the three agency pilots joined the Army Air 
Corps—and did not last long after the war’s conclusion. Despite significant press 
coverage touting the prowess of these surveillance craft, they were ineffective in actual 
use. Finally, in 1945,  a Border Patrol pilot crashed and died while flying an autogiro in 
Texas. “[T]he autogiro experiment expired with him,” Broyles et al. write (2020, p. 11). 
Figure 5: Two views of an autogiro. The pilot, Ned Henderson, was killed in an autogiro 
crash in 1945. Courtesy of the National Border Patrol Museum, El Paso, Texas
85
Initial adoption in California
It would be almost three decades before rotary-wing aircraft were reintroduced to 
US border enforcement.26 Although US Army commandos tested helicopters in Myanmar 
during World War II and all branches of the military employed helicopters to a limited 
degree in the Korean War, their combat effectiveness was not fully recognized until the 
Vietnam War. That conflict cemented the importance of helicopters in modern military 
operations. Consequentially, it also generated the surpluses of trained pilots, qualified 
mechanics, and available equipment that would eventually enable the Border Patrol to 
adopt this new form of flight. 
According to government records, the Customs Aviation Program had eight 
helicopters in service for narcotics interdiction as early as 1972 (McPhail 1998, p. 7). 
Unfortunately, the history of that program is not as extensively documented as that of the 
Border Patrol, and I have not been able to find information on where or how those 
helicopters were deployed. In contrast, Border Patrol’s incorporation of helicopters into 
air operations had a definite geographic point of origin: the Chula Vista sector,27 in 1976.
Opinions evidently vary on whether the primary initiative came from the local 
sector administrators or from the INS commissioner, former Marine general Leonard 
Chapman. “It is likely that helicopters were being pushed from both ends of the 
command chain,” Broyles et al. write, “although that wasn’t always obvious to those on 
either end” (2020, p. 222). All involved agree that it was the Chula Vista sector in 
particular that inspired the adoption of the aircraft, “due to the level of illegal entry 
26 One newspaper report from 1947 claimed that “along the Rio Grande zone a helicopter snoops for 
border-jumpers” “Citizenship Pleas Hit 40-Year Low”), but this is uncorroborated and almost certainly 
a misunderstanding based on the earlier autogiro flights in Texas.
27 Now the San Diego Sector (UPI 1984).
86
activity in that urban setting and the historic level of nighttime illegal entries there” 
(idem, p. 223). In contrast with the Border Patrol’s cowboy self-image and institutional 
emphasis on sign-cutting, most crossings at this time occurred in or just outside major 
urban areas. The Chula Vista sector, which included the stretch of the border between the 
cities of San Ysidro and Tijuana, was the highest-volume migrant corridor into the US. 
Despite increases in infrastructure and personnel throughout the 1950s and 1960s, “the 
scale of unauthorized immigration across the boundary in the San Diego area increased at
a far greater rate than did the capacity of U.S. authorities” (Nevins 2010, p. 65). 
In 1976, the Border Patrol began using a Hughes 500C helicopter—the civilian 
version of the OH-6 ‘Cayuse’ Light Observation Helicopter developed for the Army—in 
the Chula Vista sector for the first time (see Figure 6, next page). A Border Patrol 
spokesman in San Ysidro told the NYT that his officers were hampered by the “wasteland
of steep-walled canyons” outside the sector’s urban areas, and claimed the helicopter, 
equipped with “a powerful searchlight capable of illuminating 300 square feet of the 
canyons,” would deter gangs who preyed on migrants as well as the migrants themselves 
(Holles 1976). Another NYT reporter documented helicopter activities near San Ysidro in
1979: “Border Patrol helicopters, searchlights blazing and loudspeakers blaring the 
warning ‘go back’ in Spanish, dip and wheel in the inky sky” (Crewdson). This is 
consistent with the account given by Dunn, who states, “The deployment of helicopters to
intimidate would-be undocumented border crossers at night was from the outset a key 
element of the Border Patrol’s use of helicopters” (1996, p. 216). 
Unlike airplanes, the introduction of helicopters in US border enforcement was 
not publicly linked to fears of foreign aircraft entering US territory. That is not to say that
87
helicopters have never prompted such aerial anxiety—in 2010, for instance, Texas 
governor Rick Perry demanded more federal funding for border security after a Mexican 
military helicopter was observed flying over the border, and Representative Ted Poe 
called for the deployment of the National Guard on the same premise (Taylor 2010; 
States News Service 2010).28 The territorial anxiety provoked by the realization that 
airspace remains largely uncontrolled endures. But that anxiety was not a major public 
justification for acquiring helicopters at the time of their initial enrollment into the 
apparatus of enforcement.
Figure 6: One of the Border Patrol's first helicopters, on the beach in Chula Vista Sector 
(now San Diego Sector) in its first year of operations. Courtesy of the National Border 
Patrol Museum, El Paso, Texas.
28 Despite these political protestations, accounts of US helicopters entering Mexico without formal 
permission are at least as common. See, for instance, Rohter 1989, Inter Press Service 1993, and 
Marizco 2005.
88
Deliberately noisy, bright, and obtrusive, helicopters were at first an awkward 
addition to the Border Patrol’s air operations, which (as described in Ch. III) had 
previously prioritized patient sign-cutting and observation in lightweight airplanes. One 
pilot recalled that in the late 1970s, “there was a split culture in Chula Vista Air Ops. 
There were the genteel daytime Cub pilots, and then there were the very strange, socially 
questionable night spooks” who flew helicopters (Broyles et al. 2020, p. 270). 
Helicopters did not lend themselves well to the stealth tactics practiced by some of the 
older pilots. “If you’re flying [the Super Cub] in slow flight, you can fly low over the 
hills and you will fly up on groups of aliens or smugglers, you’ll see them before they 
even hear you,” one of those pilots explained. “In a helicopter, you hear that son of a 
bitch seven or eight miles away” (idem, p. 108). The pilot identity that had grown out of a
mythologized strain of ‘Old West’ frontier-making would have to adapt to encompass this
new platform.
Two internal factors accelerated the transition. One was simple financial 
incentive: “most of the daytime gentleman pilots succumbed to the lure of night 
differential pay and double pay on Sunday, and they got cross-trained into helicopters” 
(Broyles et al. 2020, p. 270). The other was a new altitude restriction on fixed-wing flight
introduced in the late 1980s, which required the Border Patrol’s airplane pilots to stay at 
least 500 feet above the ground when not taking off or landing. The restriction was a 
bureaucratic response to a series of crashes that killed one pilot and injured another. 
Some of the pilots interviewed by Broyles et al. argue that the plane was to blame in 
these crashes—both occurred in the Christen A-1 Husky, rather than the Piper Super Cub
—and that pressure from the manufacturer of the plane in question influenced the 
89
administrative response (pp. 70, 354-355). Regardless, the prohibition of low-altitude 
fixed-wing flight created a new, border-wide aircraft hierarchy almost overnight, favoring
helicopters and the pilots who could fly them.
But there was a significant external factor driving the adoption of helicopters, too. 
As briefly mentioned above, this was the availability of military surplus or 
decommissioned equipment, and the simultaneous availability of military-trained pilots 
with experience flying helicopters for pursuit and intimidation. 
Demobilization and surplus
In the endnotes to his analysis of ‘border militarization,’ Dunn notes the multiple 
connections between the Border Patrol’s acquisition of helicopters and the recently-
concluded US war in Vietnam. The Hughes 500C, in its military configuration, was 
“widely used by the United States in the Vietnam War. All three of the initial pilots had 
served in Vietnam as helicopter pilots. Former [Marine Corps] general turned INS 
commissioner Leonard Chapman encouraged the Border Patrol to begin using 
helicopters” (1996, p. 214). Broyles et al. note the same pattern: pilots trained to fly 
helicopters during the Vietnam War “returned to civilian life, including jobs with the 
Border Patrol” and “brought their enthusiasm for helicopters” with them (2020, p. 221). 
Former military pilots were key to the Border Patrol’s early helicopter operations—one 
former pilot noted that “when the Vietnam era pilots started getting too old to fly […] the 
Patrol didn’t have a big enough pilot pool to draw from” (idem, p. 280). Although I do 
not have exact statistics on the percentage of pilots who previously served in Vietnam,  
anecdotes suggest it was considerable. “The job market was full of pilots,” one veteran 
recalled, “so I took the first job I could: Border Patrol agent […] All of the first Border 
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Patrol helicopter pilots were Vietnam veterans: U.S. Navy, U.S. Marine Corps, U.S. 
Army, with lots of combat decorations” (idem, pp. 663-664). It seems fair to say that the 
Border Patrol’s helicopter program, at its inception, depended upon the expertise of ex-
military pilots.
If some of those pilots took indirect routes from combat flying to border 
enforcement, the equipment they used had a more straightforward path. The first two 
helicopters used in the Chula Vista sector were commercial models, but the agency 
lacked the funding to purchase or lease additional new aircraft. Instead, it turned to the 
Army. As previously mentioned, the Hughes 500C was the commercial-market variant of 
the Army’s OH-6, of which approximately 1400 were built for the Vietnam War. 
Although a majority of those were destroyed in combat, at least 500 were left over after 
the US withdrawal (Porter 2017). And the Army was willing to share. “The OH-6A was 
the airframe of choice simply because the patrol found a source for free airframes,” a 
former chief pilot told Broyles et al. “The operative word is FREE” (2020, p. 225). The 
Department of Defense offered the Border Patrol two OH-6s “on loan at no initial 
acquisition cost” (ibid). Over the next three decades the patrol acquired at least 45 of the 
Army’s surplus OH-6 helicopters, which comprised the majority of the Border Patrol 
rotorcraft fleet (Broyles et al. 2020, p. 228; Dunn 1996, p. 183). Acquisitions from the 
Army allowed the Border Patrol to expand from just two helicopters in 1976, to nine 
helicopters in five sectors by 1982, 22 deployed across all southwest border sectors by 
1988, and 58 by 199229 (Dunn 1996, pp. 43, 150-151, 183). Some of the helicopters 
obtained from the Army in this period “had bullet holes still in them,” and required 
29 The growth between 1988 and 1992 may be attributable in part to the prohibition on low-altitude fixed-
wing flight, discussed above. 
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repainting to cover their military-standard olive drab with the Border Patrol’s white and 
green livery (Broyles et al. 2020, pp. 227, 246). An Inter-Service Support Agreement 
between the El Paso Border Patrol sector and the Army’s Fort Bliss allowed the patrol to 
depend on military mechanics for spare parts supply and maintenance in those initial 
years (idem, p. 227). If the Piper Super Cub was the signature airplane of the Border 
Patrol, the OH-6 was its signature helicopter, and the backbone of rotary-wing operations 
until the 1990s.30 
As briefly mentioned in Ch. III, this was not the first time that military surpluses 
had bolstered aerial operations along the border. The Army Border Air Patrol, which 
operated briefly between 1919 and 1921, emerged partially as a way to give new purpose 
to some of the aviators and airplanes grounded abruptly at the conclusion of World War I 
(Maurer 1987). The autogiros tested in the early 1940s were also obtained from the Army
(McKinney 2011).31 Demobilization at the end of World War II provided a renewed 
supply of airplanes and qualified pilots (Broyles et al. 2020, pp. 13, 246-247). In this 
regard, the Border Patrol’s acquisition of helicopters from the Army beginning in the late 
1970s continued a pattern that had been established decades prior.
Nor were helicopters the only technology transferred from Vietnam to the border. 
The first physical border ‘wall’ (as opposed to just a fence) was constructed from leftover
‘Marston Mats,’ perforated steel planks used as helicopter landing mats during the war 
(Nevins 2010, p. 99; Dunn 1996, p. 66). The electronic sensors that formed the core of 
30 As one journalist wrote in 1996, “Twenty-five years ago, the Army helicopter was likely loaded with 
ammunition and wreaking havoc on the deltas of Southeast Asia. A generation later, the surplus OH-
6A, which looks like a fishbowl on skids, has swapped machine guns for infrared cameras” (Schiller). 
31 “Undoubtedly, the Army was pleased to write off their unsuccessful experiment,” Broyles et al. write  
of that case (2020, p. 9). 
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the first ‘virtual wall’ system were developed, at least in part, at the Army’s Electronic 
Proving Ground at Fort Huachuca in southern Arizona—itself a holdout from the Army’s 
days of attempting to stop the cross-border movement of the Chiricahua Apache (Hartt 
1965; Sell 1968). Those sensors were deployed across Vietnam and Laos along the 
‘McNamara Line,’ an attempt to intercept all movement along the Ho Chi Minh Trail 
(Correll 2004). Their feasibility for remote detection proven, the sensors were repurposed
for use along the southwest border beginning in 1970 (Dunn 1996, p. 214; Barkan 1972). 
But helicopters, as Dunn mentions, were one of the most prominent, obvious additions to 
border enforcement (1996, p. 98). Unlike sensors buried in the earth, or steel panels that 
the average observer would not likely recognize as military-surplus equipment, 
helicopters provided clear visible and audible evidence of the military’s influence on 
border enforcement wherever they were deployed.
Dunn portrays helicopters as evidence of the migration of low-intensity conflict 
doctrine into border enforcement efforts (1996, p. 28). Although this is a valid conclusion
to draw, I believe there is a more expansive way to frame the transfer of aircraft and 
pilots between the military and border enforcement, one which helps foreground the 
reciprocal connections between US militarism abroad and domestic border policing. 
Surplus state capacities and militarization
It is useful to view the helicopters acquired from the US Army, the pilots 
experienced in flying them, and even the Army-trained aircraft mechanics as 
manifestations of what Gilmore (2007) calls ‘surplus state capacity.’ Gilmore uses this 
concept to help explain the emergence of the modern prison-industrial complex in 
California, and it is also helpful for understanding the growth of the border enforcement 
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apparatus at this juncture. State capacities, she writes, “are made up of laws and 
lawmakers, offices and other built environments, bureaucrats, budgets, rules and 
regulations, rank-and-file staff, the ability to tax or borrow, and direct access to mass 
communication and education” (2007, p. 78). State capacities, in short, include all those 
human and technological capacities that enable the state to carry out its functions. The 
concept is readily applicable to this particular context. From the example of offices and 
built environments, it is no significant stretch to include vehicles fabricated specifically 
for the war-making elements of the state, like the Army’s OH-6 helicopter. And ex-
military pilots (as well as mechanics) could fit Gilmore’s category of ‘rank-and-file staff.’
All are examples of state capacities developed—through investment, the direction of 
material processes, and deliberate training—for a specific purpose: war in Vietnam. 
The key insight from Gilmore’s analysis, in this context, is that state capacities do 
not simply cease to exist when they are idled or rendered officially extraneous. 
“Technical capacity does not disappear even when certain practices lose legitimacy in the 
eyes of voters, or capitalists, or other key interests,” she writes (2007, p. 113). But the 
collapse of a particular aspect or version of state legitimacy may create a gap between 
what the state can do technically and what the state can do politically, leaving already-
existing technologies and forms of expertise without a politically palatable purpose. The 
US withdrawal from Vietnam, which for the military meant diminished geographical 
reach, a (temporarily) shrinking budget, and the cessation of major combat activities 
(Stewart 2005, pp. 369-377), created a condition of surplus state capacities. The 
equipment built for counterinsurgency warfare and the personnel trained in its use no 
longer had a politically justifiable raison d’etre. Border enforcement offered new space 
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and new legitimacy for the revitalization of these individual, collective, and material 
capacities: the helicopters, the Army mechanics, the larger constellation of defense-
dependent manufacturers and suppliers, and the pilots trained to fly light helicopters at 
low altitudes. Redeploying these capacities in order to reinforce the state’s territory thus 
amounted to a simultaneous ideological and spatial reconfiguration of state capacities for 
the exercise of coercive force. 
I do not mean to suggest that the state simply lifted people and equipment from 
the battlefields of Vietnam and plunked them down in San Ysidro or El Paso—obviously, 
the relationship is not quite so simple as that. To quote Gilmore once again, “surplus state
capacity is not an absolute thing, but rather a quality that can emerge over time” (2007, p.
113). It took time for the Army to decide that its supply of Light Observation Helicopters 
was unnecessarily large.32 It took time for pilots to realize that the flight skills they had 
practiced as part of their military mission were transferable to another context. And it 
took time for Border Patrol officials to realize that those pilots and their skills could be 
assets to its novel program of helicopter operations. One of the first three helicopter pilots
in the Chula Vista sector in 1976 noted that he hadn’t flown an OH-6 since leaving 
Vietnam in 1968, and hadn’t flown any aircraft at all since his departure from the Army 
Reserve in 1972 (Broyles et al. 2020, p. 252). Another recalled, “I did not even have a 
current airplane license” (idem, p. 248). But with time, the surplus state capacities 
emerging from the military’s “post-Vietnam War doldrums” (Stewart 2005, p. 377) 
intersected with the “the rise of neo-restrictionism” in US border politics (Nevins 2010, 
p. 77), resulting in significant changes in the use of aircraft for bordering.
32 One former Border Patrol pilot joked, “I don’t know how many helicopters they had, but they must 
have scrounged around real hard to find the worst ones. At least, that’s what we got.” (Broyles et al. 
2020, p. 246)
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The ‘neo-restrictionism’ to which Nevins refers began in the 1970s. From that 
time onward, “federal government officials and national politicians, along with a 
compliant media, helped to construct the perception of a crisis and to stoke public fears” 
(Nevins 2010, p. 78). Andreas recognizes this phenomenon, too: “Public perception is 
powerfully shaped by the images of the border which politicians, law enforcement 
agencies, and the media project,” he writes (2009, p. 9). Those actors reframed the 
permeability of the border as an intractable, permanent problem necessitating the same 
“continued proliferation of laws, courts, judges, bailiffs, law enforcement personnel, 
technologies of surveillance, helicopters, and other means of domestic warfare” seen in 
the parallel rise of the prison-industrial complex around the same time (Gilmore 2007, p. 
122). The alleged permanency of the border’s unruliness legitimized the increased 
congressional budget appropriations needed to staff and equip an ever-more-militaristic 
border enforcement agency, even in a time generally characterized by ideologically 
driven fiscal austerity at the federal level (Dunn 1996, p. 174; Andreas 2009, p. 89). The 
escalation of border enforcement in the wake of military demobilization can be viewed as
an example of how surplus state capacities, rather than simply vanishing, are often 
redistributed within a new configuration of state authority.
Helicopters were and are a significant factor in the continuing production of the 
perception of crisis. But before I discuss the links between helicopters, media 
representations, and politicians in the remainder of this chapter, I want to reiterate my 
assertion that viewing the proliferation of helicopters in border enforcement as a 
reconfiguration of surplus state capacities is preferable to employing the more common 
and popular framework of ‘border militarization.’ There are two major reasons I advocate
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thinking in terms of transferable state capacities rather than simply ‘militarization.’
The first is that use of the term ‘militarization’ subtly suggests a non-militaristic 
past. Although it is evident that border enforcement today (on both sides of the border) 
includes tactics, equipment, and organizational structures acquired from or based upon 
the military, as well as outright cooperative civil-military efforts like Joint Task Force 
North (Heyman & Campbell 2012), it is a mistake to see today’s militaristic apparatus of 
enforcement as a historical anomaly. Remember that, as was discussed in Ch. II, the US-
Mexico border was established by military conquest and originally policed by the armies 
of those countries. The border remained a military concern for the US during World War I
and the Mexican Revolution, and as was shown in Ch. III, military operations provided 
the first opportunities for the deployment of aircraft to the border. It is mostly true that, as
Heyman and Campbell write, “the U.S. military had minimal involvement with border 
enforcement from 1920 to the 1980s” (2012, p. 84) and that border enforcement in those 
years was not as visible or deliberately militaristic as it is today. But this period of 
relative demilitarization along the border—a period which, we should recall, also 
included the infamous mass deportations known as ‘Operation Wetback,’ commanded by 
the former US Army general Joseph Swing33—is not, in my view, representative of the 
border’s longer history. When we speak of militarization as a modern phenomenon, 
something beginning in the 1970s, we obscure the deeper history of the border and its 
“continuum of violence” (Hernandez 2018, p. 24). A militaristic state presence at the US-
Mexico border is congruent with the longer history of territorial division in that region, 
not a deviation from it. 
33 Swing also participated in Gen. Pershing’s “Punitive Expedition” into Mexico in 1916 (US Citizenship 
and Immigration Services 2020)
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The second reason is that, on a more theoretical level, the term ‘militarization’ 
also implies a one-way relationship in which border enforcement gradually takes on the 
characteristics of warfare but war does not resemble bordering. And although it is easy to 
reach that conclusion when observing the use of military tactics and hardware along the 
US-Mexico border, thinking in this way puts us at risk of ignoring the more complex 
reciprocity between those two categories of state action. The process of bordering and its 
underlying ideal of neatly territorialized national space have long influenced the conduct 
of war. Territorial borders, Williams and Roach write, are “intimately connected to ideas 
of military security and political stability” (2006, p. 4). States often go to war to defend 
their borders, or to expand them. And war can reinforce perceptions of the importance 
and meaningfulness of territorial boundaries. As Kaplan argues, “[T]he nationalisation of 
space is part of the discourses of mobility and freedom that become both generated and 
restricted in times of war. When national space is believed to be penetrated or dissolved, 
governments attempt to redress the situation” (2006, p. 399). In short, war and bordering 
are often intimately linked. We should also remember the role of the US borderlands as a 
developmental zone for some of the technologies of war that are construed as evidence of
border militarization. I have already mentioned the Electronic Proving Ground at Fort 
Huachuca, just north of the border, which helped develop the acoustic and seismic 
sensors used in Vietnam to monitor the movement of ground troops and trucks. Those 
sensors were shortly repurposed for use along the border, the predecessor of 
contemporary ‘smart wall’ initiatives (for more, see p. 124). And I discuss in Ch. V how 
drone aircraft, often cited today as a clear example of border militarization, were tested 
and developed in the borderlands and along the Texas coastline (Chaar López 2018). In 
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addition to serving as testing grounds for military technological development, the 
borderlands have been treated as useful training grounds for military personnel. 
Participation in border enforcement, one military author argues, “provides challenging, 
realistic, and mission essential training for units and individuals” (Southcott 1996, p. 15). 
Joint Task Force North, the US Department of Defense’s ongoing anti-drug and counter-
terrorism mission in the US southwest, is officially justified as improving the combat 
readiness of the troops who participate (“About Us” 2021). Service in the borderlands 
environment is depicted as functionally analogous to other military activities. From the 
abstract to the concrete, these are all reminders that the term ‘border militarization’ masks
—even if unintentionally—a persistent bidirectional relationship between the military 
and border enforcement.
Andreas has argued that one of the false narratives that dominates US discussions 
of border enforcement is the notion of a ‘loss of control.’ “That narrative, he writes, 
“overstates the degree to which the state has been able to control its borders in the past” 
(2009, p. 7). I regard ‘border militarization’ as another potentially misleading narrative, 
because uncritical use of that term overstates the degree to which the border was ever 
disentangled from military force or military activities. The phrase, as Heyman and 
Campbell note, has had “a very sloppy rhetorical career” (2012, p. 77, footnote 2). And 
although it is more linguistically cumbersome (or less politically expedient) to talk about 
the continual reconfiguration of state capacities, I believe this is ultimately a more useful 
intellectual framework to understand the transfers of technology, people, and expertise 
between different components of the state. Moreover, thinking beyond the binary border-
military coupling is essential, because there are also similar transfers occurring between 
99
the border-industrial complex and the carceral apparatus of the state—an equally relevant
relationship if we are trying to comprehend US bordering today. 
Helicopters are far from the only example of technological and ideological 
slippage between branches of the state, but they provide a particularly apt case study 
because of how directly they connect the shrinkage of one state agency to the expansion 
of another. While the US Army downsized, the US Border Patrol grew. 
Representational power
Once added to the technological arsenal of border enforcement, helicopters 
frequently filled the same functions as the airplanes that preceded them. Although they 
opened up the possibility of greatly expanded night flying—thanks in no small part to a 
custom searchlight system fabricated by a Border Patrol mechanic, which allowed for 
unusually agile positioning of the craft’s quadruple lights (Broyles et al. 2020, pp. 403-
405)—and intimidation, helicopters were often still employed in the typical tasks of the 
fixed-wing era, including tracking and sign-cutting, coordinated apprehension efforts 
with ground agents, and farm or ranch checks. But helicopters were also pressed into 
service for a new task: providing tours to press and politicians.
It is not clear when precisely this practice began. As mentioned in Ch. III, the 
photographs of aerial patrol and alleged interception published by the LAT in 1938 could 
not have been taken unless the photographer was flying in another airplane alongside the 
government aircraft (see pp. 58-59). Reporters also joined Border Patrol pilots for ride-
alongs (or fly-alongs) in 1950 (“Mexican ‘Wetbacks’ Crossing Border…”), 1959 
(Hillinger), 1967 (Hillinger) and 1972 (Baskerville). However, I have found no 
documented cases of politicians doing the same prior to the introduction of helicopters. 
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Tours for elected representatives and appointed officials seem to have begun in 1977, the 
year after the Border Patrol acquired its first helicopters. According to a retrospective 
LAT column published four years later, INS commissioner Leonel Castillo “made his 
contribution to the immigration service’s illegal entry statistics by manning the 
searchlight of a border patrol helicopter while it hovered over a group of Mexican 
nationals who were trying to sneak into the country from Tijuana” (del Olmo 1981).34 The
use of helicopters to provide border tours to public officials is thus nearly as old as the 
use of helicopters for enforcement, but has not yet been considered in academic analysis.
An unidentified congressman apparently followed Castillo’s example in 1979. An 
LAT reporter described him as operating the vaunted searchlight with “a child’s 
excitement” (Scheer). In 1983, Attorney General William French Smith became at least 
the third political figure to assume searchlight duty, “spending part of Thursday night 
operating spotlights from a swift Border Patrol helicopter” (Freed; see also Houseman 
1983). Controlling the light seems to have been an experience offered only in the early 
days of the practice, but the tours themselves continued. In 1989, INS western region 
commissioner Harold Edzell flew for just 10 minutes in the inaugural voyage of a new 
Aerospatiale AS-350 helicopter before declaring it “fantastic!” (Barfield). Bob Martinez, 
then director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, took a 30-minute helicopter 
ride over the San Diego sector in 1991 in order to, in his words, “get a feel for the flavor 
of the problem out here” (McDonnell). 
There are fewer reports of such tours from the early 1990s to the early 2000s. 
After this apparent lull, however, helicopter tours took off again. Senator Harry Reid flew
34 del Olmo was ahead of his time in bluntly identifying the trope of the “obligatory first-hand look,” 
noting that “it always makes for colorful articles and dramatic TV footage,” but also “makes illegal 
immigration seem like little more than an international game of cops and robbers” (1981). 
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over the San Diego sector in 2006 (Berestein), and Speaker of the House J. Dennis 
Hastert flew a congressional delegation to the Border Patrol’s remote Camp Grip in 
Arizona the same year (Hurt).35 In 2008, Representative Mary Fallin, CBP Commissioner 
W. Ralph Basham, Attorney General Michael Mukasey, and Senator Jon Kyl all took 
tours (States News Service; Gilbert; Mukasey; Reynolds). Fallin claimed she “was 
present when officers apprehended illegal aliens trying to penetrate the fence” (Office of 
Rep. Mary Fallin 2008); similar claims would feature in more and more of the post-flight 
press conferences or press releases going forward. Representative Ted Poe, for instance, 
claimed that from his helicopter he could see something he decided was “obviously a 
smuggling operation getting ready to take place on the Mexican side of the river […]  a 
drug cartel apparently, in my opinion, was loading up duffel bags” (Office of Rep. Ted 
Poe 2009). Senator John Barasso declared, “I saw an unsecure [sic] border,” after flying 
with the Texas National Guard that same year (Office of Sen. John Barrasso 2009).
Helicopter tours continued apace throughout the 2010s. During that time, 
passengers on flights over the border have included the chief counsel of ICE (Smith 
2010), the secretary of the Department of the Interior and multiple secretaries of the 
Department of Homeland Security36 (Daly 2010; Spagat 2013; U.S. Dept. of Homeland 
Security 2017), the governors of Arizona, Louisiana and Texas (Silva 2013; Deslatte 
2014; Targeted News Service 2017), the Speaker of the House of Representatives (Ryan 
2017), and senators and representatives from numerous states (see, e.g., Legal Monitor 
2013; US Fed News 2017). And, of course, the practice continues through the present: as 
35 In an unusual reversal of the regular pattern, Hastert reportedly allowed Border Patrol agents to use one
of his delegation’s helicopters for a marijuana seizure mission during his visit (Hurt 2006).
36 This includes one acting DHS secretary, Chad Wolf, whose appointment was later ruled unlawful 
(Ingram 2020). 
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described in Ch. I, March 2021 saw a flurry of helicopter tours by federal and state-level 
legislators (see p. 1). This list is almost certainly incomplete. 
Although one might be able to find temporal correlations between some of the 
tours cited above and electoral cycles, legislative debates, or other moments of political 
opportunity, what interests me most about these aerial tours is not the timing nor the 
precise identities of the individual passengers. Rather, what stands out is the gradually 
expanding role of helicopters as tools for sustaining a specific vision of the border that 
legitimates the continuing escalation of enforcement activities. Helicopters, while 
actively serving as instruments of enforcement in the larger matrix of complementary 
technologies that comprise the border enforcement apparatus, also function as tools of 
communication. They agents of border enforcement to show the border as they see it to 
officials and representatives—and, simultaneously, to avoid any potential contact with 
migrants on the ground that might complicate that vision. Back in 1979, when the LAT 
noted that an unidentified congressman worked the spotlight on a Border Patrol 
helicopter during an aerial tour, it also reported that his “child’s excitement” dissipated 
when the figures in the beam proved to be “fathers, mothers, children, mechanics, farm 
hands, Catholics—huddled masses, as the Statue of Liberty says” (Scheer 1979). The 
counter-institutional humanizing potential of such encounters can be more easily avoided 
when observers are kept high(er) in the air. Helicopter tours provide a facade of intimacy,
allowing representatives and officials to claim they’ve seen the border firsthand while 
simultaneously distancing them from the broader scope of enforcement efforts or the 
tangible consequences of enforcement policy.
Both Nevins (2010, p. 78) and Andreas (2009, p. 9) have argued that public 
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perceptions of the border can be significantly influenced by politicians, government 
officials, law enforcement agencies, and, of course, the media. Pre-arranged helicopter 
tours are a striking example of how that process operates. The practice provides 
predictably dramatic visuals, as well as convenient press conferences in which political 
figures can tout their newly acquired aerial bona fides and enforcement administrators 
can piggyback on an eager media audience. It is, as del Olmo observed in 1981, “quick 
and easy publicity.” But it is not simply publicity for politicians themselves. These 
heavily choreographed tours also reinforce public perception of the border as a problem 
unto itself, generally concentrating attention on the question of intensified enforcement 
rather than on the legitimacy or sensibility of the US bordering regime writ large. In this 
regard, helicopters provide a type of value to enforcement authorities beyond their actual 
capability to traverse rugged terrain, increase apprehensions, or otherwise contribute 
directly to the control of motion across the border line. And clearly, the Border Patrol has 
concluded that the communicative power of helicopters exceeds that of trucks, ATVs, or 
other possible vehicles in which visiting political figures might be guided into position to 
observe the ongoing maintenance of territorial division.37 
In addition to facilitating the alignment of politicians, press, and media to 
reinforce a particular public perception of the border, helicopters also feature prominently
in Customs and Border Protection’s contemporary representation of itself. Specifically, 
helicopters are cited as life-saving tools and thus used as evidence that CBP is a humane, 
caring agency, conveniently eliding the agency’s role—and helicopters’ specific 
contribution—in creating the lethal scenarios from within which migrants ultimately 
37 Perhaps that is attributable to the ‘geography-defying’ nature of aircraft: they allow visiting officials to 
get from base to border and back as rapidly as possible, unencumbered by terrain in between.
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require rescue.  Humanitarian justifications for airplane patrols were not common in the 
newspaper articles I located in my research. One LAT article on the Coast Guard aerial 
patrols of the late 1930s did highlight planes’ potential use for providing aid to stranded 
travelers or isolated communities (Arnold 1938). Aside from that, press coverage stressed
the enforcement capabilities of aircraft. But since helicopters were introduced to the 
Border Patrol, the agency’s spokespeople and press releases have consistently framed the 
aircraft as search-and-rescue assets. 
Such framing was evident from the first major expansion of the Border Patrol’s 
helicopter fleet. Although pilots of the era attest that the initial decision to acquire 
helicopters in 1976 was driven by internal agency perception that the Chula Vista sector 
was “completely unmanageable” and “being overrun” by migrants (Broyles et al. 2020, 
pp. 250 & 252), administrators framed the acquisition of eight more helicopters in 1980 
as motivated by humanitarian concerns. Acting INS commissioner David Crosland stated 
that the OH-6 helicopters transferred from the Department of Defense would “be used for
rescue operations in remote desert and mountain areas as well as for general surveillance 
programs” (Associated Press 1980). The same rationale was offered when the Border 
Patrol acquired its first AS-350 in 1988, and when the Border Patrol received a UH-1 
“Huey” a decade later (Barfield 1989; Sanchez 1998). The Huey, a Border Patrol 
spokesman stated, would be used to bring agents in the specialized Search, Trauma, and 
Rescue unit—known as BORSTAR—into “remote parts of eastern San Diego county.” 
Tellingly, he added that the helicopter would not “be used regularly to airlift injured 
people” (Sanchez 1998). Delivering agents was a priority; transporting migrants, 
apparently, was not. 
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That said, Border Patrol and CBP helicopters have been used at least semi-
regularly to transport exhausted, ill, or injured border crossers to hospitals. One of the 
reasons we know this is that the agency reliably issues press releases or statements to 
reporters that highlight occasions when its aircraft have been used for search and rescue 
missions. “[T]he Border Patrol often touts its search-and-rescue operations as evidence of
the agency’s humanitarian priorities,” Cantú asserts (2018, p. 260), and indeed, in the 
course of my research I found dozens of press releases and news reports from 1999 
onward that specifically mentioned the use of a Border Patrol or CBP helicopter for 
search and rescue.38 That count is certainly incomplete—I am confident that a more 
painstaking trawl of all border enforcement press releases from that period would 
generate even more examples. Still, I believe it is substantial enough to demonstrate that 
border enforcement authorities consistently emphasize the search and rescue capabilities 
of their aircraft in order to deliberately construct associations between helicopters and 
humanitarian aid, and thereby shape the public perception of their operations. “These 
aircraft have been real life savers out in the ranchlands,” one CBP official in McAllen, 
Texas told a local newspaper. “They are literally saving lives every day” (Hernandez 
2015). This is the image that the agency wants to project. But despite agency assertions, 
there is also substantial evidence demonstrating that helicopters are not used solely for 
beneficent purposes, and are in fact employed to enhance the violence—and the lethality
—of US border enforcement policy in the southwest. 
38 These include, chronologically: Associated Press 1999; Gross 2000a, 2000b, 2000c; Union-Tribune 
2000, Associated Press 2000a, 2000b; Marquis 2001; Nieves 2002; Associated Press 2002; Marizco 
2003a, 2003b; Turf 2003; Rico 2004; U.S. Customs and Border Protection 2005, 2007; Associated 
Press 2009; U.S. Customs and Border Protection 2009, 2010, 2011a, 2011b; Sherman 2013; Carroll 
2015; Galvan 2015; Hernandez 2015; U.S. Customs and Border Protection 2017. 
106
Contesting official representations
The overarching strategy of US border enforcement since the 1990s is known as 
‘prevention through deterrence,’ and entails the weaponizing of the landscape against 
migrants (see Ch. II, pp. 21-25). In 2016, the activist groups No More Deaths/No Mas 
Muertes and La Coalición de Derechos Humanos published the first volume of The 
Disappeared Report, which seeks to explain “the disappearance of tens of thousands of 
migrants and refugees in the expansive wilderness north of the US-Mexico border” 
(NMD/CDDH 2016a, p. 3). This report, based on a survey of migrants and analysis of 
calls to the Missing Migrant Crisis Line (NMD/CCDH 2016b, p. 5), makes deliberate 
mention of the role of helicopters.
 “Border Patrol agents chase border crossers through the remote terrain and utilize
the landscape as a weapon to slow down, injure, and apprehend them,” the report states 
(NMD/CCDH 2016b, p. 3). These pursuits also cause groups to fragment, which in turn 
“causes individuals to become disoriented, lost, and empty-handed: many border crossers
perish during the prolonged exposure to the elements that results” (idem, p. 7). Although 
these ‘chase and scatter’ operations39 can occur whether the pursuing agents are on foot, 
driving, or flying, the report contends that aircraft are particularly effective at 
fragmenting—and thus further endangering—groups of migrants. “The number of people
who became lost after a chase involving a helicopter was significantly higher than the 
number of people who became lost after a chase without a helicopter,” the authors state. 
“Helicopters’ presence in the sky terrorizes people who are crossing” (idem, pp. 18-19). 
39 Although CBP does not officially acknowledge ‘chase and scatter’ as an approved or routine tactic, all 
of my interviewees used the phrase. This reflects both widespread recognition of a  strategy and, 
potentially, the reach of The Disappeared Report within the larger humanitarian/activist community in 
the borderlands.
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As I mentioned earlier in this chapter, part of the helicopter’s power to evoke fear is its 
physical presence. Helicopters are loud, they carry blinding spotlights, and the wind 
created by their rotor wash is significant. But CBP helicopters evoke fear in other ways, 
too: “Often times there’s an agent sitting on the side of the helicopter with an assault 
rifle,” G. said. Beyond the direct threat implied by an armed agent on board, helicopters 
also signal the impending arrival of other agents—also armed—whom migrants may 
regard as additional threats. “People know that Border Patrol is a violent organization that
has basically total impunity,” G. told me. “There’s no sense of having any kind of real 
protection when they’re out there” (Personal communication, September 7, 2021). 
Between the helicopter’s physical presence and its role as the advance guard of a law 
enforcement agency with a well-established reputation for violence, corruption, and 
general lawlessness (Graff 2014), it is not difficult to understand how its arrival could 
create terror. 
“The other methods that they use for scattering that aren’t helicopters are, like, 
calling out common Spanish names, having dogs to chase people, that sort of thing,” J., 
who works in the San Diego area of California, said. “So it’s really with the intention of 
breaking up a group. The helicopter’s just another way of doing that.” She believes that 
scattering does not increase the number of apprehensions or arrests made by the Border 
Patrol, but instead “is done with intent to get people lost.” And although she noted, 
above, that there are multiple ways of scattering a group, she speculated that helicopters 
were likely more effective in doing so than other methods: “I don’t know for a fact. But I 
would think so. If you think about how scary and loud a helicopter is, and knowing that 
they could see you from a really high vantage point, you would run longer and faster. 
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That’s just my assumption” (Personal communication, October 13, 2020). 
“It creates fear,”  K., who primarily works in the areas south of Tucson, Arizona, 
agreed. “But what they do is they kill people in the process. Because we hear stories all 
the time—‘What happened to you?’ ‘Oh, the helicopter came and we ran and we couldn’t
find our group again’” (Personal communication, November 22, 2020). 
Not all of my interviewees were certain that scattering was always an intentional 
tactic. “It’s not uncommon to run into migrants who were part of a group that got chased 
or scattered,” M. recalled of their experiences in the same zone south of Tucson. “I don’t 
know how much of it is deliberately trying to disorient them or whether it’s just a natural 
reaction to Border Patrol’s appearance for everybody to run in different directions” 
(Personal communication, October 22, 2020). But the distinction is perhaps unimportant: 
ultimately, what is the practical difference between a pilot flying low in order to 
deliberately scatter a group and a pilot flying low without caring whether or not a group 
scatters? Either way, the outcome is the same, and “too common to be dismissed as the 
acts of a few rogue agents” (NMD/CDDH 2016a, p. 8). 
There may be geographic variation in the practice. “It’s not the most frequent, 
from what I hear, at least in our area, method of scattering people, but it is one way that 
they do it,” J. said, referring to the areas of San Diego and Imperial County (Personal 
communication, October 13, 2020). “I don’t believe it’s happening as much [in Texas],” 
C. said. “It may not be where there’s a lot of trees, a lot of tree cover, a lot of cactus, and 
a lot of brush. Right? So it may not be as effective as if it was out there in the mountains 
where there’s very little vegetation, in Arizona” (Personal communication, February 2, 
2021). Everyone I spoke to in Arizona was familiar with the use of helicopters for 
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scattering groups, and The Disappeared Report is a product of two Arizona-based groups 
who interact primarily with migrants crossing through that state. Regional variations in 
land ownership (federally vs. privately owned land), associated airspace rights, and 
terrain may influence the local prevalence of the tactic. But it is notable that the tactic has
been most thoroughly documented in the areas where migrant traffic increased the most 
following the implementation of prevention through deterrence—the Arizona deserts 
(Madsen 2007, pp. 283 & 285). In that regard, it is logical to speak of ‘chase and scatter’ 
as an additional layer of violence built on top of existing border strategy.
Determining exactly how widespread the practice is at this time would require 
additional data sources. But my interviewees were firm that the practice is routine and 
ongoing: “It’s something they deny. Border Patrol denies that they do that. But it’s real. 
It’s real,” B. insisted (Personal communication, October 29, 2020). “I wouldn’t say every 
case, but probably a majority of cases [in which migrants sought aid] people will describe
some incident involving being chased and scattered by Border Patrol and the helicopter is
often part of that,” W. affirmed. “I’ve never seen people physically being scattered, but I 
have on many occasions seen the helicopter, from a distance or not that far away, down 
really low, clearly working something in the brush” (Personal communication, November
7, 2020). “I’ve seen this happen,” K. claimed. “They’re not supposed to do this but I’ve 
seen this happen […] We have been told that they weren’t supposed to do that. And yet 
we’ve all seen them doing it” (Personal communication, November 22, 2020). 
Multiple interviewees suggested that the danger created by helicopter scattering 
operations could be even greater when those operations occur at night. “I’d say that 
Border Patrol interactions in general are scarier at night, and helicopters as well,” G. told 
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me (Personal communication, September 7, 2021). Darkness increases the odds that 
someone separated from their group will lose their bearings, J. explained: “Once you get 
lost from where you’re going… if you’re getting scattered at night time, with all these 
crazy lights and sound, and you don’t know where you’re going […] when it’s daylight, 
everything looks the same. You have no idea where you’re at” (Personal communication, 
October 13, 2020). W., based in Ajo, Arizona,  expressed a similar idea in greater detail: 
My sense is that the Border Patrol helicopter is most effective as a tool of 
intimidation and fear when it's used at night, which it often is. They fly with their 
lights off, and I've run into it in those situations too, and it's even more 
disorienting. Because that's when it can be basically right on top of you, you start 
to hear it, but you can't see it, and then maybe the last minute they'll turn their 
lights on, spotlight on, something like that. That's, I think, a really important 
piece. And then it's probably most effective and most dangerous as a scattering 
tool when used at night, you know? When people run at night it's much easier to 
fall or become injured, or get lost from the rest of your group, get disoriented. So 
I suspect... I've had a few nighttime encounters with the helicopters and I can only
imagine that it's probably most effective at night.  (Personal communication, 
November 7, 2020)
Note the mention of the spotlight, which was introduced as part of the helicopter system 
decades ago and retains its power as a tool of intimidation. AMO pilots are able to fly 
with their lights off when using night-vision goggles (Broyles et al. 2020, pp. 535, 645, 
679). Combining that capability with knowledge of the local terrain that allows them to 
remain unseen as long as possible, pilots maximize the disorienting effects of sudden 
noise, blinding light, and physically destabilizing rotor wash. Night flights are 
consequential because in many areas along the border daytime temperatures are too hot 
for crossers to move safely without risking dehydration or heatstroke. Moving at night 
offers some respite from the environmental risks of the journey, as well as a decreased 
chance of visual detection. But night flights alter that calculus, transforming the potential 
safety advantage of the night into yet another danger. They thus further enhance the 
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hostility of borderlands terrain, rendering it more dangerous to crossers, and a more 
effective ally to the institutions of enforcement. 
My interviewees pointed out that the humanitarian posture CBP assumes in its 
press releases, public statements, and other forms of self-representation is at odds with 
the ongoing policy decisions that uphold prevention through deterrence and push 
migrants into increasingly dangerous situations. And they identified the helicopter as a 
particularly clear embodiment of this deceptive dualism: the same helicopter that arrives 
to rescue a desperate border crosser may have been used the night before to disperse that 
person’s group. Nearly all of my interviewees expressed some variation of this essential 
point. I quote from multiple interviews below to demonstrate how widespread this view 
was among my respondents. (Emphasis has been added.)
They were trying to present themselves as a search and rescue organization, you 
know. They would really highlight their search and rescue work. Which was 
always really dubious […] I think one of the basic ironies, contradictions, of it, is 
the helicopter that rescues people is also the helicopter that chases them and 
scatters them. It's like, alright, we're going to fly this helicopter out and harass 
you two or three times over the course of a week, and at the end of the week, 
when you give up, then we're going to go and rescue you. [...] No doubt, there's 
people who are in the middle of nowhere or something and might otherwise die 
and the helicopter shows up and picks them up and they live. So, call that a 
rescue, I suppose. But then that helicopter's also chasing people and causing a 
whole lot of pain and no doubt causing deaths. (W., personal communication, 
November 7, 2020)
The helicopter would come in and do what they call dusting. It would fly low over
the group and it would pick up all this dust and little pebbles and that. First it 
would scare the people and split the group up. […] Back then they started 
using it for that also, but for rescues. They also use the helicopters for rescues 
and for search […] at the beginning, I would say it was used mostly for the 
scattering of groups. (O., personal communication, October 22, 2020)
But, see, that's what kind of strange about it. We [the US] try to kill them on one
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hand, and then we try to rescue them on the other. It's a contradiction. (K., 
personal communication, November 22, 2020)
They're wonderful at PR. […] 'This year, we've rescued 300 people,' or whatever 
it might be. It's like, wait a minute—you can't have it both ways! You can't set up 
a system where you're creating these situations and then you go in to save 
someone, you act like you're saving them. Wait! You created this system where 
you put them in danger, to create what happened to them, and now you're 
claiming that you're the hero? No. […] We're gonna create this situation, and 
then we're gonna go in and save people from a situation that we've created, 
because we've made them vulnerable. Come on. (B., personal communication, 
October 29, 2020)
One of the things that we emphasize is that they paint themselves to be the 
heroes in a problem of their making […] But the problem is that so many 
people are dying as a result of this push and pull—that they're orchestrating, 
honestly. (A., personal communication, October 13, 2020)
This is an incisive perspective that resituates the technology and the tactics of border 
enforcement agents in the larger context of their work. These interviewees do not 
attribute danger solely to the environment itself, as CBP generally does, but to the 
combination of a hazardous natural environment and deliberate policy decisions that 
concentrate enforcement around the least hazardous routes across the border, thereby 
pushing potential migrants toward more remote and more dangerous areas. “The system, 
the policy, sets the crisis,” C. in Texas told me. “When you have ‘prevention by 
deterrence,’ you are creating people going to the more remote areas […] and that’s not 
going to deter people” (Personal communication, February 2, 2021). “The obvious effect 
of all of this is it pushes people into more remote, more treacherous terrain,” G. said 
(Personal communication, September 7, 2021). By emphasizing how the infrastructure of 
desert rescue also contributes to the desert’s violence—that the helicopter which rescues 
somebody may have been the same helicopter that separated them from their group and 
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pursued them to exhaustion—these activists contest the facade of benevolence projected 
by Customs and Border Protection. 
Multiple interviewees also stated that rescues are not a priority for CBP, and that 
the agency’s supposedly comprehensive knowledge of the borderlands conveniently 
vanishes when volunteers attempt to recruit help for migrants in distress. O. said she 
believed agents were not doing as much as they could to help locate missing persons:
With the knowledge that they have of the desert area, because they’re out there 
every day, the agents are out there every day on foot and in the air […] if I tell 
you, ‘OK, I left this person’ or ‘I saw this person that was laying there on the 
ground in this area,’ or they call in and report, ‘We left somebody in this area,’ 
they [CBP] can’t find them for several days? Or several months? […] I think they 
could do more. Because like I’ve said, I’ve heard several stories where people 
have reported […] ‘We called and nobody came,’ or they come and search for a 
while and then they leave because they couldn’t find anything. (Personal 
communication, October 22, 2020)
K. described the frustrating process of trying to communicate her location to an agent 
over the phone:
I told him exactly where we were, how many miles I'd gone and what the road 
numbers were. And he goes, ‘Oh, we don't use the road numbers. We have our 
own system.’ And I said, ‘That's fine. We have our own system too [...] But we 
also know what the public uses, and I think it's a good idea that you might have a 
map of the Forest Service roads so if another layperson calls you you'll be able to 
know where they are.’ And he says, ‘Well, we're looking for a map right now.’ 
And I go, ‘What a good idea.’ (Personal communication, November 22, 2020)
In contrast with that agent’s insistence on an unknown, institutionally-specific system for 
establishing location, consider the story of R., who has assisted with humanitarian aid and
recovery of remains in both California and Texas for many years:
We know the border pretty well, because we’ve been doing it for years. 
Sometimes I’ve even gotten just a photograph of where they were, and I was able 
to identify the spot, and notify the authorities in that area and they were able to fly
a helicopter in there and rescue that person. (Personal communication, January 25,
2021)
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These anecdotal accounts of CBP being unwilling to mobilize its geographic knowledge 
or its geography-defying equipment for rescue purposes are reinforced by the third 
volume of The Disappeared Report, which found that CBP initiated search and rescue 
efforts in only a third of cases where such efforts were requested (NMD/CDDH 2021, p. 
6). Often, the kind of bureaucratic defenses described by my interviewees are deployed: 
“Agents frequently state that they can’t search for a missing person unless that person has
placed a direct call to 911 from the field, and Border Patrol has been given exact GPS 
coordinates traced by 911 dispatchers” (idem, p. 21). Other times, the agency simply does
not respond to requests for assistance (idem, p. 22). The authors of this report thus argue 
that non-response is “a logical extension of an overall strategy that uses death as a 
deterrent to enforce the border” (idem, p. 16). Although this report was released after my 
interviews were completed, I believe most of my interviewees would likely agree with 
this assessment, based on the statements highlighted above. 
Yet CBP’s continued assertions that its helicopters and pilots are contributors to 
rescues does reveal one important truth: many components of the border enforcement 
apparatus have the potential to be used in other ways. A helicopter is indeed a versatile, 
even exceptional tool for saving lives, if flown for that purpose. Air and Marine 
Operations pilots have the skills necessary for search and rescue operations, like low and 
slow surveillance flying. These state capacities could fulfill humanitarian functions. 
Unfortunately, those state capacities are currently held within the confines of an 
ideological framework that prioritizes the exercise of coercive force along the border and 
delegitimizes other state functions and modes of governing—a framework that Corva 
(2008) has identified as “illiberal governance.” 
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Disorderly spaces and governance by force
Illiberal governance, Corva writes, is a term that describes “the legitimation and 
application of coercive power by liberal nation-states” like the US40 to subjects and 
spaces that are politically constructed as incompatible with “the administration of 
freedom” (2008, p. 177). Warfare and aggressive policing are two of the primary and 
most recognizable manifestations of illiberal governance, and increasingly blur into one 
another as policing becomes transnationalized and warfare is reterritorialized within the 
state. “The police/military distinction in the age of modernity relied upon and reproduced 
the sovereignty of the liberal nation-state,” Corva explains. “The military function acted 
upon disorderly subjects outside of, and the police functioned to engage disorderly 
subjects within, the borders of the nation-state” (2009, p. 163). Disorderly subjects and 
disorderly spaces become justifications for the exercise of coercive sovereign power. 
Illiberal governance is thus a thread running through the Vietnam War, the ‘War on 
Drugs,’ and the ‘Global War on Terror,’ among others: all are “connected by a shared 
discourse that [...] identifies specific global spaces that need to be governed in other 
ways” than the democratic and non-coercive means by which liberal states (supposedly) 
govern themselves (Corva 2008, p. 191). The US-Mexico borderlands are often framed as
a space of disorder that must be governed forcefully in order to protect the social body of 
the US nation from unidirectional inward flows of “drugs, illicit economic trade, and 
unproductive labor” (Corva 2009, p. 168; see also Sorrensen 2014, p. 341). At the border,
the enforcement of political-territorial sovereignty against individual migrants
40 The US does not fit the classic definition of a ‘nation-state’ in political geography scholarship. Corva 
uses the term ‘nation-state’ in its popular though technically inaccurate usage as, effectively, a synonym
for territorial states of all kinds. This should not distract from his key argument, which is the 
contradiction between the ‘liberal’ self-definition of the US and its illiberal politics of governance.
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—“nonsovereign beings whose coerced actions are defined as active choices” (Coutin et 
al. 2002, in Corva 2008, p. 180)—remains the overriding concern of the federal 
government. This is the governing rationale of border enforcement, whether enacted by 
agents on the ground or helicopters in the sky.
When use of the tools of illiberal governance—which is to say, the state capacities
developed to govern global ‘disorderly spaces’ and “excluded populations” (Corva 2008, 
p. 191)—becomes publicly unpalatable, they are promoted as multi-purpose tools, 
equally suited for compassionate humanitarianism as well as enforcement. This is the 
strategy used by CBP. While deploying helicopters to intimidate, terrorize, and endanger 
migrants, it claims those aircraft are necessary because of their possible use for saving 
lives. But that narrative is shallow and unconvincing to people like the interviewees I 
spoke to and the migrants they assist, who witness or experience the violence enacted 
through helicopter flights over the borderlands. The proliferation of rotorcraft along the 
border has paralleled the intensification of illiberal governance—a framework I find more
useful than the popular idea of ‘militarization’ for explaining the current configuration of 
state capacities that comprises the border enforcement apparatus. 
Corva makes one other important observation. “Neoliberalization produces social 
and economic vulnerability,” he writes; “criminalization produces ways to capitalize on 
that vulnerability” (2008, p. 181, emphasis added). The term ‘capitalize’ is intended 
literally: Corva refers to the prison-industrial complex when he uses it, which turns 
incarceration into a source of revenue and profit. But the US has a border-industrial 
complex, too, and its influence is manifest in the third major category of aircraft in use at 
the border today: drones.
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Conclusion
In this chapter, I described the relative prominence of helicopters in the 
borderlands today, based on my interviews with firsthand observers of enforcement 
operations. I summarized the history of rotary-wing flight in the context of border 
enforcement, and analyzed the connections between the end of the Vietnam War and the 
start of helicopter operations on the border. Based on those connections, I argued that the 
proliferation of helicopters along the border is best understood as an example of the 
spatial reconfiguration of surplus state capacities—an analytical framework which is 
more expansive than ‘militarization’ alone. Studying helicopters thus provides insight 
into the political-economic circumstances shaping the material apparatus of border 
enforcement. I then turned to the helicopter tours that Customs and Border Protection 
provides to elected or appointed officials, and to the press releases and public statements 
in which CBP frames its helicopters as tools of humanitarian assistance. Both, I argue, are
part of an institutional effort to maintain the escalation of enforcement while denying 
responsibility for its lethal consequences. Based on the perspectives of my interviewees, I
contend that helicopters embody the contradiction between CBP’s public self-
representation as compassionate, reluctant enforcers and the underlying strategies of 
illiberal governance that define border enforcement today. This chapter therefore 
addresses all three of the research questions guiding this project.
In this chapter I emphasized the influence of war on the availability of technology 
and expertise that could be repurposed for border enforcement. That theme is equally 
important when considering drones, the latest type of aircraft deployed for border 
enforcement. However, as I will demonstrate in the next chapter, making sense of drones’
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role in border enforcement also requires more direct consideration of how border 
enforcement has become a venue for the circulation and valorization of capital. 
Especially when considered in the longer context of aerial border enforcement, drones 
cannot be satisfactorily understood without attention to the growth of the border-
industrial complex. Although Ch. V, like this chapter, speaks to all three of my major 
research questions, the third question—on the political-economic circumstances that 
shape bordering—will be a particular focus, because the massive expansion of the border-
industrial complex in the past 20 years means that the political-economic incentives for 
drone use are significantly different from those that influenced the adoption of helicopters
or airplanes. 
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CHAPTER V
DRONES
Drones are the most recent addition to the aerial apparatus of border enforcement. 
In this chapter, I survey the historical connections between the development of drones 
and the US-Mexico border, and in the process dispel an early rumor about the initial 
adoption of drones for border surveillance.41 I then describe the period of testing and 
gradual incorporation that created the Predator B program and the current scope of that 
program. Building on this background, I critically consider the current presence of drones
in the borderlands, based on my interviews with humanitarian aid workers in that region 
as well as governmental analyses of drones’ efficacy. Taken all together, these sections 
address my first research question about technological succession and the evolving roles 
of aircraft. And what emerges from these sources is a general consensus that drones do 
not contribute significantly to the effectiveness of border enforcement, do not have a 
physical presence in the borderlands comparable to other types of aircraft, and are likely 
not perceived as a significant deterrent. (It bears reiterating here that, although drones are 
often associated with the US program of targeted killings abroad, they have not ever been
used for that purpose at the border—CBP’s drones are not armed. See Eckardt & Castelli 
2013, p. 3.) Given the lack of clear evidence that drones make a substantial contribution 
to the control of cross-border mobility, I consider alternative explanations of their 
possible value within the border enforcement apparatus: as ‘media infrastructures’ (Chaar
López 2018) that form part of the state’s means of self-representation, similar to 
helicopters; and as a means of political ‘disavowal’ (Chandler 2020), similar to the 
41 The complete story of the emergence of drones is much larger than I can capture here. Works like those
by Newcome (2004), Shaw (2016), Michel (2017) and Chandler (2020) provide a more complete 
overview.
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outsourcing of enforcement to the natural environment. Both of these explanations can be
seen as potential answers to my second research question about the contributions of 
aircraft to public representations of bordering and the border. However, neither 
explanation sufficiently addresses the third question driving my research: in what ways 
does the use of aircraft in bordering reflect the larger political-economic circumstances 
shaping the evolution of the United States border enforcement apparatus? With this 
question in mind, I argue that we must also regard drones as evidence of the growing 
influence of the border-industrial complex, rather than simply evidence of militaristic 
government policy.
One brief note on terminology: US government entities use the formal terms 
‘unmanned aerial vehicle’ (UAV) or ‘unmanned aerial system’ (UAS). These terms are 
somewhat misleading: although no pilot is on board, each Predator B aircraft flown by 
CBP requires as many as 20 personnel to control and support it throughout its flight 
(Haddal & Gertler 2010, p. 4). The US federal government does not formally call these 
aircraft ‘drones,’ because it reserves that term for UAVs capable of autonomous flight 
(CRS 2010, p. 1). However, that distinction is not shared in public usage (Custers 2016, 
p. 10-11). ‘Remotely piloted aerial vehicle’ is the most accurate description of CBP’s 
Predator B aircraft, but for the sake of simplicity, and despite the possible risk of 
imprecision, I defer to the more recognizable term ‘drone’ throughout this chapter.
Drone development and the border
The regular use of drones for border enforcement in the US only began in 2005. 
But drones have been linked to the border for far longer. Chaar López writes that the US-
Mexico border was “a fundamental space in the development of drone warfare” from at 
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least the end of World War II through the Vietnam War (2018, p. 25). During this period 
drones were used as mobile targets or stand-ins for enemy aircraft to help train Air Force 
pilots in aerial combat over the Gulf of Mexico, in a set of exercises code-named “Project
William Tell” (idem, p. 36). It was in this period that the name ‘drone’ was coined 
(Chandler 2020, pp. 16-17). Such exercises strengthened the association between 
territorial intrusion and social danger, Chaar López contends, and “helped demarcate the 
nation’s boundaries” at the same time that they provided practice for pilots (2018, p. 40). 
I regard Project William Tell as another example of the state reacting to the ‘aerial 
anxiety’ induced by technological changes that challenge our perceptions of territorial 
integrity (see Ch. III). The fact that early drones were tested near the southern border is 
not coincidental—rather, this “situated development” (Chaar López 2018, p. 26) reflects 
collective anxiety over the ability of the state to control access to its space. Thus the 
development of drone technology was justified, at least in part, by the same essential 
rationale that prompted calls for an airborne border patrol force in the early decades of 
the 20th century: a fear of incursions across the southern border by geography-defying 
aircraft. That fear was amplified by the new threat of nuclear weaponry (idem, pp. 64, 
73), but its underlying logic dates back to the earliest days of powered flight. 
One key developmental site within the borderlands was Fort Huachuca, a US 
Army base in southern Arizona originally established in 1877 to monitor and disrupt the 
cross-border movement of the Chiricahua Apache (Smith 1976, pp. 14-18). Though no 
longer officially responsible for securing the border, the fort was a key venue for the 
creation of surveillance technologies that would later be deployed for the purpose of 
border enforcement—including drones. After a brief deactivation in 1947, Fort Huachuca
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was reopened by the Army four years later and gained two new facilities: Libby Army 
Airfield (which doubles as the Sierra Vista Municipal Airport) in 1951, and the US Army 
Electronic Proving Ground in 1954. A decade later, the LAT reported that the fort was 
conducting “unending research” on “the use of unmanned drone aircraft” (Hartt 1965). 
Some of that research was documented in the US Army’s television series The Big 
Picture, which shows the launch and recovery of a camera-equipped Northrop 
Radioplane RP-71, an early surveillance drone built by a military contractor, at Fort 
Huachuca (“TV 353 - Pictorial Report No. 26,” n.d., 5:03 – 8:19). Though far less 
technologically advanced, the RP-71 was one of the stepping stones toward the Predator 
drones that fly out of Libby Army Airfield at Fort Huachuca today.
The Electronic Proving Ground was one of the testing sites for the electronic 
surveillance systems at the core of a project known officially as “Operation Igloo White,”
and colloquially as the “McNamara Line,” after defense secretary Robert McNamara. 
Igloo White was an attempt to create a virtual ‘wall’ of surveillance across Vietnam and 
Laos to cut off the so-called Ho Chi Minh Trail between North and South Vietnam 
(“Investigation Into Electronic Battlefield…” 1971, p. 109). Acoustic and seismic sensors
sent signals to aircraft circling overhead, which relayed those signals to a command post 
that could, in theory, coordinate targeted strikes against supply transports (Nalty 2005, 
pp. 12-13). The sensors destined for southeast Asia were first tested in southern Arizona: 
“One of Huachuca’s jobs these days,” the LAT reported, “has been to help develop and 
thoroughly test the supersecret devices which are used in Vietnam to locate and identify 
unfriendly North Vietnamese as part of the top secret ‘McNamara Wall’” (Sell 1968). 
Operation Igloo White introduced a new role for remotely piloted aircraft beyond 
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simple photo-reconnaissance, something Chaar López does not acknowledge. There were
three major components to the system: the electronic sensors, placed by special 
operations teams or dropped by air; the aircraft, flying over the sensors to relay their 
signals; and the command center, at Nakhon Phanom Air Force Base in Thailand, which 
was built and operated by the US (“Investigation Into Electronic Battlefield…” 1971, p. 
111; Correll 2004, pp. 58-59; “Nakhon Phanom During the Secret War…” n.d.). The 
original aircraft used to relay the sensor signals carried crews of 17 to 18 people, 
exposing large numbers of Air Force personnel to significant danger. The Air Force’s 
replacement was the QU-22B Pave Eagle II: “a single-engine, propeller-driven aircraft, a 
modified Beech Model 36 Bonanza, designed to fly in either a manned or unmanned 
mode” (Correll 2004, p. 59; see also “Investigation Into Electronic Battlefield…” 1971, 
p. 122). Although technically capable of remotely-controlled flight, the QU-22B was 
never reliable in that mode (Collins 2014; Correll 2004; Matheson; National Museum of 
the US Air Force). It always flew with a pilot during its use in Igloo White, allegedly 
because of the electronic systems’ sensitivity to interference from atmospheric electrical 
activity (Matheson). Despite that practical limitation, the QU-22B was important because
it roughly marked the beginning of the integration of drones into a larger, interconnected 
system of near-continuous electronic surveillance intended for the governance of 
terrestrial mobility. 
The potential application of such a system at the US-Mexico border was not 
difficult to predict. In 1972, electronics and defense writer Robert Barkan published an 
article in New Scientist42, in which he claimed that the Border Patrol had “adopted the 
42 Reprinted in the LAT and elsewhere.
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same anti-infiltration barrier used by the military to detect troop and truck movements on 
the Ho Chi Minh Trail,” including drones:
The U.S. Air Force’s QU-22B remote controlled pilotless aircraft—made surplus 
in Vietnam by the introduction of more sophisticated drones—have been returned 
to the United States, where they fly over the border to monitor the sensors and 
relay data to central control points. (Barkan 1972)
Barkan’s claim was repeated more recently by Shaw (2016, p. 89). If true, it would move 
the date of the first drone flights over the border back by decades. But all available 
evidence suggests Barkan was mistaken. 
Besides the fact that the QU-22B was incapable of remotely piloted flight outside 
of controlled tests, there were only 27 of the highly specialized aircraft built. Six were 
lost in combat. The remaining 21 were decommissioned, and members of the 553rd 
Reconnaissance Wing—the Air Force unit that piloted the QU-22B out of Thailand—
have tracked the whereabouts of each one through FAA registration records (Westin 
2018). Most were transferred to colleges or aviation schools, presumably after being 
stripped of their proprietary electronic systems. Just one plane is unaccounted for, which 
a squadron member speculated “may Have Been Used [sic] by the US Border Patrol” 
(Westin 2018). Though tantalizing, this assertion was denied by other former members of 
the 553rd Reconnaissance Wing. The compiler of the list said that the information he was 
able to find on that particular airplane was contradictory, and it might have been lost in 
combat (L. Westin, personal communication, July 6, 2020). “I am familiar with the ‘Q-
bird on the border’ rumors also!” another ex-pilot wrote in an email. “I spent a lot of time
from the late seventies and throughout my entire career flying into every Texas border 
town with an airport! Never did I hear of any facts surrounding that rumor!” (M. Berry, 
personal communication, July 7, 2020). Two former pilots reported having known an Air 
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Force flight instructor in California whose father might have flown a Beechcraft Bonanza
for the Border Patrol, but that clearly would not have been a drone. “It didn’t involve all 
the electronics, as I recall,” one wrote, “but was used mainly because of the capabilities 
to stay airborne for extended periods of time” (D.L. Martine, personal communication, 
July 8, 2020). None of the former squadron members corroborated Barkan’s article.43
Still, even if no drones flew over the US-Mexico border in 1972, Barkan was not 
completely mistaken. The sensors developed for Igloo White were indeed repurposed for 
use in select Border Patrol sectors at least as early as 1970 (“Investigation Into Electronic
Battlefield…” 1971, p. 14; Chaar López 2018, pp. 115), becoming a permanent addition 
to the region where they were originally tested. Border authorities were beginning to 
construct an assemblage of electronic surveillance dedicated to identifying, locating, and 
detaining bodies or vehicles transgressing the planar boundary of the United States. The 
technology for remotely-piloted flight was not yet sufficiently mature to be integrated 
into that assemblage, but the Vietnam War and Robert McNamara’s dream of a virtual 
wall had accelerated the pace of development. It would not take long for the capabilities 
of drones to begin to match their imagined uses.  By 1986, the LAT was reporting that the
technology necessary for drones to be “dispatched to remote areas to determine whether 
patrol personnel are needed” was “available” but prohibitively expensive (McDonnell). 
Finally, in 1990, drones came to the U.S.-Mexico border—for three weeks. 
Initial testing and acquisition
The first tests of drones for surveillance at the US-Mexico border were conducted 
43 Barkan or one of his sources may have confused a different Beechcraft airplane for the QU-22B. The 
Border Patrol used other planes from that manufacturer, including the Bonanza 35 and the T-34B 
(Broyles et al. 2020, pp. 21, 72). If still in active use in 1972, either could plausibly have been mistaken
for the rarer QU-22B. 
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by the Marine Corps, in collaboration with the Border Patrol—another example of the 
blurring between policing and military action that occurs so frequently at the border. “The
small, remotely piloted aircraft sent television-like pictures to ground operators, 
surveying an 80-mile-long stretch of border west of Laredo, Texas,” the LAT reported. 
“During the three-week [sic] that ended Feb. 26, the information provided by the Marines
enabled federal agents to snare smugglers toting almost $1 million worth of marijuana 
and to double the number of undocumented workers captured for illegally crossing the 
border” (Zamichow 1990). Note the parallels between the lauded accomplishments of 
these first drones flown over the border and the anticipated uses of airplanes described by
the same paper in 1913: “to locate and pursue a fugitive,” and “in watching for 
smugglers” (“Is Aviation Any Real Benefit...”). These trials of remotely piloted aircraft, 
near the close of the 20th century, followed a logic that had existed since the earliest years 
of powered flight. 
Further trials took place later in the decade in conjunction with the Army, Navy, 
and Marines (“Unmanned Systems Roadmap 2007-2032,” 2007, p. 37). According to the 
Department of Defense, such trials occurred “one or more times annually” between 1990 
and 2003 (ibid). But they attracted only sporadic media attention. For example, the 
Arizona Daily Star reported in 1997 that a Pioneer drone flown out of Fort Huachuca 
“crashed into a hillside” (“Unmanned Spy Plane Crashes…”). This may have been a 
border surveillance flight: the Border Patrol reportedly assisted in the recovery of the 
aircraft. In 1999, the Albuquerque Tribune reported that a drone was flying over western 
New Mexico and southeastern Arizona, monitoring the border (“Drone airplane watches 
border…”). That article also noted that the same craft had been previously tested 
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somewhere in south Texas, but did not specify when. 
Drones were fully incorporated into the US border enforcement apparatus circa 
2005, following the creation of the Department of Homeland Security—in the wake of 
September 11th—and the launch of that department’s Secure Border Initiative (SBI). 
Although Boeing won the initial SBI contract from a field of well-established military-
industrial contractors—Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Raytheon among 
them—in part because its plan “put far less emphasis on costly unmanned aerial vehicles”
(Lipton 2006), the department had also already begun testing those same vehicles as a 
complement to the network of surveillance cameras, sensors, and towers that the 
aerospace contractor promised (“Unmanned Systems Roadmap 2007-2032,” 2007, p. 38; 
see also Lichtblau 2004). From a preliminary feasibility study conducted between June 
and September 2004, CBP officials determined that an Israeli-manufactured Elbit Hermes
450 drone would incur per-hour operational costs more than double that of an AS-350 A-
Star helicopter, the Border Patrol’s primary manned aircraft at the time (Aguilar 2004, p. 
11). A General Atomics Predator B drone,44 with its more substantial sensor package, 
would cost ten times as much as the A-Star to acquire and operate, again on a per-flight-
hour basis (idem, p. 12). Despite the fact that the agency’s own testing had thus far found 
that a drone was “neither as effective operationally nor as cost effective as an OBP 
[Office of Border Patrol] helicopter piloted by a Border Patrol agent,” it argued that costs 
would fall and effectiveness increase as drones became more thoroughly integrated into 
the agency’s systems and practices (idem, pp. 12-13). As will be discussed in greater 
detail below, those predictions have not been borne out. 
44 The Predator B is also known as the MQ-9 Reaper.
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Despite the high acquisition and operation costs of the Predator B drone, this was 
the platform that DHS ultimately selected for its drone program in August 2005 
(“Unmanned Systems Roadmap 2007-2032,” 2007, p. 38). The very first Predator B 
flown for border surveillance inauspiciously crashed less than a year into service (Levin 
2007; Wald 2007). Still, CBP continued to expand its Predator fleet, to five of the aircraft 
by 2009 and nine by 2016 (Archibold 2009; Nixon 2016). The expansion meant major 
contracts for General Atomics. CBP had predicted in 2004 that each additional Predator B
would cost $5.4 million (Aguilar 50/3-C 2004, p. 11); by 2016, the reported cost per 
aircraft had risen to $17 million (Bier & Feeney 2018, p. 3). Those figures are only the 
initial purchase price, and do not reflect additional costs of ongoing support. In the first 
years of CBP drone operations, for instance, the Predators were “flown and maintained 
by contractor personnel” rather than CBP agents and employees (“Unmanned Systems 
Roadmap 2007-2032,” 2007, p. 38). The total worth of the contracts between General 
Atomics and CBP reached hundreds of millions of dollars (Aizeki et al. 2021, p. 21). The 
agency finally halted its acquisitions of new Predators in 2016 after DHS “recommended 
CBP not expand its Predator B program beyond its current nine aircraft” (Gambler 2017, 
p. 26). Of the nine Predator B drones operated by the Office of Air and Marine, six are 
assigned to the US-Mexico border, divided evenly between Fort Huachuca in Sierra 
Vista, Arizona and Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas, and three are deployed to the US-Canada 
border, flying out of Grand Forks, North Dakota (Nixon 2016).
CBP also operates at least 135 “small” or “hand-launched” drones (Davis 2020), 
remotely piloted aircraft weighing less than 55 pounds (Gambler 2017, p. 43). These 
include both small, fixed-wing drones that resemble hobbyists’ remote-control planes and
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lightweight quadcopters that strongly resemble—and may in fact be—off-the-shelf 
commercial drones commonly used for cinematography or remote sensing (Davis 2020, 
see images).45 Like the Predator B, CBP hopes that these small drones will be able to “fly 
unnoticed by human hearing and sight” (Aizeki et al. 2021, p. 21). Unlike the Predator B,
small drones may incorporate facial recognition technology and license plate readers 
(ibid; see also Bier & Feeney 2018, p. 4). The agency has not yet publicly touted this 
capability (see Davis 2020), and it may still be in a developmental phase. Concrete data 
on the effectiveness and actual capabilities of these small drones are not yet available. 
“[A]side from anecdotal evidence from trials that CBP says are promising,” Ghaffary 
writes, “it’s hard to say exactly how useful these tools are proving” (2020). The use of 
small drones in border enforcement does not appear to have been studied in depth by 
academics or other independent researchers at this point, and Michel notes that “very 
little scholarly inquiry and analysis have been applied to the use of small drones by the 
military” either (2017, p. 9). Meanwhile, the proliferation of small, affordable drone 
systems has also provoked renewed aerial anxiety: reports that cartels are flying 
inexpensive commercial drones across the US-Mexico border echo the same fears that 
repeated in newspaper coverage of airplanes in the 1920s and 1930s. “[W]e cannot know 
how big the problem is. But what things we have seen suggests that the problem is much 
larger than anybody realizes,” one security consultant told Air & Space Magazine 
(Wright 2020), sounding much like border officials describing unauthorized airplane 
flights in the early twentieth century (see Ch. III). These so-called ‘narcodrones’ have 
45 Although a CBP official quoted by Davis claims that the drones used by the agency are “not the 
consumer-grade drones you might see in a big box retailer” but rather “Department of Defense-
approved systems,” Atherton (2018) has previously reported that the Department of the Defense does 
in fact use commercially available small drones at times.
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been found to carry both explosives (though not into the US) and narcotics, mirroring the 
fears illustrated so vividly in the LAT a century ago (Henry 1919). It is at least clear that 
small drones deserve future attention and scrutiny—especially since CBP has stated its 
intention to quadruple the number of small drones in its use (Davis 2020). 
Overall, the acquisition of drones for border enforcement followed a different 
pattern than the acquisition of either helicopters or airplanes. Both of these earlier types 
of aircraft initially became available to the Border Patrol through military 
decommissioning and the reconfiguration of surplus state capacities, as I discussed in 
Chs. III and IV. Although the agency eventually began purchasing some aircraft directly 
from manufacturers, it could not have gotten either its fixed-wing or its rotary-wing flight
programs off the ground when it did without taking advantage of these surplus state 
capacities. In contrast, when the newly-formed CBP sought to incorporate drones into the
border enforcement apparatus, it relied on cooperation with the military for initial testing 
but then contracted directly with the corporations building the aircraft, like Elbit and 
General Atomics. The overall availability of drones was still influenced by American 
wars abroad: as previously noted, the Vietnam War was a major impetus for drone 
development, and drones gained governmental acceptance and thus commercial viability 
through their use by the CIA and Air Force on combat missions in Afghanistan, Pakistan, 
Iraq, and beyond in the early 2000s (see Woods 2015, Chaar López 2018). But without a 
period of demobilization comparable to the aftermath of the Vietnam War, the state has 
not developed a stockpile of surplus drone aircraft available to non-military agencies. In 
consequence, the CBP drone program has been a lucrative opportunity for aerospace and 
defense contractors since its inception. Prior to the halt in new Predator acquisitions, 
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General Atomics was anticipating future purchases of drones worth almost half a billion 
dollars (Lipton 2013). If the enrollment of former military airplanes and helicopters into 
border enforcement demonstrated the porous ideological and material boundaries 
between law enforcement and military state agencies, the incorporation of drones 
demonstrates the increasing significance of the border-industrial complex in the post-9/11
era, and the degree to which the state practice of border enforcement has become an arena
for the circulation and valorization of private capital.
I will return to that theme later in this chapter. For the moment, however, I turn to 
the question of current drone use. Although the use of drones in border surveillance is 
highly publicized, there is little to no documentation of how the presence of drones is 
actually experienced and perceived in the borderlands today. The interviews I conducted 
provide insight into the current use of drones along the border from the perspectives of 
people who ostensibly work beneath their gaze. 
Perceptions of drones in the borderlands
To my surprise, nearly all of my interviewees for this project expressed little 
familiarity with CBP’s drone operations. These individuals are, in general, highly 
knowledgeable about Border Patrol and CBP activities. Most have or have had regular 
contact with Border Patrol agents in the field, and some have built relationships with 
supervisory agents while negotiating search and rescue efforts. They are well aware of 
the multiscalar determinants of local impacts, citing federal and state-level policy 
decisions in conversation. Yet despite their broad familiarity with the US enforcement 
apparatus, they seemed largely unaware of—and unconcerned by—the current scope of 
drone flights.
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“I haven’t seen any drones,” J., who works in the areas east of San Diego, told 
me. “There’ve been times when I’ve heard planes, and I’ve looked around and I couldn’t 
see anything. Maybe they were up that high? I don’t even know if they make noise” 
(Personal communication, October 13, 2020). M., whose field work takes place south of 
Tucson, shared a similar thought process. “There were times when I’ve wondered if I’d 
heard or seen a drone flying overhead, but I don’t really know what to look or listen for,” 
he explained. “So, I don’t know. Certainly nothing that was hovering or circling like a 
helicopter” (Personal communication, October 22, 2020). 
J. is essentially correct in surmising that drones flying overhead would likely be 
too high to hear. According to CBP, Predator B flights take place at a minimum altitude of
19,000 feet per Federal Aviation Authority regulations (Eckardt and Castelli 2013, p. 7). 
Remember that planes and helicopters engaged in border surveillance are often flying 
mere hundreds of feet above the ground—drone flights occur in an entirely different level
of airspace. At that altitude, it is highly unlikely that anyone on the ground would be able 
to see or hear a drone. That, of course, is part of the technology’s appeal to border 
enforcement authorities. It is therefore logical that so few interviewees reported potential 
drone observations.
I say ‘potential’ because even those interviewees who believed they had seen a 
drone could not feel completely certain. “I’ve only ever seen one drone,” K. stated, and 
then explained:
In the Altar Valley. Along the Baboquivari range. But I’m assuming that’s what it 
was, because it was too small for an airplane, but it looked like an airplane, but it 
wasn’t an airplane. And then I went, ‘Oh, I bet it’s a drone.’ But I have no way of 
knowing 100% for sure that’s what it was. […] I’ve seen pictures of some of the 
drones, and later I thought, ‘Oh, that’s what it was.’ Because, I mean, we see 
airplanes, fixed-wing, all the time down there. It wasn’t a fixed-wing. (Personal 
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communication, November 22, 2020)
It is difficult to judge from this description whether the aircraft in question was indeed a 
drone. The Predator drones flown by CBP are actually larger than a small, fixed-wing 
light airplane like the Piper Super Cub. (A Predator has a wingspan of 66 feet; the Super 
Cub just 35 feet.) But they are smaller than common small commercial airliners like the 
Boeing 737 (wingspan 93+ feet). Seen at a distance, the unknown aircraft remained just 
one of multiple curious sightings that could not be definitively identified. The 
combination of private, commercial, military, and law enforcement flights in the region 
may serve CBP’s desire for surreptitious surveillance: there are always plausible alternate
explanations for any single sighting, making patterns difficult to establish. 
G. claimed to have seen drones on multiple occasions in the areas near Ajo and 
Arivaca, but “they were really high up in the sky,” and he admitted he wasn’t completely 
certain that they were indeed drones (Personal communication, September 7, 2021). 
Other volunteers, he asserted, had seen them closer. G. was also the only one of my 
interviewees who stated that migrants he had encountered had talked about seeing drones.
Some migrants, he said, had expressed a belief that “there’s drones everywhere,” and this 
belief in widespread aerial surveillance likely influenced their decisions about where, 
when, and how—though not whether—to cross the border. But he specifically 
emphasized that “people are even more aware of the presence of surveillance towers,” 
and said that those towers had a greater influence on decision-making than perceptions of
aerial surveillance or drone operations, a theory somewhat supported by the recent 
research from Chambers et al. (2019). He was also skeptical of CBP’s claims about the 
reach and efficacy of its drone surveillance operations. “They [Border Patrol agents] 
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think drones are really cool,” he recalled. “They would always really play up their drone 
capabilities, and I remember reading at one point that they only had two active drones in 
the whole border region” (personal communication, September 7, 2021). In other words, 
there was a discrepancy between what agents on the ground were saying about the drone 
program’s capacities and what was publicly known about the actual extent of the 
program. He did not believe that drones truly were “everywhere”—a belief supported by 
the limited available data on the actual frequency and extent of drone surveillance flights.
The only other interviewee who reported seeing a drone was O., who described an
unexpected encounter while driving:
We were in the car, and I remember hearing a noise […] and I’m like, ‘What is 
that?’ And I looked out the window thinking I was going to see an airplane that 
was somewhere around, and there’s this drone flying over us. I’d say it was like, 
several feet across. Not a huge one, but it was more than just a couple of feet. […]
And I thought, ‘Oh my god, this is… that’s a drone.’
Interviewer: How could you tell that it wasn’t a plane? Did it immediately look 
different?
Because it was right over us. It was not high up […] I don’t remember exactly the 
distance. It was more than ten feet, I know that, but it wasn’t way up there. 
(Personal communication, October 22, 2020)
CBP does use small drones, as previously discussed, and O.’s description resembles a 
hand-launched, fixed-wing small drone pictured in Davis (2020). No other interviewee 
mentioned seeing or hearing such systems in use, and O. did not recall ever encountering 
such an aircraft again. She did recall seeing something that, like the unknown aircraft 
observed by K., might have been a drone:
There was this smallish, not real small like the Cessna planes or anything like 
that, but one of the smaller, regular airplanes, flying right along the border wall 
[…] in the Sasabe area. Which is east of Nogales. I don’t remember seeing any 
numbers or letters or markings, definite markings. We were several miles from the
wall. […] It wasn’t a commercial airplane, and I don’t know if it was a private 
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airplane or a government airplane or what. I just remember it was all gray. 
(Personal communication, October 22, 2020)
The size and color of this aircraft as described make it a plausible candidate for a drone 
sighting, but O. was not fully convinced. Again, there are simply too many equally 
plausible alternative explanations for her to state with confidence that she had seen one of
the elusive Predator drones. 
In general, my interviewees seemed unconcerned by CBP’s much-publicized 
drone fleet. One potentially simple explanation for this absence of concern is that the 
borderlands are already dense with more obvious manifestations of border enforcement. 
“It feels like you’re just in a state of surveillance,” J. explained: 
There’s so much Border Patrol that’s always driving around and stationed in 
different areas and undercover. I mean, we’ve been followed plenty of times, we 
get our vehicles inspected and logged. They know all of our volunteers’ vehicles 
that come out on a regular basis. (Personal communication, October 13, 2020)
In this context, when humanitarian aid activists are already accustomed to being 
followed, tracked, and observed by agents on foot, in cars, or in helicopters, it is not 
difficult to understand how the unverifiable possibility of drone surveillance could be 
perceived as a materially inconsequential addition. It is also important to remember that 
because CBP’s drones only perform surveillance and are not equipped or authorized to 
intervene directly in what happens on the ground, their presence might only be inferred 
similarly to how O. described figuring out the locations of the agency’s automated 
sensors: “We knew when we had set off a sensor because pretty soon the helicopter 
would come by and fly over […] or all of a sudden, an agent would appear on the trail” 
(Personal communication, October 22, 2020). Unless a drone happened to be flying 
within sight or hearing, which is unlikely under existing FAA regulations, some other, 
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more concrete manifestation of enforcement authority would be the most likely evidence 
to activists on the ground that they might have been under observation by a remotely 
piloted aircraft—but in that case, their attention might well be focused on the immediate 
interaction with agents, rather than the system which triggered it.
Above all, what became clear from speaking to these interviewees was that drones
do not have a clear physical presence along the border or in the borderlands. Even if 
drones are operating regularly, they are so far removed from the situations they are 
observing that people who are deliberately attentive to border enforcement operations and
activities cannot confidently recognize them. Nor did possible drone activity seem to 
intrude significantly on the psyche of these interviewees. To be sure, the existence of the 
drone program contributes to, as G. described it, a “sense of constant potential 
surveillance”: “It’s always there, maybe—you’re never really sure,” he said, comparing 
the program to the logic of the panopticon (Personal communication, September 7, 2021).
But drones do not appear to have accomplished the panopticon’s purpose of inspiring 
self-regulation among the potentially observed: none of my interviewees expressed 
concern about the possibility of being watched by a drone, or described altering their 
behavior in any way based on that potential. “It hasn’t been in my mind, in terms of… 
thinking that I’m being surveilled by a high-altitude drone or something,” W. told me. 
“That hasn’t been there” (Personal communication, November 7, 2020). W. was aware of 
the drone program in a general sense, knew that surveillance flights over the area where 
he worked were a possibility, and yet seemed no more than intellectually curious about 
the notion of being watched in that manner. And if G.’s impressions are accurate, the 
perception of drone activity may have motivated migrants to modify their crossing plans, 
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but not to abandon them. These interviews prompted me to reconsider the functions of 
drones in the context of the overall border enforcement apparatus.
Assessments of drone efficacy
In comparison with helicopters, which are regularly used to scare or intimidate 
migrants and enhance the effects of the prevention through deterrence strategy, drones 
seem to have almost no substantial material presence in the borderlands. Their 
contribution to the goal of deterrence is thus questionable.  Although there is obviously 
inherent bias in relying on the reports of people who chose to cross the border, G.’s 
recollections suggest that drones have no greater deterrence effect than CBP’s stationary 
surveillance towers (which themselves have been an unsuccessful deterrent). Given that 
drones often cannot be seen nor heard by the average person on the ground, their capacity
to generate fear and thereby influence decision-making—the essential premise of 
deterrence as border enforcement policy—seems inherently limited. Overall, the 
interviews conducted for this research suggest that drones are not perceived as a major 
factor in the overall system of border surveillance and, if ever visible, could easily be 
mistaken for other, more common types of aircraft. Again, that provides an advantage in 
avoiding detection, but not in projecting an impression of watchful, omnipresent 
surveillance, or of an unavoidable enforcement presence. This conclusion is only 
tentative, however. At this time, it is unclear what proportion of potential border-crossers 
are aware of CBP’s drone program, or how they perceive it.
Setting aside the question of deterrence for the moment, have drones increased 
CBP’s ability to apprehend border-crossers or smugglers? The short answer is that, to 
date, CBP has provided no conclusive data to prove that drones make enforcement more 
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effective. What data are available suggest that the border drone program’s extraordinary 
expense has not delivered proportionate increases in the agency’s own preferred metrics 
of apprehensions and seizures. Despite the publicity drones have received since their 
enrollment into the US border enforcement apparatus in 2006, their demonstrable 
influence on the actual conduct of border enforcement has been relatively minimal. In 
contrast to the notion that drones provide a “persistent stare” or “constant stare” over 
swathes of inaccessible terrain (Chaar López 2018; Michel 2017), the actual extent and 
duration of drone flights has been quite limited. By 2013, drones “regularly patrolled 
only about 170 miles of the 2,000-mile southern land border” (Bier and Feeney 2018, p. 
2). CBP’s Predator drones averaged just 95 minutes of flight time per day, and at least 20 
percent of scheduled flights were canceled because of unfavorable weather (idem, p. 1). 
In 2014, the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of the Inspector General 
conducted an audit of the unmanned aircraft systems program and concluded that “CBP 
cannot prove the program is effective” (Bumgardner et al. 2014, p. 1). There was “little or
no evidence” that the introduction of drones to border enforcement had led to “increased 
apprehensions of illegal border crossers, a reduction in border surveillance costs, [or] 
improvement in the U.S. Border Patrol’s efficiency” (ibid). The audit also asserted that 
CBP was under-reporting the program’s actual costs while falling far short of predicted 
flight hours. Although presented in the sterile language of bureaucracy, the report is 
quietly scathing, stating that CBP’s drones cost more, fly less, and achieve less than the 
agency has claimed. Three years later, a separate review by the Government 
Accountability Office found that “mission data […] was not recorded consistently across 
all operational centers, limiting CBP’s ability to assess the effectiveness of the [Predator 
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UAV] program” (Gambler 2017, “Highlights”). Both governmental reviews note that 
CBP has failed to develop clear metrics of performance or record sufficient data to 
effectively demonstrate that the program is successful or unsuccessful. Given that the 
program has been operational for 16 years, this persistent failure suggests either 
institutional disinterest in conclusively demonstrating the efficacy of drones, or an 
inability to do so.
Shokh (2016) acknowledges the lack of any compelling data showing drones’ 
effectiveness, arguing that a more holistic view of the contributions of drones might be 
appropriate. She emphasizes the potentially underappreciated ‘soft’ results of drone 
surveillance flights—that is, cases in which drones supported agent operations without 
being directly responsible for an apprehension or seizure (p. 117). Such assistance, Shokh
writes, might include “successfully vectoring agents to the location of the event” (p. 118),
i.e. providing a location or directions, “preventing potential crossings”—how a drone 
would do this is unclear, as was previously discussed—or “identification of non-
suspicious […] detections,” i.e. confirming a non-event (p. 119). A more capacious 
accounting that records all of these possible support capabilities (which Shokh contends 
are not captured well in existing drone flight data) might make the program’s extravagant 
costs appear more justifiable. But it seems highly doubtful that even the most generous 
record of drones’ accomplishments would change the fundamental conclusion that the 
introduction of drones has not altered the conduct of border enforcement in any way 
comparable to the earlier introductions of airplanes or helicopters. 
Of the three classes of aircraft considered in this thesis, drones appear to be the 
least materially consequential for border-crossers or for agents of enforcement. Why, 
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then, does the program continue?
Signaling strength and disavowing responsibility
Here I consider two alternative explanations for the value of drones to the state, 
offered by scholars who focus specifically on drones. Both are centered around questions 
of communication and representation. Though I do not find either theory satisfactory as a 
sole explanation of drone use at the border, both are worth consideration as contributing 
factors in the continued use of drones for border enforcement.
Chaar López, in one of the most sustained and thorough analyses of the linkages 
connecting drones and the US-Mexico border, argues that CBP’s drones function as 
‘media infrastructures’ (2018). He uses this term to signify the literal operation of drones 
as components of surveillance systems that transform landscapes and individuals into 
images and data, “a plane of perception within which unauthorized border crossers were 
made perceptible and knowable” via digital transmission and reproduction (p. 173), but 
also—and, in my view, more importantly—the power of drones as communicative 
symbols that reinforce a particular image of border enforcement. In the latter regard, 
Chaar López builds on the analysis of Andreas, who contends that the escalation of 
border enforcement has frequently been “a public performance for which the border 
functions as a kind of political stage” (2009, p. 9). And his attention to the role that 
drones play in the image-making and representational efforts of enforcement authorities 
corresponds with what I have argued here about the similar (though not directly 
equivalent) functions of helicopters as tools for shaping public and political perception of
the border ‘problem.’
Drones, Chaar López writes, are an example of “the expressive role of law 
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enforcement, the communication of the state’s authority to mark and maintain the 
borderline” (2018, p. 152; emphasis added). To “a domestic audience moved by a border 
technopolitical regime predicated on the animosity towards and the exclusion of certain 
categories of racialized people” (ibid)—in other words, that fraction of the US population
that believes strongly in the project of border enforcement—drones sustain the 
impression that the federal government is seriously committed to using all possible 
technological means to intensify the enactment of its territorial boundaries. Drones are 
part of what Andreas calls “successful image management,” a project that “does not 
necessarily correspond with levels of actual deterrence” (2009, p. 9). The use of drones to
communicate state authority and an image of successful border management can occur 
relatively directly: for instance, C. described the use of aerial surveillance footage in 
meetings with “conservative white ranchers” who had been “beating their drum about 
people going through their land:” 
They’re demonstrating to those white ranchers that they’re doing their job […] 
The more hardware, the more equipment, the more militarized it is, the more 
conservative ranchers that want more enforcement are impressed. […] They’re 
depending on the ranchers to snitch, to report suspicious activity, right? […] So it 
behooves them [CBP] to cultivate that. (Personal communication, February 2, 
2021)
But such communication can also occur indirectly through media reports (or academic 
articles), which often uncritically cite the presence of drones as evidence of a thoroughly 
monitored border, thus contributing to overestimation of the degree of government 
control effected within that space. As G. explained:
On the left, at least, there’s a general perception that the border region is highly 
surveilled and completely militarized. […] There’s some truth to that, but it also 
masks the fact that lots of people are crossing the border every day and not getting
caught and never being seen by Border Patrol. The desert is a vast wilderness, and
it is possible to navigate through that successfully evading Border Patrol. 
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(Personal communication, September 7, 2021)
Credulous or incautious reporting on drone operations is a component of this “tendency 
to sensationalize surveillance capabilities a little bit,” G. suggested. This serves the 
Border Patrol and CBP well, because it is in their interest to project an aura of 
omniscience, omnipresence, and inevitability. But none of those are true: even if CBP’s 
surveillance capabilities “are pretty sensational, objectively” (G., personal 
communication, September 7, 2021), the agency is not omniscient, it is not omnipresent, 
and its continuance is not inevitable. We should not be persuaded otherwise by repeated 
invocations of drones. 
Moreover, as media infrastructures, drones reinscribe troubling racial and 
biopolitical ‘scripts’, Chaar López asserts. “The Predator’s technical vision did not hunt for 
White migrants from Western Europe but for those brown bodies marked as risks and 
threats,” he writes (2018, p. 168). As his description implicitly acknowledges, these racial 
scripts are simultaneously geographical ones, linking racial categories to points of origin. In 
video or photographs captured by drones, migrants appear only as “the silhouette of a 
body pre-inscripted for exclusion along racial lines by public discussions and 
governmental policies” (idem, p. 161). The name of the drone, ‘Predator’ corresponded 
neatly with existing representations of border enforcement as a “cat and mouse game” or 
a type of hunting (idem, pp. 128,165)—metaphors that I encountered consistently in 
newspaper articles spanning more than half a century.46 These metaphors dehumanize 
46 Some selected examples: Hillinger 1959 (“the cat and mouse game”), Baskerville 1972 (“In The 
Border Game, Ab Taylor is the Hunter”), Crewdson 1977 (“The waiting game is about to turn into one 
of cat and mouse”), Montemayor 1980 (“a cat-and-mouse playground”), Reza 1984 (“Alien Smugglers 
Are Prey and Border Patrol Hunters”),  Gross 1996 (“endless cat-and-mouse game”), Rowe 1999 (“a 
game of cat and mouse”), Martinez 2002 (“It’s the thrill of the hunt, without the kill”), Romero 2005 
(“their cat-and-mouse trip”),  Lipton 2013 (“the cat-and-mouse game that plays out every day”), and 
Carroll 2015 (“an ever-evolving game of cat and mouse”). 
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migrants (Cantú 2018, p. 110) and contribute to the scripting of interactions at the border:
“The unauthorized border crossers played the role of the prey hunted by a predatory 
assemblage,” while CBP aircraft and agents “were predators seeking to capture those that
DHS had named as ‘risks’ and ‘threats,’” Chaar López argues (2018, p. 172). Images of 
Predator drones—or stills from their video feeds—recirculate and reinforce these 
narrative scripts, circumscribing migrants within the category of hunted enemy and 
legitimating the perpetuation of enforcement. 
Chaar López’s ‘media infrastructures’ argument is one compelling explanation for
how drones provide value to the apparatus of border enforcement through their symbolic, 
communicative power rather than their material efficacy. A second critical interpretation 
of drones, bridging the symbolic and material registers, comes from Chandler (2020). 
Chandler’s argument centers on the concept of ‘unmanning’, and although it is not 
specific to the use of drones at the US-Mexico border, it is nonetheless a valuable 
contribution to our understanding of their function there. 
Drones, in Chandler’s perspective, represent “a disavowal of politics by 
technology” (2020, p. 2). The term ‘unmanned aerial vehicles,’ she writes, “collapses the 
operator, aircraft, and camera into a single technological unit” (p. 3) and obscures the role
of human decision-making in the system of surveillance.47 Chandler contends that the 
linguistic obfuscation of agency is deliberate: 
In World War II, drones were described as targets and prototype guided missiles,48
and their flight was ‘pilotless’ or ‘manless.’ By 1946, usage shifted to 
‘unmanned,’ indicating the negation of man, not just his removal […] The denial 
enacted by ‘unmanning’ positions drone flights in opposition to, rather than as an 
47 Or, in the case of warfare, the system of violence.
48 During the Vietnam War, the prototype drones tested in Operation Igloo White were classified as 
missiles in Air Force accounting (“Investigation Into Electronic Battlefield…” 1971, p. 147).
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extension of piloted flight, while the drone’s eventual use for surveillance by the 
United States disavows human action to outline its function as apolitical. The 
drone is constructed as monitoring the nation rather than enacting its politics. 
(2020, p. 62)
Though this rhetorical “disavowal of politics by technology” is perhaps subtle, it is 
nonetheless a troubling parallel to the ongoing rhetorical disavowal of the lethal effects of
CBP’s ‘prevention through deterrence’ strategy.  As de León has demonstrated (2015), 
border enforcement authorities frame the desert environment of the southwestern 
borderlands as the only cause of the deaths of migrants who attempt to cross through it, 
downplaying the fact that it is US enforcement strategy that has consistently and 
intentionally driven migrants to the most remote, hostile zones of the border. 
Weaponizing the environment and substituting electronic systems for human pilot-
observers both serve to distance the body politic from the material consequences created 
by the enforcement of territorial division on the ground, contributing to a deceptive 
narrative that suggests the border can “essentially enforce itself” (Warren 2015, p. 93). 
And allowing drones and the desert to carry out the work of bordering also reduces the 
direct risk to Border Patrol or CBP personnel, thus increasing the state’s capability to 
simultaneously project force and protect its forces. This logic of multiplying the state’s 
reach while minimizing the vulnerability of its agents is part of the fundamental appeal of
air power (see Kaplan 2006, p. 404; Killingray 1984) and has been a guiding principle of 
the longer history of drone development. Chandler’s writing is a reminder that this 
principle manifests in the practice of border enforcement, too. 
Chandler also draws a connection between the use of drones for surveillance and 
the colonial violence through which the US-Mexico border was originally established. 
“[T]he illusion of automated machines,” Chandler writes, “remov[es] the colonizer from 
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the act of continued violence implied by surveillance” (2020, p. 81). While this point is 
perhaps less directly explanatory of drones’ current role in bordering, it does help connect
the current, technologically advanced bordering regime back to the longer history of the 
border. It is worthwhile to reiterate the continuity between the current tools of territorial 
control and the long-historical context from which they emerged. Chandler’s point 
complements Hernandez’s insistence on recognizing the continuity of colonial violence 
inherent in the border (2018), as well as Gregory’s exhortation to analyze not only on 
“the technical (or techno-cultural) object” that is the drone but on the “wider dispositions 
and propensities” that enliven it (2014, p. 7), including—in the context of the US-Mexico
border—the ongoing “destruction of Indigenous lands and histories” (Chandler 2020, p. 
81). The aerial surveillance conducted by drones “exposes the land, in turn defining the 
territory below as known, inspected, and watched by the United States,” Chandler writes 
(idem, p. 78).49 But again, it does so under the illusory premise of apolitical automation. 
From Chandler’s perspective, we might conceive of drones as a form of psychological 
insulation against the ongoing consequences of colonization and bordering alike.
The weight of the border-industrial complex
Although these critical readings of drones are valuable in striving to comprehend 
the otherwise seemingly illogical continuance of CBP’s Predator program, both are 
primarily focused on the state. In consequence, neither sufficiently addresses the role of 
the corporate border-industrial complex in creating and sustaining the ongoing drone 
surveillance program in the southwest. But there is simply no way to understand drone 
use at the border without attending to the role of capitalism. This requires us to “look 
49 It is worth noting that Mexico employs drones as part of its border surveillance efforts, too—ongoing 
processes of coloniality occur on both sides of the border. 
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behind and around the state,” as Heyman (2012, p. 264) aptly phrases it. 
As I discussed above, the Predator B drones operated by CBP cost tens of millions
of dollars to acquire and maintain (see pp. 124, 127). And while tens of millions of 
dollars is already an extraordinary amount of money, it is merely the tip of the iceberg in 
the grand scheme of border profiteering. “Since 9/11 a border security juggernaut has 
swept across the Southwest,” Barry writes (2011, p. 151). CBP’s annual budget has 
tripled since 2003, from $5.9 billion to $17.7 billion (Aizeki et al. 2021, p. 22). Much of 
that money has flowed from the agency to private corporations. Miller writes that the 
consulting firm Deloitte, for instance, holds task orders and contracts with DHS worth 
more than a billion dollars (2019, p. 141). That arrangement, he notes, is an “example of 
the ever more commonplace privatization of border enforcement” (ibid). 
The privatization of enforcement may be a global phenomenon, but like other 
trends in bordering, it is significantly driven and directed by US decisions at the border 
with Mexico (Miller 2019, 2014). At the forefront of the trend are those corporate 
entities, individual executives, and even academics whom Miller describes as “white-
collar boundary builders” (2014, p. 43). These representatives of the interests of capital 
ally with state agency interests to compete for an ever-greater share of public tax revenue 
and private investment (Heyman 2012, pp. 268-269). To such actors, the division of 
political space appears as an opportunity for the multiplication of profits. Technologies 
like drones—sophisticated, proprietary, and expensive—are key to making border 
enforcement a lucrative opportunity. 
The companies that have profited from the development, sale, maintenance, and 
even flight of drones have mostly been large and politically influential defense 
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contractors. But Silicon Valley start-ups are also increasingly pursuing contracts in this 
space (see, e.g. Ravindranath 2016, Metz 2021). “Surveillance and defense tech startups 
have found early success with the deployment of their tools like drones, AI software, and 
new sensors — some of them extending small-scale pilots into longer-term contracts,” 
Ghaffary notes (2020). Larger digital technology companies also have contracts with 
border and immigration enforcement agencies, though their greater public prominence 
have made such contracts targets of critical attention from both employees and the 
general public (ibid). Smaller start-ups are less likely to draw comparable scrutiny.
To be clear, close links between border enforcement authorities and aircraft 
manufacturers preceded the implementation of the drone program. The daughter of a 
former Border Patrol pilot, interviewed in 2019, recalled that after her father helped 
negotiate a contract for the agency’s first helicopters in Chula Vista, “he came home with 
baseball caps and key rings, and little tokens, obviously gifts from Hughes [Helicopters]”
(Broyles et al. 2020, p. 565). These trinkets are symbols of corporate courting, evidence 
of effort to establish longer-term relationships between the company and the agency. But 
the scale of those contractual relationships has increased tremendously in the post-9/11 
era of budget expansion. Remember that the Border Patrol acquired many of its earlier 
aircraft at little or no cost from the US military: after purchasing its first two helicopters 
from Hughes, the agency received at least 45 “free airframes” from the Army (Broyles et 
al. 2020, p. 225). It could not have afforded to purchase them. And neither helicopters nor
airplanes—certainly not the small and simple Piper Super Cubs—were as expensive as 
drones. Even the most advanced commercial helicopter purchased by CBP, the A-Star, 
was an order of magnitude less expensive than a Predator B drone, measured on a per-
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flight-hour basis (see p. 123). Drones are emblematic of the growth and intensification of 
the border-industrial complex, “the outgrowth of a US-government-constructed crisis 
predicated on the purported need for massive investment in border policing in response to
an ever-expanding range of manufactured threats” (Aizeki et al. 2021, p. 21). Complex 
technological systems like the Predator B function exceedingly well as vehicles for the 
circulation and valorization of capital, despite demonstrating little actual effectiveness in 
the practice of border enforcement. 
Recognizing that drones may benefit their manufacturers more than their 
government operators is also consistent with Warren’s analysis of border security as an 
‘extractive industry’ (2015, 2017, 2019). Warren, like Andreas (2009), has argued that 
“border smuggling and border security function as a kind of singular economic network, 
each largely dependent on the work of the other for the high profits and high funding that 
sustain them” (2015, p. 166). This tightly coupled “interdiction economy,” he writes, is 
“mostly an extractive industry where the benefits of high profits, lucrative contracts, and 
increased funding are enjoyed elsewhere,” while the costs are borne by migrants, 
borderlands residents, and the borderlands environment itself (idem, pp. 173, 201; 2017, 
p. 865). Drones, seen from this perspective, are at once a novel way to derive profits from
the borderlands and consistent with longer histories of corporate extraction and 
exploitation in the region. 
I do not want to encourage an oversimplified view of the business of border 
enforcement. The relationships between capitalism—“a dynamic network of relationships
that moves unceasingly across geographic space”—and the geographically delimited 
territorial state are complicated, tense, and sometimes confusing (Heyman 2012, p. 264; 
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see also Andreas 2009, Sparke 2006). In the specific context of the US-Mexico border, 
Heyman points out that border enforcement cannot be said to serve the uncontested 
interest of a monolithic capital. He cites, for instance, underinvestment in official ports of
entry, which causes freight delays and thus friction in the transnational flow of 
commodities and capital (2012, p. 267). While “between-port enforcement” can be 
lucrative for “the so-called homeland security-industrial complex,” he contends that this 
industry is “a relatively modest agent of capital in comparison with the manufacturing 
and trade interests that are negatively impacted by poor-quality ports” (idem, p. 269), and
suggests that the influence of the border-industrial complex has been overestimated. His 
broader point—that what benefits some capitalists may negatively affect others, and that 
some state decisions cannot be readily explained by reference to the interests of capital—
is important to bear in mind. 
It would be an oversimplification, therefore, to claim that profit motive alone 
explains the continued use of drones for US border enforcement. At the same time, it 
would be a mistake to forget that major government contractors have a significant 
financial incentive to maintain or expand the use of proprietary and profitable 
technologies in bordering. Capitalism is not the only reason that drones were enrolled 
into the border enforcement apparatus of the state. But it must be acknowledged as one of
the reasons that drones continue to be deployed to reinforce and communicate the state’s 
authority over geography despite the absence of proof of their efficacy.
Conclusion
In this chapter, I have attempted to survey the use of drones in US border 
enforcement in the southwest, and put that use into context through comparison with the 
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other types of aircraft employed by CBP, with the goal of answering my research 
question about the evolution of aerial bordering practices across successive technological 
platforms. However, there remains much that we do not know about the use of drones in 
US border enforcement. Because CBP guards much of the data on the Predator B 
program closely—and, according to internal audits, fails to collect sufficient data in the 
first place—it is difficult to assess the program thoroughly. Similarly, the agency’s use of 
small drones is not well documented at this point. Despite these lacunae, some things are 
relatively clear. 
The development of drones was significantly influenced by fears of aerial 
intrusion at the southwestern land border, and simultaneously by US attempts to control 
terrestrial mobility as part of military efforts abroad. The technological foundations of the
current drone surveillance system were created, in part, within the borderlands—in San 
Diego, as Chaar López points out, and at Fort Huachuca, Arizona, which now serves as 
the center of flight operations for one-third of CBP’s Predator B fleet. That system was 
also built, from the beginning, with the cooperation of military contractors, who have 
parlayed their experience navigating the military-industrial complex into prominent roles 
in the parallel border-industrial complex. Although the enrollment of drones into the 
apparatus of border enforcement has drawn significant public attention and criticism, 
publicly available data suggest that their direct contributions to enforcement is in fact 
quite limited. And interviews with humanitarian aid activists make clear that the physical 
presence of drones near the border is minimal. They are rarely, if ever, definitively seen 
or heard. Unlike helicopters, which play a direct and obvious role in both apprehension 
and deterrence, drones seem to be of little concern to these activists, and possibly to 
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migrants as well. Still, drones have potentially consequential symbolic functions. Their 
presence communicates the state’s claim to authority over territory, and simultaneously 
helps to keep at a distance the violence generated by aggressive enforcement of that 
claim. While drones may have symbolic and representational value to the state, they also 
represent substantial monetary value for the border-industrial complex.  That complex 
has grown in size and influence as a consequence of the political attention and federal 
funding devoted to reinforcing the territorial boundaries of the state in the twenty-first 
century. Such growth is unlikely to end soon: “There can never be ‘total’ security,” write 
Aizeki et al., “and, thus, there will always be an alleged need for new technology to fill 
perceived gaps. Failure of any kind helps create a market for the next even more 
expensive product or service” (2021, p. 2; see also Boyce 2016). Indeed, drones continue 
to feature prominently in calls for a ‘smart’ border wall.
But the technological sophistication of drones should not distract us from the 
underlying political-territorial goals they are intended to accomplish. Drones are not a 
radical departure from the other types of surveillance aircraft that preceded them (Michel 
2017; Chandler 2020). As Aizeki et al. argue: 
… all border policing—whether low-tech or ‘smart’—shares a common goal: to 
control human beings and to deny entry to those deemed undesirable or 
undeserving. In other words, the goal of a ‘smart’ border is not increased 
humaneness, but greater effectiveness in advancing this violent enterprise (2021, 
p. 9)
Drones aloft and sensors below are new means to an old end. The US has been striving to
control passage across the limits of its territory for over 150 years. It has been attempting 
to secure the vertical space above the border—both against intrusion, and as a position 
from which to exercise power—since the invention of powered flight. The use of drones 
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conforms to the pattern of the state’s commitment to reinforcing (and reinscribing) its 
fixed edges in the face of clear challenges to territorial authority. Their most novel 
characteristic is not their often-overestimated contribution to the reach and persistence of 
border surveillance, but the degree to which they have transformed border airspace into a 
venue for the circulation of capital on a new and troubling scale. 
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CHAPTER VI
CONCLUSION
The fleet of airplanes, helicopters, and drones that patrols the international 
boundary between the US and Mexico today is a far cry from the first, floundering 
attempts to control the border from the air in the early decades of the twentieth century. 
The practice of aerial border enforcement in the US began with ex-World War I aviators 
flying unreliable biplanes nicknamed ‘flaming coffins’ (Hinkle 1970, p. 7), Customs 
Service agents commandeering the aircraft of smugglers, and an unsuccessful—and fatal
—multi-year experiment with the now-forgotten autogiro. Now, Customs and Border 
Protection fields “the largest law enforcement air force in the world […] equivalent 
roughly to the size of Brazil’s entire combat air force” (Graff 2014). The scale, scope, and
sophistication of aerial enforcement have grown tremendously, enabled by the 
availability of surplus state capacities and later by the emerging border-industrial 
complex. But the underlying political-geographic justifications for the continuing work of
bordering from above reflect the same fundamental territorial anxieties that have haunted 
the US since the establishment of its southwestern land border. 
The purpose of this thesis is to improve scholarly understanding of the enrollment 
of aircraft into the apparatus of US border enforcement, the mutually constitutive 
relationships between public representations of the border and the apparatus of border 
enforcement, and the ways in which that material apparatus is shaped by changing 
political-economic conditions. My key sources for this research included remotely 
accessible newspaper archives, newly-published internal histories of US Border Patrol 
aviation, and remotely-conducted interviews with members of humanitarian aid groups 
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currently active in the US-Mexico borderlands. Additionally, I drew upon government 
documents, independent reports, and a wide variety of existing academic research. My 
research was guided by three questions: First, how have the functions of aircraft in US-
Mexico border enforcement evolved with time and technological succession? Second, 
how have public representations of the US-Mexico border influenced the incorporation of
aircraft into bordering, and how have those aircraft, in turn, contributed to public 
representations of the border? And, third, in what ways does the use of aircraft in 
bordering reflect and reveal the larger political-economic circumstances shaping the 
evolution of the United States border enforcement apparatus? In this final section, I 
review the key conclusions of the three preceding chapters and highlight the continuities 
between the three major categories of aircraft studied. I also discuss some of the 
limitations and ‘loose ends’ of this project, and suggest future directions of potential 
research that might reinforce, complement, or even challenge what I have presented here. 
Major findings
In Chapter III, I analyzed how the proliferation of powered flight challenged ideas
of territorial stability. Airplanes were perceived as a “geography-defying” technology 
(Butler 2001, p. 639), exposing the gap between three-dimensional human mobility and 
the planar, cartographic logic that dominated state conceptions of territory. Newspaper 
reports in the 1910s and 1920s promoted the notion that unchecked air traffic from across
the border with Mexico was a threat requiring a response from the federal government. 
This aerial anxiety, as I have chosen to term it, became a persistent justification for 
expanding the capabilities of the state apparatus of border enforcement—and, at least in 
the beginning, for deploying airplanes to patrol the border. After a series of faltering false
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starts, aerial enforcement became institutionalized in the 1940s and 1950s, helped by the 
availability of planes and pilots in the wake of World War II. Though guided by the 
Border Patrol’s traditional practice of terrestrial ‘sign-cutting’ or tracking, enforcement by
airplane also relied on radio communications and cooperation with ground agents, 
evidence of the increasing complexity and networked nature of border enforcement. 
In Chapter IV, I argued that US military demobilization following the Vietnam 
War again created the conditions for a new expansion of border aviation. Following 
Gilmore (2007), I frame the Border Patrol’s acquisition of decommissioned helicopters 
and its hiring of former military helicopter pilots as examples of the spatial 
reconfiguration of surplus state capacities: as the original justification for employing 
those capacities in one place lost political support, a new justification was established 
elsewhere. The multiple uses of helicopters by the Border Patrol (and later, Customs and 
Border Protection) reveal a major gap between how the agency represents itself to the 
public and how it actually conducts enforcement operations. On one hand, border 
enforcement authorities have consistently represented helicopters as a life-saving tool, 
enhancing their ability to conduct search and rescue missions in remote sections of the 
borderlands. On the other hand, as humanitarian aid activists working in the borderlands 
attest, helicopters are regularly used to intimidate, scatter, and disorient migrants 
attempting to cross remote sections of the borderlands, thereby enhancing the lethal 
effects of policies that already funnel migrants toward the most rugged and dangerous 
terrain. And when helicopters are not in use for direct enforcement operations, they are 
often used to carry politicians and journalists on carefully orchestrated tours above the 
border, helping border enforcement authorities reinforce public perception of the border 
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as a ‘disorderly space’ (Corva 2008) that must be dealt with through the continuing 
escalation of enforcement.
Finally, in Chapter V, I reconsidered the role of drones in the current border 
enforcement regime. Although the border region was key to the early development and 
testing of the technologies that made remotely piloted aerial surveillance systems 
feasible, interviews with humanitarian aid activists working in that region today suggest 
that drones have little material presence in the borderlands, and similarly little effect on 
the conduct of border enforcement. While there remains much that we do not know about
CBP’s use of drones—including, notably, the full extent and capabilities of its small-
drone program—the data that exist reinforce those activists’ perception. Government 
audits of CBP’s drone program have found it provides no clear enforcement advantage 
while costing substantially more than traditional piloted flight operations. But drones can 
be understood as communicative technologies that, like helicopters, help CBP project the 
image of a formidable and necessary institution responding to an intractable problem. 
They also serve as a means of political disavowal, concealing the deliberate decisions that
drive border policy beneath a facade of computerized automation. Still, even taking these 
potential rationales into account, we cannot ultimately make sense of the continued use of
CBP’s Predator B drones without acknowledging the rise of the border-industrial 
complex, which is accumulating its own inertia as the US pursues continued expansion 
and intensification of border enforcement on the ground and in the sky. 
If there is one overarching narrative that unites these chapters, it is the gradual 
transition from portrayals and perception of aircraft as ‘geography-defying’ (Butler 2001)
to aircraft as geography-defining. The ability of aircraft to define and enforce state 
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geography in terrain where the spatial limits of the state are otherwise weakly demarcated
is now more materially consequential, in the context of the US-Mexico border, than the 
capacity of aircraft to disrupt or transgress that border. I hasten to add that the shift is 
incomplete: the possibility of ‘rogue’ or ‘foreign’ aircraft intruding on US airspace 
lingers, and periodically resurfaces in the discourse surrounding border security. 
Nonetheless, the transition is significant. The vertical dimension, once perceived as an 
uncontrolled arena of mobility that defied states’ authority over the political division of 
space, has now largely—though not, I stress, completely—become another domain for 
the exercise of that authority. The human consequences of enforcement from the air have 
changed as aerial technology evolved alongside US border policy, and the increasing 
complexity of aerial technology has created new and troubling opportunities for the 
privatization of enforcement, but on the whole the enrollment of aircraft into border 
enforcement essentially reflects territory’s ‘continuing allure’ (Murphy 2013)—the 
enduring ideological primacy of the concept of strictly bounded political space. 
Airplanes, helicopters, and drones have all been adopted as tools in service of the 
political ambition to define and control space. The fact that this ambition is ultimately 
non-finalizable (Kolossov and Scott 2013; Jones 2009) does not negate the fact that it 
continues to be a major driver of state policy and a key determinant of how technologies 
are perceived, developed, promoted, and deployed for bordering.
Limitations and future directions of research
The process of researching and writing this thesis raised at least as many 
questions as it answered. Here I highlight some of the potential directions of future 
research that might help to address the questions left unaddressed by this thesis. 
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One obvious starting point would be to speak directly to current, past, and/or 
potential migrants about their perceptions of the US aerial enforcement apparatus.50 This 
thesis does not include the perspectives of migrants, except when repeated secondhand by
humanitarian aid activists (e.g. Ch. V, p. 129). Although my interviews for this project 
and the internal histories of Border Patrol aviation certainly suggest that migrants’ 
perception of the border regime and their decision-making are influenced by aerial 
enforcement, I cannot confidently claim to know precisely how influential aircraft are in 
this regard. Interviewing or other traditional ethnographic methods of study might 
provide some greater clarity. However, while research conducted in this manner could be 
illuminating, it is also important to recognize that the results of such research might well 
attract the attention of CBP, and could indirectly provide that agency with ideas on how 
to target or expand its enforcement efforts. Anyone undertaking such a project must 
seriously consider that potential risk.
An alternative approach using similar methods would be to research the people 
who fly the aircraft: Air and Marine Operations pilots and/or drone operators. This 
project drew upon the perspectives and recollections of past pilots, but only in indirect 
form. The volumes compiled by Broyles et al. have significant historical value but do not 
provide substantial insight into the current workings of enforcement. There are obvious 
institutional barriers to access that would complicate an attempt to study AMO 
employees; such research would likely require circumnavigating or subverting the 
information controls of CBP. But if someone were able to speak frankly with current 
aircraft pilots about their training, tactics, and culture it might provide significant insight 
50 While I found no English-language on migrants’ perceptions of aerial enforcement, it may be the case 
that research or documentation exists in languages other than English. 
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into the human elements of the border enforcement apparatus.
Thinking beyond ethnographic methods, there is much more room to investigate 
the narrative constructions that legitimize border aviation. While this thesis included 
elements of discourse analysis, the range of materials considered within that analysis was 
limited to newspaper reports. There are numerous other materials that could be 
productive inclusions in a broader discourse analysis. In the specific context of aircraft, 
Chandler (2020) and Chaar López (2018) have shown the value of analyzing government 
documents from the early years of drone development, and Butler’s (2001) work drew on 
international conference proceedings from the early 20th century. The same approach is 
broadly applicable to all kinds of discursive representations of border aviation. Though 
not writing about aviation in particular, Jones (2014) analyzed the television show Border
Wars to show the disjuncture between the show’s official narrative and the actual imagery
included in it. Some of my discussions with my interviewees revolved around CBP’s use 
of social media or podcasting to shape its public image, and these forms of representation
are also potentially relevant to an expanded discourse analysis. In short, the wider 
discursive foundations of bordering from above deserve additional scrutiny. 
This thesis does not include any significant use of spatial data or geographic 
information systems, but those geographic tools are clearly relevant to the study of border
enforcement, as the work of Chambers et al. (2019) and others demonstrates. In the 
context of aviation, much information about the location of Border Patrol centers of 
operation is already publicly available, and the journalist Jason Paladino has 
demonstrated that some Predator B drone flights can be identified and tracked using 
open-source data (see Atherton 2020). To the best of my knowledge, that tactic has not 
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been used extensively in the border region. If successfully applied on a larger scale—and 
I freely admit that the technical questions involved are beyond my expertise—it might 
provide a way to locate the areas of greatest drone activity and/or the margins of drone 
surveillance, especially if combined with publicly available information about the 
technical capabilities of the Predator B platform. Aerial enforcement is not yet factored 
into the analysis conducted by Chambers et al. (2019), and adding that data might reveal 
new patterns in the varying spatial impact of border enforcement strategy. 
A comparative study of aerial enforcement in other border contexts could also be 
valuable. Although some limited research exists on the use of drones for border 
surveillance in Switzerland (Pedrozo 2017) and on the emerging uses of drones to 
monitor and reproduce the external borders of the European Union (Garijo 2020, Oliveira
Martins & Jumbert 2020), I have found only one intentionally comparative study to date 
(Koslowski & Schulzke 2018). That study focuses narrowly on the direct costs and 
‘benefits’ of drone use, and does not explore the broader questions around bordering and 
territory that I have tried to engage here. Future critical geographic research on the uses 
of drones in border-making projects outside the US is warranted, both for its own sake 
and for the potential of better understanding the US border regime through comparison.
One might also take a broader historical perspective on the institutional evolution 
and divergences that have shaped US border enforcement in particular. As described in 
the introduction, the responsibility for guarding the US-Mexico border has been 
frequently transferred and divided between agencies since formal enforcement began. In 
this thesis, I have emphasized the continuities that persisted despite these periodic 
reorganizations. I acknowledge, however, that the effects of this institutional convolution 
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may be more complex than I have been able to describe here. The establishment of an 
independent Air Force after World War II, for instance, might have influenced the type of 
aerial enforcement operations pursued by the Border Patrol and Customs Service in the 
same period. When multiple agencies share the burden of the nation’s aerial anxiety, how 
is responsibility ultimately divided? This question has both organizational and spatial 
implications, and likely merits greater consideration in the future.
Finally, I should also acknowledge that there are uses of aircraft by US border 
enforcement authorities that do not feature prominently in this thesis and may be 
regarded as oversights on my part. For example, I have not devoted significant space here
to the practice of farm and ranch check, during which airplanes often served as overhead 
surveillance while agents searched for undocumented workers in agricultural fields. In 
my view this practice is more closely related to interior immigration enforcement than to 
directly policing movement across the border itself—though of course, I recognize that 
some readers may question that distinction. More notably, I have not written in this thesis
about the use of aircraft in forced deportations, a practice which began in the 1960s 
(Broyles et al. 2020, p. 131) but was recently thrust into popular attention again by the 
high-profile deportation of thousands of Haitian migrants in September 2021 (see, for 
example, Sullivan &Jordan 2021; Sonmez & Miroff 2021). Early in my research process 
I decided to exclude these deportation flights from the scope of my analysis—partly as a 
practical choice, given the time constraints for this thesis, and partly because I viewed 
them as a separate issue requiring a separate analysis. Whether or not the latter judgment 
was correct, I hope that the use of aircraft for deportation will be the subject of future 
research. It is a tactic that intersects with both the strategy of prevention through 
162
deterrence, which de León (2015) characterizes as the weaponization of geography, and 
the international expansion of the US bordering regime (Miller 2019). Multiple potential 
sources of data already exist: the internal histories compiled by Broyles et al. (2020) 
contain significant material on the history of the original so-called ‘airlifts,’ the volunteer 
organization Witness at the Border attempts to track and record current ICE deportation 
flights,51 and the practice has been investigated by the Center for Human Rights at the 
University of Washington (“Hidden in Plain Sight,” 2019). Further analysis of the 
development and impacts of this practice is warranted. 
I am less concerned with the possibility that I may have given insufficient 
attention to the humanitarian uses of Border Patrol or CBP aircraft. These agencies are, as
I have argued earlier in this thesis, continually attempting to represent themselves as 
compassionate, humane organizations. I refuse to assist them in that image-laundering 
effort. While there may well be compassionate individuals within the ranks of those 
agencies, US border enforcement is not a humane practice—it is, as Miller writes, “anti-
human” (2014, p. 230) and cannot be redeemed by individual acts of kindness or by 
press-friendly helicopter rescues. 
Parting thoughts
Omissions notwithstanding, this thesis is, to the best of my knowledge, the first 
attempt to analyze the successive incorporation of multiple types of aircraft into US 
border enforcement. It contributes to the broader conversation within political geography 
about the linkages between the discursive and material production of borders. Both 
“tangible arrangements of steel and concrete, wires and semiconductors, nuts and bolts” 
51 See witnessattheborder.org
163
(Winner 1986, p. 29) deployed in the name of border enforcement and narratives of 
territorial vulnerability—like those that originally justified the deployment of aircraft—
are part of the means by which borders are reproduced. It is my hope that this work may 
motivate other research, particularly from a geographic perspective, into the technologies 
and representations that enable bordering and the ongoing effectuation of territory. 
That research has theoretical importance, but it has an urgent practical 
importance, too. What happens at the border does not stay confined to the borderlands. 
The recent use of CBP drones to surveil Black Lives Matter protesters (Atherton 2020) 
and the use of a CBP helicopter to intimidate anti-pipeline protesters with wind, noise, 
and flying debris (Brown and Richards 2021) should not be seen as anomalous incidents. 
The tactics of illiberal governance practiced in bordering and the state capacities 
developed for that task are readily transferable to other contexts away from the 
borderline. It is imperative that we understand and denaturalize the political and 
geographical rationales legitimizing these tactics, and at the same time, that we prepare to
resist them wherever they appear. 
164
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