The U.S. Border Patrol is putting up 11 more video surveillance towers in the Detroit area to help secure parts of the U.S.-Canadian border.
The towers will help monitor water traffic along Lake St. Clair, a duty performed by Border Patrol agents.
Five more towers are being installed in Buffalo, N.Y., to watch over the Niagara River.
The cameras will be used to zoom in on a boat that left Canada, for instance, and watch where it goes and what it does, said Mark Borkowski, executive director of the Secure Border Initiative at Customs and Border Protection.
"So the idea is to have cameras watch, and then agents are freed up to respond," Borkowski said in an interview with the Associated Press. The cameras will cut down the agent's response time by minutes, he said.
Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington, D.C., said the Detroit surveillance towers sound like a good idea.
The technology can be especially helpful on the northern border, he said, where the number of illegal immigrants crossing is much lower than on the southern border but, proportionally, "they're much more likely to be bad guys."
Security operations along the northern border include the use of unmanned aerial vehicles and coordination and intelligence sharing with local law enforcement.
The government awarded the $20 million tower project to Boeing Co., which has been criticized for faulty technology with its so-called "virtual fence" along the U.S.-Mexico boundary.
Borkowski acknowledged that as cameras pan an area, it might point at a private residence. He said that is not the cameras' intended targets and the resolution of the video won't be clear enough for residents to be concerned about privacy issues.
The Border Patrol says its 1,500 agents along the 4,000-mile northern border were involved in the arrests of 7,925 individuals last year. During the same time, 705,005 people were arrested on the southwestern border with Mexico, where 16,500 agents are assigned.
Borkowski said parts of the northern border are vulnerable to terrorists and drug trafficking.
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