Rep. Delia Ramirez Moves to Kill US Border Tower Program

Border tower program funding is now in the crosshairs of a sitting member of Congress. Delia Ramirez, a Democratic US representative from Illinois, has announced she will introduce legislation to terminate the surveillance tower system strung along the US southern border, a move that follows a fresh investigation into what those towers have actually accomplished since they went up.

The announcement landed days after MIT Technology Review published "Dying on Camera." That investigation examined deaths along the border that occurred close to one or more of the towers, and its reporting found that nearly one in four deaths analyzed between 2015 and early 2026 happened within the towers' advertised range. It's a staggering figure. And the Department of Homeland Security doesn't keep track of those deaths, nor does it track other metrics that might reveal whether the towers succeed or fail at their stated job, which means we've got no real way of knowing if they're working at all.

Ramirez Cites the Numbers and Pounces

Ramirez, who sits on the Homeland Security Committee, pointed directly at the reporting. She said nearly "1,100 people have died within range of a billion-dollar surveillance tower system between 2015 and 2026." Her conclusion was blunt.

"The towers that we have paid a billion dollars to just don't work."

That line is the spine of her argument. A billion dollars buys a lot of hardware, and hardware is supposed to produce measurable outcomes. The trouble, as the investigation laid out, is that nobody at the department has been measuring anything. There is no scorecard for the border tower program. No tally of interdictions, no count of lives saved, no accounting of the deaths that happened in the camera's field of view. The absence of that data is not a small procedural gap. It is the entire problem.

Deploy a surveillance system at scale, and the public gets told what it'll catch. What it misses rarely gets published. The MIT Technology Review work put a number on the misses. That number was uncomfortable. And it's not the kind of figure officials rush to share, because when you build a system meant to watch everything, the gaps in what it actually sees, the people and places and moments it never registers at all, tend to say more about the limits of the technology than any list of successes ever could.

What the Reimagining Safety Act Would Do

The legislation carries a name that signals its ambition: the Reimagining Safety Act. It was developed in consultation with community groups and local and state representatives, not drafted in a vacuum by staff attorneys. Two advocacy organizations helped shape the calls to terminate the border tower program. Just Futures Law focuses on immigrant rights and racial justice. Mijente describes itself as a "vehicle for building independent Latinx political power." The two groups put out a joint report earlier this year on the technology used by ICE, and that groundwork fed directly into the bill.

The towers are only one piece of a much larger puzzle the legislation wants to take apart. The bill is intended to function as part of a broader proposal to replace the Department of Homeland Security with a new Department of Community Safety. Under that plan, several agencies would not simply vanish. They would move.

• CISA would shift to another existing federal agency.
• FEMA would shift to another existing federal agency.
• TSA would shift to another existing federal agency.
• Customs functions would shift to another existing federal agency.

Her office hasn't released the text. It's not out yet. A spokesperson said it will come in the next few weeks, which means the specific mechanics of how the towers would be decommissioned, and on what timeline, remain unwritten for now, since nobody has seen the actual language and they're still working out the details. But that's where things stand.

A Steep Climb in Congress

It's not the first time. Bills to dismantle the Department of Homeland Security have been introduced before, and previous proposals have not gone very far, and this one faces the same math, which means the votes may not exist. But even some Democrats favor reforming the department rather than outright dismantling it. So they're not there on either side.

Ramirez, however, is not a backbencher on this file. She sits on both the House committee that oversees the department and serves as the ranking member on the Homeland Security Committee's cybersecurity subcommittee. That gives her a platform and a procedural foothold that a rank-and-file member would not have. She framed the effort as one piece of a larger rebuild.

We're limiting state surveillance. We're reigning unlawful abuses of data and curbing the militarized enforcement, and we're doing it because we've seen what happens when nobody draws a line. We're beginning the process. It's a separate civil immigration system we're establishing, and don't think they're going to stop us.

The Politics Behind the Push

Public support for abolishing ICE is growing. It's growing fast. That growth follows the second Trump administration's highly visible enforcement operations across American cities, the buildout of its detention apparatus, and shootings by ICE and CBP agents. Wilber Rafael Garcés Pérez was a delivery driver. An ICE agent shot him in the back just last weekend in Austin, Texas. And events like that have moved the Overton window on enforcement questions faster than anyone predicted a few years ago. We've seen it. They're not slowing down, and it's clear that what once seemed impossible now sits at the center of the argument.

But for Ramirez, killing ICE isn't enough. She wants more. At a press conference in Chicago on Wednesday, she made the scope of her target plain, and it's clear that she doesn't intend to stop at one agency, because what she's after goes well beyond anything we've seen so far.

"There's no question that DHS has to be dismantled. We need to provide them a road map in how we do it."

The road map language matters. It is one thing to call for an agency's end. It is another to sketch what replaces it, which agencies absorb which functions, and how the transition gets staffed. That is the harder political project, and it is the one the Reimagining Safety Act is trying to start.

The Resistance Is Already Loud

The response from the top of the department was immediate and dismissive. Markwayne Mullin, the Secretary of Homeland Security, said, "Radical leftists are calling to defund the police and abolish DHS. It's NEVER going to happen." CBP did not offer an immediate response for comment.

So they're already talking past each other. One side points at a billion dollars and nearly 1,100 deaths inside the camera's reach, and that's a lot to answer for, no matter what the other side says about the politics. The other side points at the politics and says the votes are not there. Both can be true at once. And they don't have to agree for that to hold.

Why the Towers Keep Standing

Surveillance infrastructure has a peculiar staying power. A tower goes up, a camera goes on, and the system becomes part of the background. Nobody has to defend it every budget cycle because nobody is forced to prove it works. The MIT Technology Review investigation exposed exactly that gap: the Department of Homeland Security does not keep track of the deaths or other metrics on the towers' success or failure. When there is no measurement, there is no verdict. The border tower program rolls on by default.

That's the vacuum. Ramirez is trying to fill it with legislation, and whether she actually fills it depends on a Congress that has repeatedly declined to go this far, a body that's shown no appetite for the kind of step her bill demands. But the bill puts a marker down. And markers have a way of becoming the starting line for the next fight.