Doña Ana County

Fourteen surveillance towers stand in Doña Ana County. Volunteers have mapped them and recorded the company that built them, Anduril, and the equipment they carry: cameras and radar together, watching ground rather than reading number plates. This is a border county, and towers like these are how the border is watched.

We read sixteen years of the county Commission’s record, 316 documents from 2007 to 2019. The word Anduril does not appear in it. Neither does “surveillance tower”, “integrated fixed tower”, General Dynamics or Elbit. “Border Patrol” appears once, in a 2015 packet, about a customs program that speeds up commercial truck clearance at the Santa Teresa port of entry.

Nothing about that is improper, and nobody hid anything. Border surveillance is a federal program. A county commission has no vote on it, so it never came before one. The towers stand on ground inside a county whose government never discussed them because it was never asked to.

That is the thing worth knowing. If you live here and want to ask who operates the mast you can see from your road, how long it keeps what it records, or who else can watch its feed, the county building is not where those answers are. The county’s own papers will not tell you where they are either.

Ninety-three plate readers, and not one vote

Ninety-three of the county’s 127 mapped devices are Flock Safety plate readers. In the record we read, the Commission never votes on a plate reader of any kind.

We are being careful with that one. The documents we could read stop in 2019, and Flock’s spread across New Mexico mostly happened after 2021. The likeliest explanation is not that these cameras arrived unapproved, but that they arrived after the last record we can see. It is a gap in what is readable, not proof of anything, and the county’s more recent agendas would settle it.

The one biometric decision in sixteen years is about county staff

On 8 December 2009 the Commission approved buying a Kronos Workforce Biometric Time Keeping System, purchased under a federal supply schedule and presented by the county’s information technology director.

That is a time clock that reads a body. The bodies it reads are county employees clocking on, not members of the public, and it is not a surveillance camera by any reasonable description.

It is on this page because it is the only thing in sixteen years of this county’s record that takes a biometric from anyone, and because taking one raises questions the minutes do not answer. What is captured, a fingerprint or a hand shape or something else. How long it is kept. Who can see it. What happens to it when an employee leaves. A county that scans its own staff has already decided those things, somewhere, in a document that is not the minutes.

What the county’s record is actually full of

Seventy-two of the eighty-four keyword matches across the whole corpus are the phrase “joint powers agreement”. Doña Ana governs by agreement with other bodies more than any New Mexico county we have read: flood control, health services, regional dispatch, the international port of entry.

None of the ones we surfaced is about surveillance equipment. The phrase stays worth watching, because in New Mexico a joint powers agreement is exactly how a county would join a shared camera or records system without buying one itself.

The eight “sole source” contracts in the record are a hospital, early childhood education and a community action agency. No technology is bought that way here.

What the record covers

This page rests on 316 of the 412 documents that survive from Doña Ana County’s agenda system and its older minutes archive, covering 2007 to 2019. Ninety-six are damaged beyond reading.

The county’s most recent six years are not here. Nothing on this page should be read as a statement about what Doña Ana County has done since 2019.

Where this leaves a resident

The towers are the question, and the county is not the place to ask it. Customs and Border Protection operates border surveillance in this area, and a request goes to the federal agency rather than to the county. Your congressional representative’s office is the other route, and it is the one that tends to get answered.

For the plate readers, ask the county for its recent agendas. The gap on this page is a gap in the archive, and the county can close it.

For the biometric time clock, the county is the right place: ask what it captures and how long it keeps it.