The long-delayed contract for Integrated Fixed Towers (IFTs) along the southwest border was awarded late in February. To remind those who are interested but don’t follow this issue as closely as we do at Taxpayers for Common Sense, IFTs were an element of the long since discredited Secure Border Initiative (SBI). SBI was first conceived in 2005, it morphed into SBInet in 2006, and was finally cancelled by the Department of Homeland Security in 2011.

Then, in 2012, an idea we thought was dead and buried rose again. The Department of Homeland Security issued a solicitation for IFTs. Basically, these towers would be equipped with cameras and sensors and tasked with detecting a “single, walking, average-sized adult at a range of 5 miles (T) / 7.5 miles (O) under the following conditions: daylight and darkness;” And that’s a daunting technological task.

On February 26^th, DHS announced the award of a contract worth more than $145 million to a U.S. based subsidiary of the Israeli company, Elbit. The contract allows for the work to take as long as eight and a half years to build and place the towers along the Arizona border.  The contract includes a command and control center for displaying the information captured by the cameras and sensors. That’s a long time to spend building the architecture of this program which may or may not be successful in finding people trying to cross a border almost 400 miles long. Given the history of SBI and SBInet, we can’t help but wonder if this is one more program that will be cancelled, but not before we fruitlessly spend more tax dollars.

The Obama Administration has deported roughly 400,000 people a year.  This is far more than the George W. Bush Administration which never deported more than 360,000 (in the last year of the administration) and deported as few as 165,000 people in 2002.

So maybe this administration figures it would be cheaper to deter some of these potential deportees before they reach the Arizona border. We remain to be convinced that spending $145 million on a string of towers is a good investment. And we really hope this isn’t the camel’s nose under the tent of that old, multi-billion dollar, DHS wish list of equipment that wound up in the Senate version of immigration “reform” last summer. Because spending that kind of money to “secure” the border should be a non-starter in our current fiscal climate.