New joint U.S. - Canada border surveillance post opened in Michigan

Last month a sophisticated new surveillance center was opened in northern Michigan to monitor the U.S.– Canada border.

The $30 million, 9,000 square foot facility, located at the Selfridge Air National Guard Base, will act as a joint command center for Custom and Border Protection, the FBI, Coast Guard, state and local law enforcement officials, and even Canadian police.

The command center will receive real time feeds from eleven surveillance cameras installed on towers alongside the St. Clair River. The center will also receive data feeds collected from aerial drones and helicopters.

In particular, agents at the new surveillance center will be keeping an eye on drug smuggling, human trafficking, and illegal crossings related to terrorist activity.

Officials say that the command center is perfectly situated to monitor any suspicious border crossings as it is located in between the two busiest border crossing stations, the Detroit Ambassador Bridge and the Blue Water Bridge in Port Huron, as well as the busiest railroad crossing on the northern border.

The facility is notable for its interagency model, where various government agencies will work alongside one another. Data will be shared with federal law enforcement agencies as well as nearby states including Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois.

An intelligence analyst from Canada’s Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) will also be stationed there full time to share information with the

RCMP staff sergeant Steve Brown said that the posting of a Mountie at a U.S. facility was unprecedented.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Brown said.

In the past, information sharing along the border between American and Canadian law enforcement agents had had never been formalized and occurred sporadically.

“It’s a very unique partnership in that we’ll actually have a full-time representative of the RCMP within the center itself,” Brown said.

According to Brown the intelligence analyst stationed at the center will “be creating situational reports on ongoing situations that might be happening, or intelligence reports that might indicate potential areas of crossing, or areas of concern, that law enforcement, especially in Canada, should be looking at moving some enforcement bodies towards.”

The unveiling of the base comes weeks after a recent Government Accountability Report found that only thirty-two miles of the nearly 4,000 mile long northern border had “an acceptable level of security.”

While much of U.S. resources and attention has focused on the southern border, the northern border has become a major point of entry for drug traffickers, currency smugglers, and illegal immigration due to its sheer size and limited patrols by border agents.

Last year DHS spent nearly $3 billion to secure the northern border, making roughly 6,000 arrests and interdicting approximately 40,000 pounds of illegal drugs.

Every day roughly 300,000 people cross the border, while each minute nearly $1 million in goods and services travel between the two countries.