Trump Admin Continues Aerial Surveillance Creep with CBP Drone Deployed Over LA
Posted on June 15, 2025
The Guardian has reported that Customs and Border Protection (CBP) deployed a surveillance-capable drone in response to the anti-ICE protests in Los Angeles. In a statement, CBP maintains that the drone’s mission is purely to ensure the safety of ICE officers operating in the city. Against the backdrop of an incremental domestic use of drones equipped with surveillance tools, this latest deployment prompts serious questions about the chilling effect that constant monitoring will have on First Amendment speech.
This is far from the first time that Americans have been subjected to the threat of surveillance from overhead. As the article points out, CBP also deployed drones to the George Floyd protests in Minneapolis in 2020, during the first Trump administration. And while Trump has certainly done the most to normalize domestic use aerial platforms, this did not start with him. Back during the Obama administration, DHS was salivating at the chance to fly drones over US domestic populations.
Nor was the deployment of air surveillance assets limited to federal law enforcement. Local law enforcement in Chicago and LA have made use of “dirt boxes”, mobile network monitoring devices mounted on small planes, dating back at least 20 years. Drones are simply a remote-controlled, cheaper, and logistically simpler iteration of this same capability.
Part of the ease with which CBP deployed, and justified the deployment of, their MQ-9 drone is because the entirety of Los Angeles resides within what DHS designates as a border zone, a buffer that extends 100 miles from any coastline or national border. This provides CBP with a convenient legal fig leaf for bringing all of their most formidable hardware to bear if it so chooses. Within this zone, federal law enforcement with an immigration purview can even suspend the right to privacy. This is why travelers are subject to searches at airports from which the Fourth Amendment would normally protect them.
CBP is not completely uninhibited from leveraging whatever data they collect from their current aerial “support” mission. Agency regulations from 2013, made available via Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, outline a requirement that data not utilized as part of an active criminal investigation or prosecution be deleted within 30 days of collection. But although DHS’s Office of Inspector General did find security controls to be adequate under the Biden administration, Trump may well move to neuter any attempts to tie the department’s hands, from without or within. In fact, it may occur purely on account of his sweeping cuts to personnel.
The scope of data that can be collected even incidentally is concerning. On its own, CBP’s drones each have numerous cameras, the footage from which can be submitted to facial recognition analysis after the fact. And the federal government has one of the largest repositories of American faces in the nation. Additionally, although this has not been explicitly demonstrated, it would be easy for an MQ-9 drone such as CBP’s to be supplemented with a cell site simulator (better known as a “stingray” or “IMSI catcher”) or other cellular signals interception technology. Cellular communications functionality for such platforms has already been demonstrated.
Even if the troves of data to be had on Trump’s political foes from LA are not abused in this specific instance, the CBP under his administration continues to reach new heights of surveillance ubiquity in America using military-grade assets.
You can read the full article from The Guardian here.
