This story first appeared on palabra, the digital news site by the National Association of Hispanic Journalists. This article is co-published with the Los Angeles Times and Puente News Collaborative, a bilingual nonprofit newsroom, convener, and funder dedicated to high-quality, fact-based news and information from the U.S.-Mexico border.
FT HUACHUCA, Ariz. — Inside a windowless and dark shipping container turned into a high-tech surveillance command center, two analysts peered at their own set of six screens that showed data coming in from an MQ-9 Predator B drone. Both were looking for two adults and a child who had crossed the U.S.-Mexico border and had fled when a Border Patrol agent approached in a truck.
Inside the drone hangar on the other side of the Fort Huachuca base sat another former shipping container, this one occupied by a drone pilot and a camera operator who pivoted the drone’s camera to scan nine square miles of shrubs and saguaros for the migrants. Like the command center, the onetime shipping container was dark, lit only by the glow of the computer screens…