GoKawiilNo one paid attention to the gunshots that echoed through the convention center. They were real enough, and so were the screams that accompanied them, in the sense that they were recordings of real people who, like guest stars on Law and Order, reenacted scenarios that had clearly been plucked from the headlines: a kidnapping, a mass shooting in a church, a riot on a city street. The auditory terror punctured the otherwise banal din of an industry conference. This terror was, in fact, one of the products on display: the V-300 S-Screen Simulator, developed by VirTra, one of the 193 vendors at the annual Border Security Expo in Phoenix, Arizona.
For more than a decade, vendors and government representatives have mingled at the Border Security Expo, an annual trade show at which the former hawk their goods to the latter, promising that this camera or that sensor are the key to locking down the border once and for all. A smattering of protesters greeted us outside the convention center that morning, and some speakers — including border czar Tom Homan, who lambasted the “hateful rhetoric” of the fake news media — alluded to unfavorable public sentiment. But the feeling inside was convivial. This year’s expo was a victory lap for the men and women of the Department of Homeland Security and their many friends in the “vendor community.”
Border Czar Tom Homan delivers the keynote speech at the opening of the Border Security Expo in Phoenix, Arizona on Tuesday, May 5, 2026.
The relationships were perhaps a little too chummy. Homan had, after all, allegedly accepted $50,000 in bribes from undercover FBI agents posing as business executives hoping to land a government contract. The bureau quashed the investigation after Trump’s return to office, and a Justice Department appointee called it a “deep state” attempt to discredit Trump’s valiant border czar. Even members of Congress, Homan fumed, had the gall to call ICE and Border Patrol agents “Nazis” and “racists.” Such vile epithets had no place at the expo, where attendees celebrated the past year’s record-low border crossings and record-high interior arrests. Trump, whom Homan called “the greatest president in my lifetime,” had allowed ICE and CBP to finally do their jobs. And the contractors, too, would reap the rewards, perhaps finding their jobs a little easier under an administration that has taken a maximalist approach to immigration enforcement.
On the final morning of the convention, I sat next to a jovial, hulking man who told me he had been a Border Patrol agent for decades. Now he was on the other side, trying to sell AI software to his former employer. Throughout the expo floor, pot-bellied men in their business casual best exchanged handshakes and pleasantries with military men-turned-government contractors, their career history betrayed by their branded polos and ramrod postures. Carla Provost, who served as Border Patrol chief for two years during Trump’s first term, fluttered about the room like an ever-attentive hostess. Though DHS had the most money to blow, representatives from local police departments and sheriff’s offices — which have increasingly agreed to work with ICE through partnerships known as 287(g) agreements since Trump’s reelection — milled about. Vendors eagerly showed off their wares, hoping to benefit from the unprecedented funding DHS had received under Trump’s signature One Big Beautiful Bill Act. But was it possible that the border security industry was suffering from too much success?
Scenes from the Border Security Expo.
“We own the border now,” Customs and Border Protection commissioner Rodney Scott said during the opening day of the conference. This was, speaker after speaker assured us, the most secure southwest border in history. When the border was more porous, when hundreds of thousands of people were spilling across it every single day, one could argue that the government did indeed need more equipment to monitor and prevent the flow of people. But things had changed. There were a mere 8,268 apprehensions at the southwest border in March, compared to 137,473 two years earlier. That drop in encounters, however, isn’t because of tech but because of policy. The overwhelming majority of people who crossed the border under Biden turned themselves in immediately, because their goal was to ask for asylum, which can only be done once someone is on US soil. But Trump effectively eliminated asylum at the border — a move a federal appeals court recently said was illegal — and so the number of people crossing the border plummeted.
“We’re dang close to pretty much knowing everything that comes across,” John Morris, the chief patrol agent for the Tucson Sector, said. “In my 30 years of being in the Border Patrol, I never thought we could get here. It’s not that we didn’t know we couldn’t do it. All that it took was an administration that said, ‘Hey, go do it.’”
So what was the point of all of this? If the cameras, sensors, and drones already scattered throughout the desert were already doing their job, what was the need for more?
The border was so locked down, Scott said, that the focus was now on securing the interior of the country — and each and every one of the dwindling apprehensions at the border could help lead to arrests of immigrants further afield. After arresting and interrogating someone, Border Patrol and CBP agents can, “within minutes,” pass along any information gleaned from these interviews to ICE agents. “In many cases now, we’re doing follow-up arrests in houses way away from the southwest border,” Scott said. Because people migrating to the United States often have family or friends already living in the country, border apprehension has a ripple effect well into the interior of the country. “We’re putting that thing on steroids. That’s why we’ll have the deportations Tom talked about, and we’ll have a secure border, and we’ll finally give America what we’ve been promising for a long, long time.”
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