Policy Point: Domestic Illegal Migration Route Finding Sensors, Database, Predictive Analytics, Training Needed from Entry Points to Inland

Situation: Illegal border crossings reportedly dropped by 40% after the Biden Administration applied restrictions on immigration giving federal and state agencies an opportunity to catch-up on filtering, monitoring, checking, and securing threat-elements already in the country. Domestic migration observations, datapoints, analyses, and alternative migration route probabilities have never been more important. Combined with first responder intelligence, field experience, and knowledge, a running, continuously updated domestic illegal migration pathways database would help manage tomorrow’s immigration problems.

Logically On-deck: Attempts at clandestine crossing will likely increase with tighter restrictions. This puts a premium on funding migration intelligence, migration monitoring technologies, and manpower to utilize these tools to better track and intercept illegal crossers and relocating illegals domestically. And that implies funding to increase ICE, CDC, and other extended HS-local capabilities to intercept, and quickly process illegal migrants and whatever they bring with them according to national security principles closely fused with humanitarian principles.

Free Nation Hurdles Can Become Foreign-Domestic Policy Victories: The hardest part of the national-security-humanity yin-yang for a free nation is figuring out where to place those with seemingly nowhere good to go, or whose trustworthiness is uncertain. New idea generation is required when known resources for placement are not acceptable for national security, health, and or resource reasons. Yet here is a zone in which the United States can win hearts and minds internationally and inter-culturally in contrast to the dictatorships in the world that drive migration with crackdown-politics, aggressive imperial land grabs, funding cartels, and other self-defeating practices in a human inhabited world. It is this contrast in creative, humaneness amidst peerless national security acumen that should set the free world, developed-nation systems and leadership apart from imperial, human-exploiting regimes. Private and public sector efforts are whole-of-society, and the can-do attitude that “there’s an app for that” can’t hurt as those seeking clandestine-status or covert-ordinary status will use their own ‘apps’ to sustain themselves.

Examples of High Yield Triaging in Security Efforts: On the peerless national security side, consider the need for: whole-of-society guidances and vigilance focusing on behaviors indicative of WMD handling; intense secrecy efforts; standout behaviors evincing cultural and legal lack of awareness or concern; biosafety behavior where there are no known bio-related facilities, at-risk persons, or businesses nearby; intense inter-cultural hostility, aggressive boldness in theft of necessities; excessive inveiglement with innocent or naive persons to use them for concealing domiciles or resources, and more are among signs of risk requiring specific guidances.

Likewise, discernment of decoy and false positive conduct and communications versus actual threat or threat preparation conduct must be studied and more deeply understood for wider training in methods of checking and sussing out differences, not just conclusory dismissal from surface appearances. HUMINT disciplines, street cop wisdom, linguistic support, and relief worker experience could come together to aid in developing a data-OODA loop support facility for and in connection to and in support of those human and non-human sensors having to do with high-yield, whole-of-society, national security risk chokepoints.

Spatially, infrastructure, transportation elements and hubs, illicit market supply chains, flea markets, public food service businesses, food supply chains, illegal migration wilderness routes, farms, high-traffic-high-touch areas, delivery businesses, ride services, counterfeit vendors sending unregulated substances into U.S. homes, wilderness routes and camps where illegal migrants may be found, and jurisdictions where local authorities do not usually go are among locations and instrumentalities where trained and programmed senses in data collection, response-support, and civilian workforce awareness make sense.

Adaptive Action Principle in the Above: Empathic, intuitive thinking about where threat actors could or would go, how they would respond, what that could entail, and that coupled with random, discrete non-linear inquiries from randomly-tapped observers can begin immediately to improve adaptivity to changing, moving threat actors which themselves may choose randomness as a guide to remaining undiscovered. Coupling findings from both linear and non-linear random approaches for data-informed OODA loops seems the right way to break-up self-defeating siloes.

In 2022 in the journal Nature, an adaptive AI approach to predicting asylum migration flows into Europe from remote drivers to points of entry envisioned an adaptive analysis approach similar to that discussed here. It was also discussed in November 2023 regarding immigration and border control in the Journal of Multidisciplinary Research, here, and here. These are non-exhaustive samples, and last year we broached the subject in our LinkedIn content discussions, however, there are few illegal migration route finding and prediction facilities continuing into the domestic domain for the purpose of screening illegals for threat actors, action plans, and intelligence regarding same. There is also not much public discussion of the sort of sensors and sensing available for such a task, from border entry point to destination points domestically.

Preliminary Conclusion: These non-exhaustive ideas invite constant Improvement in strategy, tactics, and particulars on the ground with excellent adaptive training going out to the hands-on, eyes-on, ears-open members in a whole-of-society approach to choking-out human trafficking, terrorist, state espionage, state operators, and crime related illegals from the larger population of migrating peoples. The need for an adaptive human and software-based system for forecasting, monitoring, gathering intelligence about, and tracing illegal and asylum migration flows from foreign drivers to domestic destinations, if not already met or underway, is urgent. And that, without tossing computer-independent, offline human-based methods should that system be brought down at any point, or for any point in time. The byproduct of selecting-out threat actors from large illegal migration flows will be identifying non-threatening migrant needs, and averting their exploitation to put them on a path to legal migration or finding a stable, lasting home in which to live and thrive.