From AI surveillance towers to robot dog patrols, the US-Mexico border has long been a proving ground for high-tech weaponry and security tools. The deployment of new technological horrors only seems to have accelerated under Donald Trump, with a new electromagnetic weapon now rubber-stamped for use along the border wall.
According to new reporting from CNN, the Pentagon has given the Department of Homeland Security the go-ahead on testing and developing operational tactics for a “military-grade heat ray” that can blast targets over a half mile away.
The weapon, likened to a kind of microwave gun, creates a horrifying burning feeling in the victim when directed at human skin. Called an “active denial system,” the weapon was first deployed by US occupation forces in Afghanistan, but was withdrawn before ever seeing combat. It then caught the eye of officials in charge of corrections and crowd control, though it isn’t clear if the weapon has ever been used to target individuals on US soil.
As the American Civil Liberties Union wrote in 2010 after the Los Angeles County Jail installed an active denial system weapon inside its walls, “there is good evidence from the United States military that it is capable of inflicting not only intolerable pain, but death.”
