As concern mounts over dangerous maritime smuggling crossings, U.S. Rep. Mike Levin said this week that he plans to ask Congress for $60 million in federal funding to install surveillance towers along the San Diego coast.
The move comes a week after three people died when a panga with 18 people aboard capsized off the coast of Del Mar. A 10-year-old girl also went missing and is presumed dead.
“Last week’s accident shows us that there’s a lot more we still have to do,” Levin, D- San Juan Capistrano, said at a news conference Monday in Del Mar. “As our land border tightens up … bad actors will continue to explore new ways to enter the U.S.”
Levin said he requested funding for autonomous surveillance towers to be deployed along maritime borders. These would include additional cameras, radar and infrared technology to help intercept maritime threats, he said.
Such technology is currently used at the U.S.- Mexico land border, according to a Border Patrol spokesperson. The solar-powered towers reach up to 33 feet tall and have a 3-mile diameter range, according to the U.S. Customs and Border Protection website.
The cameras use artificial intelligence, the agency said, to sort out real concerns from false positives. As a group or something of interest moves about, the monitoring is handed off from tower to tower, “keeping the electronic eyes on the situation at all times,” the agency said.
When the towers catch something of note, agents in the field get an alert on their phones or tablets.
There are towers for land use and maritime use, said Dave Maass, director of investigations with Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit that advocates for digital privacy. He said the United Kingdom uses similar technology to monitor the English Channel.
Locally, he said, there is at least one maritime camera on private property in Del Mar, north of Dog Beach, and another at Friendship Park along the border in San Diego.
Maass said it’s not clear what the maritime towers watch, whether they look just to the water or also see people on the beaches.
“I don’t think people have a good sense of what they are capturing and what they are seeing,” Maass said. “There should be some transparency about that, because if they are capturing people on the beach, questions should be asked.”
Levin said he was briefed on last week’s fatal incident by CBP’s air and maritime operations, as well as the U.S. Coast Guard. He then asked officials what was needed to prevent such incidents.
He said he hopes the autonomous system would be a deterrent to smugglers, who typically wait for bad weather to slip ashore. With bad weather comes greater safety risks.
“One common denominator currently hindering interdiction and response efforts is heavy fog or issues related to weather conditions,” he said. “That was the instance last week. These towers would help fill the gaps in our detection efforts and help make our borders more secure.”
As the number of migrant encounters between land ports of entry have declined, officials have said that maritime crossings could become more common.
Since the start of the Trump administration, the U.S. Coast Guard has tripled its resources on the southern border “to enhance border security, immigration enforcement, and to protect the territorial integrity of the United States,” the agency said in late March.
A family devastated
Last week’s incident was the region’s worst maritime smuggling disaster since 2023, when eight people, all Mexican nationals, died after two vessels capsized off the coast of Black’s Beach in La Jolla.
In the most recent tragedy, three people — two Mexican nationals and a 14-year-old boy from India — died at the beach. A fourth, the boy’s 10-year-old sister from India, is missing and presumed dead.
The children’s parents were among four people taken to a La Jolla hospital, where their father was in a coma. The hospital declined Monday to provide an update on the status of the patients.
The Indian Express news site interviewed the uncle of the man in the coma, who said his nephew had owned a business but the pandemic left him in financial trouble.
The uncle, identified as Anil Patel, said that last he knew, the family of four had gone to London on a visitor’s visa in October. He assumed the family would return. “They did not tell us that they were planning to enter the U.S. through the illegal route,” he said.
Patel said the Indian Consulate in San Francisco informed his family of the deaths of the two children.
Recent smuggling attempts
Del Mar has been the site of numerous maritime crossings in recent years — Del Mar Chief Lifeguard Jon Edelbrock said he’s responded to “hundreds” — and on Monday, city officials publicly supported Levin’s efforts to better secure the coastline.
“It is important to underscore that incidents like these are dangerous and put everyone involved at risk,” said Del Mar Mayor Terry Gaasterland. “We support efforts to bring the criminals involved with these human smuggling activities to justice and to prevent this activity from continuing in the future.”
From May 4 through Saturday, there were 11 maritime smuggling incidents on the Southwest border, according to weekly data from the U.S. Coast Guard in Southern California. Another nine cases were reported the week before, involving 52 people.
Over a 13-hour period on Saturday, Coast Guard personnel interdicted three suspected smuggling boats off the coast of San Diego and detained 18 people, officials said. One captain intentionally beached his boat while being pursued by a Coast Guard cutter, while another only stopped after a Coast Guard crew member fired copper slugs into the boat’s engine to disable it.
The first incident began after a 24-foot cabin cruiser was spotted around 4:40 a.m. by a Coast Guard cutter that activated its blue lights while trying to stop it. The boat’s captain sped off toward shore and intentionally ran into the sand near Windansea Beach, where 13 people jumped off and began running.
Homeland Security officers on shore were able to apprehend five men from Mexico, a woman from Cuba and a woman from Guatemala. Six got away, officials said.
The second incident occurred around 2:40 p.m. when a Coast Guard crew did a routine security boarding on a 20-foot pleasure craft 2 miles south of Point Loma. The boat was not displaying any registration, and the three people onboard were not authorized to enter the U.S. The three were detained and transferred to Homeland Security officials.
The final incident occurred around 5:50 p.m. when officials spotted an 18-foot cuddy cabin traveling north near Point Loma and watched with surveillance cameras as it entered San Diego Bay, officials said.
A Coast Guard boat crew went to intercept the vessel, but the captain drove off. The crew used verbal commands and fired several loud warning shots to try to get the captain to stop. When that didn’t work, a crew member fired four copper slugs into the engine to disable it. The crew boarded the boat and found eight people onboard, including five men, one woman and two teen boys. All were detained.
Besides the funding request, the congressman is also part of a bipartisan group of legislators that in February reintroduced a bill that aims to expand CBP’s jurisdiction from 12 to 24 nautical miles offshore.
“Specifically, it will increase detection, interdiction, and ultimately prosecution of those who are attempting to bring illegal cargoes (narcotics, bulk cash, guns and human trafficking victims) into the nation,” Levin’s office said in a news release.
San Diego County Supervisor Jim Desmond, a Republican who is running for Levin’s congressional district, called the effort “too little, too late.”
“Mike Levin has been complicit in the chaos we’re seeing today,” Desmond said in a statement. “This isn’t leadership — it’s political damage control.”
Levin said Monday he plans to submit the request for federal funding “within the next few days.”
Staff writer Karen Kucher contributed to this report.
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