A long its northern and southern borders—some areas of which are vast, often forbidding wilderness—the United States confronts threats from foreign adversaries, their proxies, and transnational criminal organizations. These groups increasingly employ sophisticated surveillance technology to enable human and drug trafficking and other activities. The United States needs to fight back with more advanced technological tools combined with knowledge of the terrain from tribal populations or other communities around the borderlands.
Collaborative law enforcement relationships with Indigenous communities aren’t new. A prime example is the partnership with the Shadow Wolves, a specialized unit of Tohono O’odham Nation members, who have served in the Sonoran Desert of southern Arizona for five decades. They are the only Native American tactical unit assigned to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and rely on centuries-old tracking skills.
The Shadow Wolves specialize in detecting and countering TCOs (transnational criminal organizations), particularly their narcotics and human trafficking operations, through intelligence gathering and direct interdiction. The Shadow Wolves have achieved significant results, including large seizures of narcotics, disrupting trafficking routes into the United States, and mitigating escalating violence.
The United States could have more units like the Shadow Wolves, and they could be even more effective if equipped with advanced technology such as UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones) for observation and reporting. Such tools could serve multiple missions: search and rescue, monitoring of natural hazards, observation and tracking of subsistence resources, and local law enforcement. This dual-use approach could create benefits for tribal and local communities while also equipping them to be part of the effort to detect and mitigate threats to the United States from beyond our borders.
Working with local forces, especially to counter drug-trafficking cartels, is not unique to the United States. Various defense groups emerged in Colombia in the 1990s to combat the cartels. That is also happening today in Mexico.
