If you've ever spent your morning commute daydreaming about starting afresh with your career, this feature is for you. Each Monday, we speak to someone from a different profession to discover what it's really like. This week we chat to barrister Benjamin Knight, from Central Chambers, Manchester, and Liberal Chambers, London.
Beyond the headlines, behind the statistics, real lives are being devastated by cross-border trafficking, with impacts that ripple through families and communities for generations.
Every day at U.S. borders, trafficking networks exploit our most vulnerable – children, women, migrant families and communities already at risk – using increasingly sophisticated tactics to smuggle people, drugs, money, weapons and contraband. For many of these victims, the trauma doesn’t stop at the border – they’re often trafficked for forced labor in the nation’s interior.
The human cost of the fentanyl epidemic, its enterprise propagated illicitly across borders, is likewise unspeakable. Entire communities have been hollowed out as hundreds of lives are lost to fentanyl overdoses every single day in the U.S.
Cross-border traffickers put a literal price on human lives and are quick to discard them if they become an inconvenience. In open desert, treacherous mountains and brutal heat, migrants, including unaccompanied minors, are abandoned in the harshest environments to fend for themselves.
U.S. Border Patrol (USBP) personnel, acting as first responders, give these people hope for another day. Operating in remote terrain in border regions hundreds to thousands of miles between points of entry (BPOE) – at significant risk to themselves – the USBP, with support from the Border Patrol Search, Trauma, and Rescue Unit (BORSTAR) as well as Air and Marine Operations (AMO), provide crucial rescue operations and humanitarian aid.
The trauma and loss suffered by the victims of these criminal trafficking schemes is unfathomable. For those brave enough to help – the personnel of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and adjacent agencies – tending to this daily tragedy takes a tremendous personal toll.
More than anything, these personnel simply want to return home safely to their loved ones at the end of their shift.
Securing a vast border
CBP recorded approximately 444,000 migrant encounters in 2025 (fiscal year). Of these, roughly 238,000 were migrants crossing BPOE, underscoring the operational challenges shouldered by the USBP and AMO resources along remote border terrain.
In parallel, federal funding has seen a major uptick in budget targeted for border security, with a focus on physical infrastructure like border walls complemented by intelligence technology improvements that extend border protection capabilities far beyond where walls can reach.
The USBP continues to monitor this wide-open border terrain using a suite of technology and infrastructure assets like heat sensors and patrol operations. False alarms are commonplace, triggered by trivial events – heat signatures of roving animals, for example. Traditional camera and radar sensors remain encumbered by line-of-sight obstructions, and lighting and weather sensitivity.
The time, effort and effectiveness lost to these conventional measures is significant.
There’s a major opportunity to upgrade detection and search capabilities such that USBP can close the gaps – the geographical distance gaps and efficiency gaps – to achieve vastly improved investigative precision.
The USBP can gain significant operational and investigative benefits by improving their capabilities in tactical intelligence gathering focused on network communication used in BPOE trafficking.
Location-aware operations enable Ground, Air and Marine teams to intercept smugglers before they reach interior distribution hubs. These teams are likewise better equipped to recover missing or distressed migrants before they succumb to exposure, and they can deploy support and rescue assets more efficiently.
These advanced capabilities are at the forefront of the fight against cross-border trafficking because they yield precise and actionable insights.
These capabilities provide lifesaving intelligence and ultimately will help to relieve the hard and hidden tolls of cross-border trafficking.
In addition, these capabilities reduce operational risks to USBP personnel, to help ensure they get home safely.
These are worthy goals and the technology to achieve them is well within our grasp. For more information about advanced tactical and decision intelligence capabilities for combating cross-border trafficking, visit www.cognyte.com.
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