Last week, residents of Nogales, Arizona—a border-hugging town of about 20,000 people—awoke to find a large white blimp stationed in the sky. Even elected officials had no idea the blimp was coming. "What the hell?" Mayor Arturo Garino told Nogales International. "Did it land here by mistake?"
The blimp, it turns out, is conducting around-the-clock surveillance on behalf of U.S. Customs and Border Patrol (CBP), which launched the craft last Thursday. The CBP issued a press release on the project just one day prior, noting that the blimp would be "operational and manned by Border Patrol Agents 24 hours a day, seven days a week, to provide continuous aerial surveillance of the border." By the time the official CBP announcement came out, some Nogales residents had already noticed the blimp beginning to be inflated.
