Customs and Border Protection will launch a Goodyear-style blimp to provide surveillance from up to 15,000 feet in the sky for a bird’s eye view of a stretch of the southern border known as a high-traffic smuggling corridor.

The bulbous airship, known as a Tethered Aerostat Radar System, was dropped off at the Border Patrol’s Santa Teresa Station in southern New Mexico and is due to be launched into the air within the next few days to provide round-the-clock surveillance, according to Border Report. 

“El Paso Sector is deploying an aerostat just west of the Port of Santa Teresa, New Mexico, in September 2024 to monitor the area of the U.S.-Mexico border in that zone,” the CBP told Border Report. “This area also has a significant number of human smuggling related deaths and rescues as the area’s harsh desert conditions and remote terrain present a dangerous risk to migrants who are often abandoned in the area by criminal smugglers.”

The aerostat is being used to quell the large amount of migrant deaths that have occurred in the region this past spring and summer. Border agents, along with local first responders and police officers, have found the bodies of 168 migrants across the desert after they got lost or were simply abandoned by smugglers.

The TARS system uses an unmanned helium-filled dirigible, outfitted with high-powered cameras, that hang in the air while tethered to a stationary position on the ground to provide a wide field of view that is unable to be seen on the ground. 

The CBP’s Aerostat program, first enacted in 1980, is part of a broad strategy of using new technology, which also includes underground sensors and tower-mounted cameras. The blimps have only been used in eight other locations across Arizona, Texas, Louisiana, Florida, and the American commonwealth of Puerto Rico.

Blimps have long been experimented with for their usefulness when it comes to surveillance.

The Navy also used non-rigid airships when Goodyear provided them for aerial monitoring during World War II and kept the program in operation until 1962.

Goodyear Blimps, often used for commercial purposes, have also been commissioned during emergencies and were used to conduct disaster assessment after the California Earthquake of 1989 and Hurricane Andrew in 1992.