DHS Awards $4.5 Billion in Smart Wall Border Contracts
The Department of Homeland Security and US Customs and Border Protection have announced ten new Smart Wall construction contracts totalling approximately $4.5 billion, adding hundreds of miles of integrated detection technology along the southwest border.
The Smart Wall programme deploys a layered combination of physical barriers, sensor systems, and surveillance technology designed to detect, classify, and track intrusion attempts along the US-Mexico border. Detection technology components include ground-based radar, seismic sensors, camera towers, and fiber optic sensing — effectively a large-scale perimeter intrusion detection system spanning continental distances.
Additional awards followed in late 2025, including the Del Rio 3 Project (SLSCO LTD, $372.8 million) covering approximately 35 kilometres of primary wall and 21 kilometres of detection technology in the USBP Del Rio Sector, Texas.
Total Smart Wall contract investment now exceeds $8 billion across active and planned awards, making it by far the largest single PIDS procurement programme globally.
For the perimeter detection industry, the Smart Wall programme represents both the largest revenue opportunity and a technology proving ground. The scale and environmental diversity of the border — desert, river valley, urban interface, mountainous terrain — stress-tests sensor technologies under conditions that no commercial or industrial perimeter replicates. Vendors whose products perform reliably in this environment carry proven credentials into other critical infrastructure markets.
The programme also highlights the gap between traditional commercial PIDS (fence sensors, camera analytics at a facility boundary) and the emerging class of wide-area detection systems (long-range radar, DAS over tens of kilometres, autonomous sensor platforms) that border and military applications demand.