Customs and Border Protection recently confirmed the use of unmanned aerial vehicles, better known as drones, over the unrest in Los Angeles. According to a statement to 404 Media, “Air and Marine Operations" MQ-9 Predators are supporting our federal law enforcement partners in the Greater Los Angeles area, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement, with aerial support of their operations.”

Officially, these drones, which CBP has used since 2005, are supposed to be for border security. CBP states that they are “a critical element of CBP missions to predict, detect, identify, classify, track, deter and interdict border traffic that threatens the continuity of U.S. border security.”

That may be true, but the drones are used for quite a bit more than that. CBP frequently lends them to other federal, state and local law enforcement agencies across the country, in some cases for uses that raise questions about civil liberties.

Los Angeles is far from the first place where drones have been used to surveil protests and civil unrest. In the three weeks after George Floyd was killed by police in 2020, CBP

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