World
Seguritech Owns the Border Hub Where US Agents Will Work
A private Mexican company owns a 20-story surveillance tower in Ciudad Juárez until August 2027. Five US agencies are assigned to work from it under arrangements Chihuahua calls informal, not Foreign Ministry accords.
Seguritech's Torre Centinela activated its first surveillance floor in early May, weeks after Mexico said the CIA agents who died in Chihuahua had entered without authorization.
The 20-story building in downtown Ciudad Juárez is built and owned by Grupo Seguritech until August 2027 under a five-year contract signed with Chihuahua state in 2022. Five US federal agencies (FBI, DEA, ATF, Homeland Security Investigations, and CBP) are assigned to the 18th floor. As of May 4, Chihuahua officials described the intelligence-sharing arrangements as "informal processes" rather than Foreign Ministry agreements.
The Contractor
Grupo Seguritech was founded in 1995 by Shimon Picker and his son Ariel Zeev Picker Schatz, who remains CEO. No other beneficial owners appear in public records; Seguritech declined to answer questions about its ownership structure.
The company has collected at least $1.27 billion (21.8 billion pesos) across 63 government contracts since 2012, operating in 26 of Mexico's 32 states through at least 31 subsidiaries. Four are registered in Texas or Delaware; two were added in 2025.
In Tamaulipas, a Seguritech subsidiary called Tres10 signed a $220 million contract in 2019 to build a command center in Reynosa. A 2024 congressional document called the contract "plagued with financial and legal irregularities"; Tres10 had been registered only one year before signing. Mexico's Attorney General's Office opened an investigation; it remained open at publication.
The Plataforma Centinela build in Chihuahua is a roughly $200 million project, with most financial terms classified by the state until 2030. State auditors suspended two quarterly payments in 2024 when Seguritech missed delivery deadlines and later recovered 112.3 million pesos (roughly $5.6M) in penalties.
By July 2025, field hardware across Chihuahua was largely deployed: 90% of pan-tilt cameras, 75% of license plate readers, and 85% of fixed cameras online. The tower, concentrating nearly 10,000 cameras and 2,000 license plate readers into a single command node, was still under construction. One floor went live in early May; the remaining floors, including the 18th, are expected online in June.
The data is already crossing the border. In January 2025, El Paso police used Centinela's license plate database to recover a stolen vehicle. Texas Governor Greg Abbott and Chihuahua Governor María Eugenia Campos Galván signed a memorandum in April 2022 granting Texas access to Chihuahua's surveillance feeds through state intermediaries.
The Authorization Gap
Two CIA agents died on April 19, 2026, in a car accident in Chihuahua's sierra. President Claudia Sheinbaum said they had not been authorized to enter the country. That incident was still unresolved when Torre Centinela's first floor switched on.
The five US agencies on the 18th floor roster are the FBI, DEA, ATF, Homeland Security Investigations, and CBP. A separate floor was reported designated for CIA and DEA operations by Mexican outlet El Soberano. No US official has confirmed that designation.
Five US agencies moving into a building a private foreign contractor controls through August 2027 forces a question no bilateral accord resolves. Data-sharing agreements govern the channel. Seguritech owns the plant.
No published Chihuahua contract specifies what the company retains from the archive after August 2027.
The contract expires in August 2027. If Chihuahua renews on the same terms, the five US agencies inherit another multi-year intelligence arrangement with a company whose data-retention obligations remain unwritten in any publicly available agreement.