The number of migrants approaching borders around the world remains at record levels. Throughout Eastern Europe, Central America, Sub-Saharan Africa, and South Asia—economic hardship, political unrest, violence, and changing climates drive people to leave home. Drought and storms devastate agricultural productivity, impacting food and water security. Poverty, economic decline, and lack of institutional governance create space for corruption, gangs, organized crime, and extremist influence.
Human-Machine Analysis
With deep knowledge of information operations, adversarial states, and non-state actors, 3GIMBALS offers meaningful trend analysis and data visualization to detect and understand migration. OMEN™ combines the power of human-machine teaming with automated analysis from data science to deliver actionable intelligence and follow the flow of migration. 3GIMBALS helps assess vulnerability and anticipate migration as soon as it begins and as far from borders as possible.
Instability Modeling
Informed by analytic, geospatial, and native language experts, OMEN improves operational insight and response to migration. 3GIMBALS created a regional spatiotemporal model to baseline instability. Weighted factors for civil services, governance, and criminal elements highlight the most vulnerable areas of regions. Defining migration corridors and zones enables more rapid status updates. Clarifying hot spots for instability, as well as the scope and extent of mobility corridors, enables 3GIMBALS to better detect and assess emerging migration patterns.
Figure 1: Mexico regional instability model with weighted inputs for civil services, governance, and crime, July 2020.
Analytic Fusion
With the fusion of multiple datasets and analytical approaches, OMEN advances migration analysis and instability modeling. Combining activity detection from commercially available mobile device data with social media and dark web searches can form a foundation for deeper migration analysis.
Figure 2: Photo from March 2021 of caravan beginning to form at the Grand Station in San Pedro Sula, Honduras. Source: Twitter.
Figure 3: Cuban, Haitian, and African migrants concentrated in Necocli, Colombia, July 2021. Source: Twitter.
OMEN gathers information about origination, routes, transport infrastructure, sustainment facilities, and destination ports of exit/entry for mobility monitoring.
Figure 4: Ukrainian migration to Latin America, March-April 2022.
Network Analysis
Multilingual experts enhance natural language processing (NLP) for broader extraction of text-based entities, locations, activity, and timing with relational databases and network analysis. Tracking patterns of life, OMEN uses network analysis to identify and quantify critical actors, communities, co-travelers, and co-locations. Assessing migration patterns through primary and alternate routes with multiple border crossing sites makes analysis more dynamic.
3GIMBALS enhances interagency coordination between border patrol officials, interagency law enforcement, and multinational partners by offering shareable, open-source information. By layering the impact of sudden events on historical and current migration routes, OMEN enhances analysis to anticipate movement. As a bonus, analyzing activity with location spoofing and jamming captures illicit operations intermixed in migration.