The U.S. Immigration Apparatus: The Smart Border & Outsourcing Surveillance

-- By AlondraVazquez - 25 Oct 2024

Introduction

In 2019, I along with ten other students hiked up to see a 160-foot surveillance tower in Arizona bordering Nogales, Mexico. The journalist leading the hike informed us that the tower mostly surveilled grazing cows and people who lived nearby. The multi-million-dollar structure is one of many in the U.S. war against migrants. The tower, built by the military company Elbit Systems, comes from the same manufacturer that provides weapons used against Palestinian civilians. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) entered a $145 million contract in 2014 with Elbit to build surveillance towers and further the construction of the smart border. The smart border, equipped with underground sensors, blimps, and drone fleets, has been championed across party lines for decades. Surveillance towers have been used by DHS since the early 2000s and faced several glitches rendering them largely ineffective, yet very lucrative for technology and defense contractors. The virtual border presents a discrete form of violence especially in remote areas of the border where the peril of crossing is already high.

One may ask, what is this all for? Is it for the supposed fentanyl crisis, trafficking rings, or migrant gangs? I, at least, cannot provide the data for any of that. Empire at work excludes people, decides who gets to live, and who gets to travel safely across borders in order to manage populations and continue the resource and labor extraction of the poor. The borderlands are laboratories of innovation, where the use of technologies can be tested on the fringes of society against nameless migrants and then later used against dissenting citizenry. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) regularly share technology with other law enforcement. CBP drones have been used to surveil protestors as Standing Rock and Elbit has taken it further by marketing their tech as useful against protestors. Although the U.S.-Mexico border, the Columbia campus, and Gaza are far apart, they are intimately entangled in Western politics of war, surveillance, and imperialism.

In 2019, I was in my second year of college, as I walked down the hill from observing the tower I could see the border in close distance and across from it make out a school yard in Nogales, Mexico. I could also see a U.S. military tank with workers who were unraveling and placing new barbed wire on the border fencing. It felt paradoxical to exist in that moment, so much money, so much “protection,” against migrants like my Mexican father and Guatemalan mother. It was almost laughable if it wasn’t also scary. The spectacle manufactured at the border attempted to be legitimized by millions of dollars is a tactic of Empire to justify a state of emergency, a state of exception, that allows nation-states like the U.S. to employ war against unarmed civilians in the name of sovereignty.

Migrant State Of Exception

The state of exception, per Giorgio Agamben, occurs when the state declares crisis in order to override human rights, while fully enacting and augmenting state power against individuals. Bordering strategies and war-like stances against the transgressing noncitizen produce the border spectacle. According to Paolo Cuttitta, migrant deaths are instrumental to these bordering strategies because the state can leverage death for emergency discourse enabling the need for “exceptional” and “immediate” security from the “other” attempting to breach its borders. In the state of exception, sovereignty unleashes the power of the state and abandons certain individual lives. By using death as a mechanism of control, a justification of surveillance, and a reason for intervention, migration inevitably becomes an issue in need of solving by all means necessary. As such the state monopolizes violence, spectacle, and crisis.

The Arms of Surveillance: Externalizing the U.S. Immigration Apparatus

The smart border in this current moment refers not only to the physical border structure separating the U.S. from Mexico and the U.S. from Canada (to a lesser extent), but also the externalization of the U.S. border to other countries. This past summer, I spent a large portion of my internship addressing concerns with CBP One, the latest stage of asylum policy idiocrasy the U.S. has come up with to violate international law and the right to asylum. CBP One is a mobile application through which individuals located in Mexico request an appointment to appear at a port of entry to ask for asylum. Appointments are assigned on a lottery basis and only after sharing personal information and filling out an extensive questionnaire regarding the specific places migrants have traversed. Not only is the process for asking asylum limited to certain languages and those with phones, but their information is shared with Google’s Firebase service. The app also requires facial recognition and access to GPS. CBP has also relied on Google, Facebook, and Twitter to collect information on migrants with and without court orders. Companies like LexisNexis? collect data on migrants and sell it to ICE and conduct analysis of migrants for “potential risk of crime.” Similarly, Motorola Solutions shares biometric information of its migrant users with ICE. In essence, migration management and policing forms part of a larger race to own and capitalize from the global security industry.

The militarization of the U.S.-Mexico border is dependent on externalization of U.S. policy to its “backyard” neighbors. The War on Terror and the War on Drugs helped increase justification of the smart border and antagonization of migrants. Cross-border exchange of migrants’ biometrics is pivotal in U.S. migration management and allowed through non-binding agreements where biometrics are exchanged between agencies in Latin America and the U.S. DHS is now developing the Homeland Advanced Recognition Technology System (HART) hosted by Amazon Web Services. HART will collect biographical and biometric data on millions of people including information from police stops, DNA, and facial recognition. The surveillance of individuals across borders through data mining controlled by corporations is but an arm of a larger regime of exclusion and resource hoarding, where countries like the U.S. “make live or let die,” and normalize such action through the peddling of security discourse.

Sources:

Aizeki, Mizue, and Laura Bingham. “The Everywhere Border: Digital Migration Control Infrastructure in the Americas.” Surveillance Resistance Lab, February 14, 2023. https://surveillanceresistancelab.org/resources/the-everywhere-border-digital-migration-control-infrastructure-in-the-americas/.

Ángela Alarcón, Franco Giandana Gigena. “‘smart Borders’ and the Making of a Humanitarian Crisis.” Access Now, March 14, 2024. https://www.accessnow.org/smart-borders-and-the-making-of-a-humanitarian-crisis/.

Geoffrey Boyce, Todd Miller, Joseph Nevins, and Miriam Ticktin. "Smart Borders or a Humane World?." Report published by Open Society Foundation (2021).

Espinoza Garrido, Lea, Sylvia Mieszkowski, Birgit Spengler, and Julia Wewior. "Migrant Lives in a State of Exception (II): Sovereignty, Mobility and Agency in a Globalised World." Parallax 27, no. 3 (2021): 241-249.

“CBP One Mobile Application Violates the Rights of People Seeking Asylum in the United States.” Amnesty International, May 9, 2024. https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2024/05/cbp-one-mobile-application-violates-the-rights-of-people-seeking-asylum-in-the-united-states/.

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