Back in 2019, President Trump took a turn from touting high-tech border construction to praise an unexpected border body. “And I always say this, because as good as that equipment is, and it’s genius, the greatest equipment in the world is a dog. … A certain type of German Shepherd, in particular. Dogs do a better job than $400 million worth of equipment. Can you believe that?” Some two years later, the role of horses in policing human mobility was captured in images of vicious assaults on Haitian asylum seekers by mounted Border Patrol agents. These human-animal policing formations underscore that the phrase “border technology” is redundant.

Why? Because the border is already a technology, mixing law, territory, bureaucracy, and policing. Put another way: Popular understandings of “the border” routinely fixate on a bewildering array of emblems—walls, fenced rivers, lengthy checkpoint queues, and spaces, like the US-Mexico borderlands or a sanctuary city that has been “invaded”—all of which hardly constitute a single line on the ground. Thus, the phrase “the border” is itself a tool that binds together seemingly disparate parts for political ends.

For example, consider the phrase “Every state is a border state.” In the 18 or so months leading up to the 2024 US presidential election, these six words rolled off the tongues of countless Republican officials and right-wing pols. For Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, “every state is now a border state because of Joe Biden’s inaction.” While stumping in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, JD Vance invoked the phrase, arguing that the “border policies that we have at the southern border, they make our communities less safe even as far north as Wisconsin.”

What these speakers offer as critique, scholars of migration and the border offer as a warning. Since migration policing can occur anywhere, “the body is the border”: that is, anywhere noncitizens (and citizens) encounter authorities using legal mechanisms for exclusion.

And even while the 2024 campaigners invoked territory, they also declared that the border could be found in sanctuary cities, lawless zones that sheared holes in the fabric of the homeland. This ideological bordering explains the legal threats and massive deployment of force against people protesting ICE raids.

But bordering today also occurs through more individualized means, digitally. Since January 20, this kind of bordering enabled through databases has resulted in such high-profile cases as Mahmoud Khalil and Rümeysa Öztürk. Nearly a million people who used the CBP One app to enter the US to seek asylum while Biden was in office have had their paroles revoked. Rebranded as CBP Home, the app now offers “self-deportation”: a double doublespeak, for a world where home is where one goes when not under threat of detention.

This tech-charged policing employs biometric technologies, databases shared across state and national jurisdictions, and predictive algorithms. Such existing and emergent digital technologies only accelerate the government expansion of border policing far from territorial boundaries. And these in turn accelerate two new crises for those opposing such policing.

1. These technologies make border policing almost ubiquitous. How then to identify that new threat, while simultaneously challenging the conceit of the omnipotent state and the feeling of overwhelm it fuels?
2. These technologies promise to “solve” the border, which is part of our current broader crisis of “technological solutionism.” This, according to Evgeny Morozov, is an ideology that treats complex social issues as “neatly defined problems with definite, computable solutions or as transparent and self-evident processes that can be easily optimized—if only the right algorithms are in place!” How then to understand and describe new digital bordering and surveillance technologies without falling into the traps of fetishizing newness and erasing everything that came before?

These crises are confronted by four new books, each in different ways. A transnational, ethnographic journey to sites of migrant surveillance and boundary fortification, Petra Molnar’s The Walls Have Eyes shows how the sharpening edges of Europe link with biometric national ID cards in Kenya and Israeli-US security complexes. Offering a similarly impressive scope, Resisting Borders and Technologies of Violence, edited by Mizue Aizeike, Matt Mahmoudi, and Coline Schupfer, gathers analytical essays, accounts of antisurveillance campaigns, and interviews with political organizers (full disclosure, I have a chapter in the collection). A mid-twentieth-century prehistory to biometric technologies, Iván Chaar López’s The Cybernetic Border: Drones, Technology, and Intrusion, shows how territorial borderlands develop as information spaces, where humans are rendered as data points to be managed. Finally, Imperial Policing: Weaponized Data in Carceral Chicago—authored by members of the Policing in Chicago Research Group (Andy Clarno, Enrique Alvear Moreno, Janaé Bonsu-Love, Lydia Dana, Michael de Anda Muñiz, Ilā Ravichandran, and Haley Volpintesta)—situates policing of Black and brown Chicago residents within a transnational imperial frame. In so doing, the group exposes the theoretical and material connections among police wars against three archetypal enemies: gangs, immigrants, and terrorists.

Collectively, these texts offer four principal interventions for making sense of contemporary bordering practices and their technologies. First, they demonstrate how nation-states and blocs (like the EU) deter and contain unwanted human mobility, through more than just a territorial border. That is, “the border” is really a set of tools, used wherever nation-states wish: whether at an international boundary, within a border zone (to create embodied sensations of the border within national territories), or dispersed transnationally.

Second, these texts demonstrate how bordering technologies evolved within history and political economy. Regimes regulating human mobility have been and continue to be shaped by racial capitalism and empire. These studies refuse to forget the existence and violence of earlier mobility regimes.

Third, they critique the technological solutionism promised in applying digital and other “high-tech” technologies to bordering practices. Technological “advances” are part of a longer history of alleged reforms, tweaks, and “fixes,” all of which have only expanded and legitimized carceral and bordering practices.

Finally, these books make space for struggle, cataloguing campaigns and artistic responses to bordering as well as developing the theoretical tools for further coalitional efforts.

Tech “solutions” to human mobility promise to find new ways to make migrants and migration patterns more transparent and hence governable. However, such solutions operate within the context of today’s nation-state system, which is fundamentally grounded in sovereign exclusion. Therefore, technological solutionism erases the colonial histories of bordering and technologies preceding computerized biometrics, like paper passports and concertina wire. This is why prison abolitionists and scholars teach us that earlier reforms promising to fix broken, ineffective, or harmful prisons have only resulted in the expansion of carceral systems.

Is today’s technological solutionism at the border simply another, though powerful, iteration of such carceral reformism? If so, then even high-tech bordering practices are revealed as only the result of the persistent, earlier failures of these systems to deliver the total control they promise, as well as struggles against the harms of these systems.

Despite their geographic separation, the EU, the US, and Australia have all collaborated to deter migration from the Global South. The Walls Have Eyes offers situated glimpses into what attorney and anthropologist Molnar calls “a global story of the sharpening of borders through technological experiments.”

Understanding the transnational scope of interconnected “migration management” regimes is imperative. The rights of people on the move are impinged upon by border fortification and digital surveillance that themselves transcend national borders, as Molnar details in her ethnographic vignettes. She recounts the harrowing lived experiences of asylum seekers being pushed back by Greek authorities and vigilante groups (illegal under international refugee law, these practices are both common and officially denied). She shares a tense moment in 2021, when a dispute between Poland and Belarus left hundreds of people stranded between the countries’ respective border fences in frigid temperatures. She conveys the cruelty of open-air prisons—euphemized as “reception camps” or “refugee camp[s]”—on the Greek islands of Kos, Samos, and Lesbos. In these island prisons, “they are always watching us,” recounts one of her interlocutors, a warning that informs the title of the book.

She also takes readers to the US-Mexico border and Israel-occupied Palestine, spaces that are interconnected through a shared “border industrial complex.” She and other (border) security scholars often refers to these as laboratories: “legal black holes … to allow for technological experimentation.”

The book seeks to illuminate these horrific practices. Yet such a strategy of exposure may not be enough to truly challenge the transnational techno-bordering project, warns critical security scholar Rhys Machold. This is because talk of newness and testing grounds risks reifying (technological) progress narratives that rehearse the “need” for always-better security. Instead, he suggests reframing accounts of techno-securitization in ways that poke holes in claims to omnipotence and foresight.

Indeed, I found Molnar’s exposés of border tech in Arizona and Palestine less compelling than her accounts of the people she met in those spaces and how they are organizing to fight back. I was particularly taken by a story she begins in the modest meeting room of a rights organization in Kenya. There we see how the apparent immateriality of data manifests in deadly material consequences, for people on the move and others.

The Nubian Rights Forum advocates for the rights of Nubian people, first disenfranchised by British colonial rule and now by the Kenyan state. For the past several years, Kenya has been trying to implement a national digital ID, using facial scans, fingerprints, and other information. These new IDs are necessary to access government services, yet Nubians and other ethnic minority groups have faced discrimination and exclusion. Since the 1990s, Kenya has also hosted large numbers of refugees (fluctuating between 400,000 and 800,000), mostly from Eritrea, Somalia, and (South) Sudan. Refugees living in UNHCR (UN Refugee Agency)-run camps have been enrolled in separate biometric collection projects, which also tether basic needs to electronic identification. Hundreds of thousands of ethnic minority Kenyans have been registered as refugees, but this means they may not register with the Kenyan state, making them “stateless in their birthright country.”

Compounding these problems is the fact that the Kenyan data are collected and shared outside Kenya itself: with the UN agencies UNHCR and IOM (International Organization for Migration); East African countries; the EU’s border guard, Frontex; and the US. Such data-sharing arrangements render “people traceable before they even leave their homes.”

Nubian rights leader Makkah Yusuf explains the digital pincer movement: “By being in the system, Europe can say that the Kenya state protects you, even as it seeks to destroy you.”

These linkages—among digital identification, access to necessary services, and mobility—are further developed in an entire instructive section of Resisting Borders and Technologies of Violence. Across seven chapters, contributors detail proposals for and organized opposition to digital national identification in India, Jamaica, the UK, and Tunisia and blockchain technology in refugee camp settings. Readers come to understand “the body as a border,” that is, that migration policing occurs in everyday acts of social reproduction.

As Jamaican activist Rodgé Malcolm explains, in a dispersed system of e-governance, the data amassed by the state become insinuated across a range of transactions, like accessing credit. This means that “in order to be recognized, I must take on risks that are not inherent in my basic social contract with the state.”

The interview with Gracie Mae Bradley, founding member of the Against Borders for Children campaign in the UK, is particularly rich. Technologies deployed to surveil migrants, she explains, necessarily also surveil citizens, despite rhetoric that only immigrants are targets. This insight led to a campaign to challenge government efforts to collect nationality data on schoolchildren. Parents, teachers, artists, and activists mobilized a boycott of the school census, in solidarity with immigrant families. The result was that over 200,000 people refused to provide nationality data, and the UK government called off the effort.

Such concrete discussions of strategy and analysis learned from activism are invaluable contributions to struggles against racial capitalism and its reliance upon global apartheid. The other four sections of Aizeki, Mahmoudi, and Schupfer’s collection analyze ideologies of exclusion, connections between domestic policing and techno-securitization, techno-surveillance in cities, and intersecting abolitionist agendas for building, in the words of abolitionist geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “a world where life is precious.”

The book aims to bring together technological development and activism in the regions where these technologies principally are being developed. One acknowledged limitation is that it does not go into detail on Chinese and Russian surveillance (there is one contribution by World Uyghur Congress). Still, the text mixes essays, interviews conducted by the editors with leading activists, and concise case study chapters, each of which introduces an activist group, offers background, describes the problem with which this group contends, what the activists have done, and how they assess future work. In this way, the collection provides a crucial toolkit of theory, key policy and technology concepts, political analysis, and abolitionist visioning.

Together, the diverse pieces of this collection revise what we know about the geography of the border. Ida Danewid, writing with the Black Mediterranean Collective, connects bordering practices in the Mediterranean Sea with histories of enslavement, colonialism, and imperialism. Such histories include South African “pass laws” and the exclusionary “White Australia” policy, developed to control and exclude the racialized poor of the Global South. “Rather than an unfortunate humanitarian crisis—to which an ethic of empathy, rescue, and hospitality is the solution—the Black Mediterranean [as an analytic] exposes Europe’s migrant crisis as a distinctively racial and colonial crisis” to which the response should be abolition.

Similarly, the spatiality of struggles for the “right to the city” is reframed in the context of big tech-led gentrification and development of so-called smart cities. J. Carlos Lara Gálvez, writing for Derechos Digitales, describes the exclusions by and problems with the Chilean government’s use of digital technologies in the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic, just a few months after the country’s mass 2019 uprisings. Derechos Digitales mobilized against how data collected for “walk-around permits” or to access financial supports could easily affect the right to publicly assemble and protest. Such measures were quietly ended.

Just how effective deterrence efforts are is impossible to gauge (how does one measure what has not happened?). Still, the category of known unknowns is ripe for datafication.

This is why the cybernetic border was developed, as Iván Chaar López argues in The Cybernetic Border, so as to “sense” and make legible unauthorized border crossing. He posits borders not as preexisting sovereign edges but rather “border technopolitical regimes” through which sovereignty and borders are co-constituted. These racializing practices, in turn, divide spaces and categorize populations.

The field of cybernetics is rooted in World War II efforts to develop antiaircraft systems. How does one stop a moving target? Information became the basis for abstracting the management of human and nonhuman entities (soldiers, pilots, missiles, etc.) via feedback loops of inputs, transmissions, and outputs. Likewise, conceptualizing the border as a prevention system turned the contemplation of unauthorized entry into a data input, which would activate subsequent systems of data collection, patrol, and apprehension. Over decades, different technologies for automating perception—including sensors and drones—have accumulated, all with the promise of turning the borderlands into a “known” space for efficient operational control.

Perhaps unsurprisingly from the contemporary vantage, this increase of data has not minimized the labor of border enforcement but expanded it. One reason is that sensors are fallible—they break in harsh conditions, animals trigger them, etc.—producing “noise” and errors, at least from the perspective of a system for preventing human mobility.

Even more important for Chaar López is that while measurable operational control rests on the idea of a verifiable empirical reality, this apparently transparent techno-space is sustained by imperial archetypes of cowboys, Indians, and Texas Rangers. The “apprehension rate” reported by DHS is an artifact of cybernetic conceptualization of Border Patrol activities as inputs. And yet, a rate cannot possibly be calculated because unknowns cannot be measured. This empirical gap nonetheless remains productive for continuing to constitute unknowability as a security risk and transfer it onto the bodies of potential border crossers. A drone pilot figures as a “cowboy in the sky,” rightfully stopping invaders and pacifying borderland communities.

National border regimes uphold the lie that citizens and noncitizens can be quickly distinguished and neatly separated. In its ubiquity and apparent invisibility, the digitization of bordering makes these lies simultaneously more insidious and patently false.

Making good on his promise to bring the border to sanctuary cities, Trump began his second term with a show of raids in Chicago, soon followed by disappearing hundreds of Venezuelan men alleged to be gang members to a prison in El Salvador. Imperial Policing provides a necessary theoretical framework for understanding vulnerability to deportation, dangers of interconnected databases, and how to expand sanctuary.

This book began as a set of action research projects started by the Policing in Chicago Research Group (PCRG), a collective founded by UIC professor Andy Clarno with graduate student researchers, in consultation with BYP (Black Youth Project) 100, Organized Communities Against Deportation (OCAD), and the Arab American Action Network. While The Walls Have Eyes and Resisting Borders and Technologies of Violence demonstrate the transnational scope of migration control in sites around the world, Imperial Policing shows how transnational capitalist and imperial forces converge in Chicago.

The book builds on abolitionist understandings of policing and imprisonment as part of the past 40 years of economic restructuring and gentrification in US cities. They compellingly argue that policing in Chicago addresses “not only the effects of neoliberal capitalism in the city itself but also the role of the U.S. empire in upholding repressive regimes and enforcing … destructive racial capitalist system[s] around the world.” This transnational imperial framing allows them to link realms and agencies of policing that are often thought of as separate.

The result is a “complex unity” comprising three principal wars: on crime, terror, and immigrants. Each is sustained ideologically through historically sedimented and racially saturated archetypes: the figures of the “gang member,” “terrorist,” and “illegal alien.” These categories continue to produce race through policing practices that target selected neighborhoods and people, resulting in gang databases, for example, that are 95 percent Black or Latine.

Like Chaar López dissecting how cybernetic logics claim to produce a knowable border space, PCRG carefully works through how police data are produced, cleansed, and circulated, toward the same end of scientifically objective policing practices. The appeal to better technology in Chicago policing, as for migration control efforts, stemmed from earlier calls for reform and professionalization. For example, computerized crime mapping began in the 1980s and helped render an existing form of predictive policing, “hot spotting,” an unbiased response to objective crime data. This constitutes another feedback loop, wherein highly uneven policing results in highly uneven data collection.

PCRG shows how the biases of these practices are erased, in part, through appealing to the ostensible objectiveness of data and algorithms. Once cleansed of the traces of their collection, these data can circulate through networked databases, constituting what PCRG calls “carceral dif/fusion.”

The final chapters of Imperial Policing describe the Expanded Sanctuary campaign of the mid-2010s to early 2020s and a grounded agenda for the abolition of imperial policing. Expanded Sanctuary in Chicago was led by BYP100, Mijente, and OCAD, and sought to make sanctuary for all a reality by challenging criminalization of Black and brown residents, and exposing how the war on gangs facilitated deportation, in part through interlinked databases. They also called for a shift in resources from policing Black and brown neighborhoods to life-sustaining investments in them, such as housing, public schools, health care, and the like. The campaign made substantive wins, including a City Council vote to end collaboration between ICE and city agencies, including the police department.

Borders are an example of what Mark Neocleous, building on Marx, calls a security fetish, or a “mystical value” created in a “process whereby security becomes fetishistically inscribed in commodified social relations.” For Nicholas De Genova, among others, “the border” is a special kind of fetish, a spectacle, a “social relationship between people that is mediated by images,” in Guy Debord’s terms. Hence the importance of Kristi Noem and Dr. Phil doing tough border stuff. But the security fetish increasingly is mobilized digitally, heralding the promise of interoperable databases that facilitate “inter-agency communication” and “advanced data analytics” in a “shared investigative ecosystem.”

Given that the border is already mystified as a technology, new forms of computerized border technologies doubly fetishize the configurations of people, materials, force, and law that compose bordering practices. The authors of these books are confronted with how to convey what I think are qualitative shifts in bordering practices—iris scans, facial recognition software, AI lie detectors, predictive analytics, drone operations, etc.—while refusing to obscure the violence engendered by walls and interconnected databases alike.

These books document the violence of existing systems and their often humanitarian appeals. They do not promise border abolition as a far-off utopia. They instead question the founding violence of borders and imperial policing and develop imaginations for alternatives out of the concrete circumstances of the present.

In this way, the four books pick up on abolitionist Mariame Kaba’s refrain that hope is a discipline, a daily practice of remaking the world. Chaar López points to artistic practices of registering glitches of and traumas engendered by the cybernetic border. Molnar emphasizes relationships and concrete practices of being with and responsibly sharing stories about people whose lives are touched by the global border regime. The organization and content of Resisting Borders and Technologies of Violence exemplify the imperative of grounded analysis for transnational movement building. Likewise, Imperial Policing shows how important critical inquiry is for building understanding of databased policing and how to dismantle state categories that divide groups facing state repression.

National border regimes uphold the lie that citizens and noncitizens can be quickly distinguished and neatly separated. In its ubiquity and apparent invisibility, the digitization of bordering makes these lies simultaneously more insidious and patently false. All other surveillance, including of our shopping histories and through our smart watches, similarly rests on the myth of sorting the suspicious from those who have nothing to hide.

Dismantling these systems means not just tracing the techno-dystopian flip sides of their techno-optimist conceits but also, as these books show, building movements that situate tech in broader analyses of power. This opens the possibility of linking the movement for migrant justice with efforts for digital privacy, or with movements fighting extractivist mining for our phones or the uneven environmental consequences of data centers. Freedom of mobility, and to stay home, rests on all of these. 

Featured Image: German shepherd. Photograph by Staff Sgt. Stephen Linch / Wikimedia Commons.