Digital Detention

About the Film

Across the USA, every day, hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers and migrants are tracked through a GPS device strapped to their ankle or wrist, or facial recognition, as they await their case determination. This deployment of for-profit surveillance technologies creates a parallel system to the booming detention system that makes the USA the country with the largest immigrant detention population in the world. 

Digital Detention shows how these technologies spread surveillance into communities, homes and workplaces, forming a for-profit, continuous expansion of detention, which guarantees major revenues to one of the world’s largest prison corporations that benefits both from the expansion of detention facilities and from their so-called alternatives. This public/private partnership imposes a significant financial cost on US taxpayers and a considerable human toll on migrants, their family members and larger community. Digital Detention is created in collaboration with monitored asylum seekers, community activists and lawyers in Austin, Texas, a city which is itself rapidly transformed by the tech industry, with lasting effects on its communities. Confinement and migration control are often laboratories for what is to come later for the general population, and the film shows how these extractive for-profit models of surveillance capitalism concern us all.