Surveillance technology has brought U.S. immigration enforcement away from the border itself and onto the bodies of people seeking to cross it
By Erica Hellerstein, former senior reporter at Coda Story.
“… The program’s surveillance tools create a “temporal experience of indefinite detention,” said Carolina Sanchez Boe, an anthropologist and sociologist at Aarhus University in Denmark, who has spent years interviewing migrants in the U.S. living under Alternatives to Detention’s monitoring regime.
“If you’re in a detention center, the walls are sort of outside of you, and you can fight against them,” she explained. But for those under electronic surveillance, the walls of a detention center reproduce themselves through technology that is heavily intertwined with migrants’ physical bodies. Immigration authorities are ever-present in the form of a bulky monitoring device strapped to one’s ankle or a smartphone app that demands you take a selfie and upload it at a certain time of day. People enrolled in Alternatives to Detention must keep these technologies charged and fully functioning in order to check in with their supervisors. For some, this dynamic transfers the role of an immigration officer onto migrants themselves. Migrants become a subject of state-sanctioned surveillance — as well as their own enforcers of it.
One person enrolled in Alternatives to Detention told Sanchez Boe that the program’s electronic monitoring tools moved the bars of a prison cell inside his head. “They become their own border guard, their own jailer,” Sanchez Boe explained. “When you’re on monitoring, there’s this really odd shift in the way you experience a border,” she added. “It’s like you yourself are upholding it.”
As the U.S. government transposes immigration enforcement to technology, it is causing the border to seep into the most intimate spheres of migrants’ lives. It has imprinted itself onto their bodies and minds.”
Such a joy to work with Erica Hellerstein. Erica’s reporting on issues related to tech and borders (among other timely topics!) is truly impressive, and you can follow her work here: @E_Hellerstein
Carolina Sanchez Boe 