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Alabama Sen. Katie Britt spawned headlines this month for telling a flagrantly misleading anecdote about sex trafficking during the GOP response to President Biden’s State of the Union address.

The way she politicized and misrepresented the context and timeline of the story presented was immoral, exploitative and wrong. But the hard truth is that kidnapping, violence and sexual exploitation remain a reality at the border — and in reality, Britt is among a legion of conservative voices whose anti-asylum policy stances would make the situation far worse. While the media has focused on her factual distortions, they haven’t yet fully delved into the hypocrisy that her policy positions represent in contrast to her remarks.

The militarization of border communities did not start with President Trump. Twenty-five years ago Tuesday, the Border Patrol launched “Operation Gatekeeper” with President Bill Clinton’s approval. It was a massive undertaking, involving the construction of walls and fences along parts of the border that were easier to cross and dramatically increasing the Border Patrol’s personnel and the technology it uses for border surveillance, trends that continue to this day.

Now, the Trump administration and Congress want[s] to pour even more funds into fortifying the border, even though border militarization disrupts communities, damages sensitive habitats and creates a dangerous situation for migrants. We need to learn from the failures of Operation Gatekeeper and its deadly legacy and reject further funding of these destructive policies.

Human Rights Watch would like to first express our condolences to the Tambunga family for their loss. The US government should do everything possible to prevent unnecessary and tragic deaths.

In fact, communities at the border and throughout the United States have been witness to an alarming increase in deaths and abuses, and we hope that we can find common ground to prevent them from continuing.

Customs and Border Protection (CBP) just released updated data on migrant deaths at the US-Mexico border, and the results are staggering. At least 895 people died at the border during the 2022 fiscal year — a 57 percent increase from the previous fiscal year. This grim statistic makes 2022 the deadliest year on record for migrants attempting to come to the US, and it’s possible that the figure is an undercount.

For years, CBP has blamed the persistent rise in deaths on three factors: the summer heat, the ruggedness of the desert terrain, and the cruelty of smugglers who leave migrants to die there.

In response, the vendor for the ALPRs, Flock Safety, visited Wichita to address the situation. Company representatives stated that this was the first occurrence of abuse that was reported to the company since its founding in 2017, and that “Flock is working to develop an alert system that flags suspicious requests but has not done so yet.” The officer’s use of the ALPR system had only been discovered after his estranged wife informed a friend, who then told the police that the officer was stalking her, as neither the department nor the company maintained any clear safeguards to prevent the technology from being used in this manner.

In many ways, the incident in Wichita is frighteningly typical; research shows that police may commit acts of domestic violence at nearly 15 times the rate of non-police. What is new and unusual is not the officer’s act of stalking, but how he did it: by tracking his wife’s car through the use of ALPRs.

When Lawrence Summers, then president of the World Bank, advocated that the bank develop a scheme to export rich nation garbage, toxic waste, and heavily polluting industries to Africa, he did so in the calm voice of global managerial reasoning. Such a scheme, Summers elaborated, would help correct an inefficient global imbalance in toxicity. Underlying his plan is an overlooked but crucial subsidiary benefit that he outlined: offloading rich-nation toxins onto the world’s poorest continent would help ease the growing pressure from rich-nation environmentalists who were campaigning against garbage dumps and industrial effluent that they condemned as health threats and found aesthetically offensive.¶ Summers thus rationalized his poison-redistribution ethic as offering a double gain: it would benefit the United States and Europe economically, while helping appease the rising discontent of rich-nation environmentalists. Summers’ arguments assumed a direct link between aesthetically unsightly waste and Africa as an out-of-sight continent, a place remote from green activists’ terrain of concern. In Summers’ win-win scenario for the global North, the African recipients of his plan were triply discounted: discounted as political agents, discounted as long-term casualties of what I call in this book “slow violence,” and discounted as cultures possessing environmental practices and concerns of their own. I begin with Summers’ extraordinary proposal because it captures the strategic and representational challenges posed by slow violence as it impacts the environments and the environmentalism of the poor.¶ Three primary concerns animate this book, chief among them my conviction that we urgently need to rethink politically, imaginatively, and theoretically what I call “slow violence.” By slow violence I mean a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all.¶ Violence is customarily conceived as an event or action that is immediate in time, explosive and spectacular in space, and as erupting into instant sensational visibility. We need, I believe, to engage a different kind of violence, a violence that is neither spectacular nor instantaneous, but rather incremental and accretive, its calamitous repercussions playing out across a range of temporal scales. In so doing, we also need to engage the representational, narrative, and strategic challenges posed by the relative invisibility of slow violence. Climate change, the thawing cryosphere, toxic drift, biomagnification, deforestation, the radioactive aftermaths of wars, acidifying oceans, and a host of other slowly unfolding environmental catastrophes present formidable representational obstacles that can hinder our efforts to mobilize and act decisively. The long dyings—the staggered and staggeringly discounted casualties, both human and ecological that result from war’s toxic aftermaths or introduction climate change—are underrepresented in strategic planning as well as in human memory.¶ Had Summers advocated invading Africa with weapons of mass destruction, his proposal would have fallen under conventional definitions of violence and been perceived as a military or even an imperial invasion. Advocating invading countries with mass forms of slow-motion toxicity, however, requires rethinking our accepted assumptions of violence to include slow violence. Such a rethinking requires that we complicate conventional assumptions about violence as a highly visible act that is newsworthy because it is event focused, time bound, and body bound. We need to account for how the temporal dispersion of slow violence affects the way we perceive and respond to a variety of social afflictions — from domestic abuse to posttraumatic stress and, in particular, environmental calamities. A major challenge is representational: how to devise arresting stories, images, and symbols adequate to the pervasive but elusive violence of delayed effects. Crucially, slow violence is often not just attritional but also exponential, operating as a major threat multiplier; it can fuel long-term, proliferating conflicts insituations where the conditions for sustaining life become increasingly but gradually degraded.¶ Politically and emotionally, different kinds of disaster possess unequal heft. Falling bodies, burning towers, exploding heads, avalanches, volcanoes, and tsunamis have a visceral, eye-catching and page-turning power that tales of slow violence, unfolding over years, decades, even centuries, cannot match. Stories of toxic buildup, massing greenhouse gases, and accelerated species loss due to ravaged habitats are all cataclysmic, but they are scientifically convoluted cataclysms in which casualties are postponed, often for generations.¶ In an age when the media venerate the spectacular, when public policy is shaped primarily around perceived immediate need, a central question is strategic and representational: how can we convert into image and narrative the disasters that are slow moving and long in the making, disasters that are anonymous and that star nobody, disasters that are attritional and of indifferent interest to the sensation-driven technologies of our image-world? How can we turn the long emergencies of slow violence into stories dramatic enough to rouse public sentiment and warrant political intervention, these emergencies whose repercussions have given rise to some of the most critical challenges of our time?¶ Slow Violence¶ In this book, I have sought to address our inattention to calamities that are slow and long lasting, calamities that patiently dispense their devastation while remaining outside our flickering attention spans and outside the purview of a spectacle-driven corporate media. The insidious workings of slow violence derive largely from the unequal attention given to spectacular and unspectacular time. In an age that venerates instant spectacle, slow violence is deficient in the recognizable special effects that fill movie theaters and boost ratings on TV. Chemical and radiological violence, for example, is driven inward, somatized into cellular dramas of mutationthat particularly in the bodies of the poor remain largely unobserved, undiagnosed, and untreated. From a narrative perspective, such invisible, mutagenic theater is slow paced and open ended, eluding the tidy closure, the containment, imposed by the visual orthodoxies of victory and defeat.¶ Let me ground this point by referring, in conjunction, to Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth. In 1962 Silent Spring jolted a broad international public into an awareness of the protracted, cryptic, and indiscriminate casualties inflicted by dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT). Yet, just one year earlier, Fanon, in the opening pages of Wretched of the Earth, had comfortably invoked DDT as an affirmative metaphor for anticolonial violence: he called for a DDT-filled spray gun to be wielded as a weapon against the “parasites” spread by the colonials’ Christian church.¶ Fanon’s drama of decolonization is, of course, studded with the overt weaponry whereby subjugation is maintained (“by dint of a great array of bayonets and cannons”) or overthrown (“by the searing bullets and bloodstained knives”) after “a murderous and decisive struggle between the two protagonists.” Yet his temporal vision of violence and of what Aimé Césaire called “the rendezvous of victory” was uncomplicated by the concerns that an as-yet inchoate environmental justice movement (catalyzed in part by Silent Spring) would raise about lopsided risks that permeate the land long term, blurring the clean lines between defeat and victory, between colonial dispossession and official national self-determination. We can certainly read Fanon, in his concern with land as property and as fount of native dignity, retrospectively with an environmental eye. But our theories of violence today must be informed by a science unavailable to Fanon, a science that addresses environmentally embedded violence that is often difficult to source, oppose, and once set in motion, to reverse.¶ Attritional catastrophes that overspill clear boundaries in time and space are marked above all by displacements temporal, geographical, rhetorical, and technological displacements that simplify violence and underestimate, in advance and in retrospect, the human and environmental costs. Such displacements smooth the way for amnesia, as places are rendered irretrievable to those who once inhabited them, places that ordinarily pass unmourned in the corporate media. Places like the Marshall Islands, subjected between 1948 and 1958 to sixty-seven American atmospheric nuclear “tests,” the largest of them equal in force to 1,000 Hiroshima-sized bombs. In 1956 the Atomic Energy Commission declared the Marshall Islands “by far the most contaminated place in the world,” a condition that would compromise independence in the long term, despite the islands’ formal ascent in 1979 into the ranks of self-governing nations. The island republic was still in part governed by an irradiated past: well into the 1980s its history of nuclear colonialism, long forgotten by the colonizers, was still delivering into the world “jellyfish babies” headless, eyeless, limbless human infants who would live for just a few hours.¶ If, as Said notes, struggles over geography are never reducible to armed struggle but have a profound symbolic and narrative component as well, and if, as Michael Watts insists, we must attend to the “violent geographies of fast capitalism,” we need to supplement both these injunctions with a deeper understanding of the slow violence of delayed effects that structures so many of our most consequential forgettings. Violence, above all environmental violence, needs to be seen and deeply considered as a contest not only over space, or bodies, or labor, or resources, but also over time. We need to bear in mind Faulkner’s dictum that “the past is never dead. It’s not even past.” His words resonate with particular force across landscapes permeated by slow violence, landscapes of temporal overspill that elude rhetorical cleanup operations with their sanitary beginnings and endings.¶ Kwame Anthony Appiah famously asked, “Is the ‘Post-’ in ‘Postcolonial’ the ‘Post-’ in ‘Postmodern’?” As environmentalists we might ask similarly searching questions of the “post” in postindustrial, post–Cold War, and postconflict. For if the past of slow violence is never past, so too the post is never fully post: industrial particulates and effluents live on in the environmental elements we inhabit and in our very bodies,which epidemiologically and ecologically are never our simple contemporaries. Something similar applies to so-called postconflict societies whose leaders may annually commemorate, as marked on the calendar, the official cessation of hostilities, while ongoing intergenerational slow violence (inflicted by, say, unexploded landmines or carcinogens from an arms dump) may continue hostilities by other means.¶ Ours is an age of onrushing turbo-capitalism, wherein the present feels more abbreviated than it used to at least for the world’s privileged classes who live surrounded by technological time-savers that often compound the sensation of not having enough time. Consequently, one of the most pressing challenges of our age is how to adjust our rapidly eroding attention spans to the slow erosions of environmental justice. If, under neoliberalism, the gulf between enclaved rich and outcast poor has become ever more pronounced, ours is also an era of enclaved time wherein for many speed has become a self-justifying, propulsive ethic that renders “uneventful” violence (to those who live remote from its attritional lethality) a weak claimant on our time. The attosecond pace of our age, with its restless technologies of infinite promise and infinite disappointment, prompts us to keepflicking and clicking distractedly in an insatiable and often insensate quest for quicker sensation.¶ The oxymoronic notion of slow violence poses a number of challenges: scientific, legal, political, and representational. In the long arc between the emergence of slow violence and its delayed effects, both the causes and the memory of catastrophe readily fade from view as the casualties incurred typically pass untallied and unremembered. Such discounting in turn makes it far more difficult to secure effective legal measures for prevention, restitution, and redress.¶ Casualties from slow violence are, moreover, out of sync not only with our narrative and media expectations but also with the swift seasons of electoral change. Politicians routinely adopt a “last in, first out” stance toward environmental issues, admitting them when times are flush, dumping them as soon as times get tight. Because preventative or remedial environmental legislation typically targets slow violence, it cannot deliver dependable electoral cycle results, even though those results may ultimately be life saving. Relative to bankable pocketbook actions there’ll be a tax rebate check in the mail next August environmental payouts seem to lurk on a distant horizon. Many politicians and indeed many voters routinely treat environmental action as critical yet not urgent. And so generation after generation of two- or four-year cycle politicians add to the pileup of deferrable actions deferred. With rare exceptions, in the domain of slow violence “yes, but not now, not yet” becomes the modus operandi.

Three primary concerns animate this book, chief among them my conviction that we urgently need to rethink-politically, imaginatively, and theoretically-what I call "slow violence." By slow violence I mean a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all. Violence is customarily conceived as an event or action that is immediate in time, explosive and spectacular in space, and as erupting into instant sensational visibility. We need, I believe, to engage a different kind of violence, a violence that is neither spectacular nor instantaneous, but rather incremental and accretive, its calamitous repercussions playing out across a range of temporal scales. In so doing, we also need to engage the representational, narrative, and strategic challenges posed by the relative invisibility of slow violence. Climate change, the thawing cryosphere, toxic drift, biomagnification, deforestation, the radioactive aftermaths of wars, acidifying oceans, and a host of other slowly unfolding environmental catastrophes present formidable representational obstacles that can hinder our efforts to mobilize and act decisively. The long dyings-the staggered and staggeringly discounted casualties, both human and ecological that result from war's toxic aftermaths or climate change-are underrepresented in strategic planning as well as in human memory. Had Summers advocated invading Africa with weapons of mass destruction, his proposal would have fallen under conventional definitions of violence and been perceived as a military or even an imperial invasion. Advocating invading countries with mass forms of slow-motion toxicity, however, requires rethinking our accepted assumptions of violence to include slow violence. Such a rethinking requires that we complicate conventional assumptions about violence as a highly visible act that is newsworthy because it is event focused, time bound, and body bound. We need to account for how the temporal dispersion of slow violence affects the way we perceive and respond to a variety of social afflictions-from domestic abuse to posttraumatic stress and, in particular, environmental calamities. A major challenge is representational: how to devise arresting stories, images, and symbols adequate to the pervasive but elusive violence of delayed effects. Crucially, slow violence is often not just attritional but also exponential, operating as a major threat multiplier; it can fuel long-term, proliferating conflicts in situations where the conditions for sustaining life become increasingly but gradually degraded.

“There is a hierarchy to care”: theoretical concerns and applications

In Frames of War (an extension and preoccupation with similar issues she outlines in her text Precarious Life), Judith Butler focuses on the ways in which particular, violent perceptions of everyday life are normalized and propagated as legible or granted “intelligibility” (through numbers, statistics, etc.). According to Butler, Frames of War follows on from Precarious Life ... especially its suggestion that specific lives cannot be apprehended as living. If certain lives do not qualify as lives or are, from the start, not conceivable as lives within certain epistemological frames, then these lives are never lived nor lost in the full sense. (2010: 1) For Butler, then, a primary concern is how these intelligibilities allow “a state to wage its wars without instigating a popular revolt” (xvi). Although Butler is writing within the context of the Iraq War and the “War on Terror,” her insights on precarity and modes of state violence exceed their immediate rele- vance. Indeed, as is clear below, the notions of war and settler-colonialism and the biopolitical rationalities they allow are eminently applicable to a local, Canadian context. The frames of war, Butler argues, are not circumscribed to combat zones with the mobilization of weapons. Instead, to Butler, “perceptual weapons” are acting on populations consistently to naturalize violences and enlist citizens to tacitly consent to (and, in some cases, actively participate in) violent forms that authorize dehumanization: “[w]aging war ... begins with the assault on the senses; the senses are the first target of war” (xvi). These perceptual violences resonate with Rob Nixon’s formulation of “slow violence” as well. To Nixon, slow violence is “a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all” (2011: 3). Further, and “[c]rucially, slow violence is often not just attritional but also exponential, operating as a major threat multiplier; it can fuel long-term, proliferating conflicts in situations where the conditions for sustaining life become increasingly but gradually degraded” (4). Conditioning the senses or what is intelligible, then, functions as the way in which state violences are legitimized, as the frames of war dictate the “sensuous parameters of reality itself” (ix). According to Butler, the task at hand is not only to “understand ... these frames, where they come from and what kind of action they perform” (2010: 83), but also to find and articulate “those modes of representation and appearance that allow the claim of life to be made and heard” (81). While Butler is exam- ining conditions of precarity, (in)security, and disposability in the context of “the War on Terror,” and Palestine–Israel, her examination of an imperial/ colonial power exerting force and enacting violence on vulnerable and racialized populations (and in the process producing and reproducing these vulnerable populations) can be fruitfully employed in the Canadian context, though not without some alteration. Although we may not perceive the more mundane, i.e. non-military, violences visited upon Indigenous communities as “war” strictly speaking, Sora Han’s oft-cited phrase that we must think of the United States (and settler-colonial nations more broadly) not “at war” but “as war” is useful here (cited in Simpson 2014: 153, emphasis in original). If we view the biopolitical man- agement of Indigenous populations and Indigenous territories as rationalities rooted in the organizing frame of settler-colonialism, then the states of emer- gency putatively thought to be produced through war are “structural, not eventful” – that is to say, war is the very condition of settler-colonialism and not a by-product of it (154). Indeed, the largest ever domestic deployment of military forces in North America took place within Canada, in the context of the so-called “Oka crisis.” As Audra Simpson writes, the “highest number of troops in the history of Indigenous-settler relations in North America was deployed to Kanehsatà:ke, as this was the most unambiguous form of exceptional relations, that of warfare. There were 2,650 soldiers deployed...” (2014: 152). And, as Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and others have noted, Western imperial powers still refer to “enemy territories” abroad as “Indian Country” and to “wanted terrorists” as “Geronimo” (2014: 56). I follow the lineages of these Indigenous theorists who view settler-colonialism as a kind of permanent war, drawing parallels between the so-called everyday violences (displacement, sexual violence) inflicted upon Indigenous peoples in the US and Canada and the death-delivering reaches of empire embodied by the West more globally. Or, to echo Mink, the transformer/shapeshifter narrating the events in Mara- cle’s Celia’s Song: “This is war” (2014: 9). For Butler, there are varying tactics for distributing “precarity” differently, or what she describes as “that politically induced condition in which certain populations suffer from failing social and economic networks of support,” producing a “maximized precariousness for populations ... who often have no other option than to appeal to the very state from which they need protec- tion” (2010: 26). In the depictions provided in her writing, as well as that of Maracle, violence is deployed not only as “an effort to minimize precarious- ness for some and to maximize it for others,” but also as a mode of shaping the perceptions of citizens in order to make such acts legible, and hence, in a sense justifiable (Butler 2010: 54). Ultimately what Butler is advocating for is a new ethico-political orientation, one with the potential to disrupt the violent regimes of the sensible, as well as the ways in which precarity is currently allocated and distributed. Paraphrasing Jacques Rancière, Jeff Derksen also advocates for political movements that disrupt “regimes of the sensible”: “a politics of the aesthetic could ... redistribute and rethink the possibility of the subject (potentially an isolated figure) within the present and within a com- munity to come” (2009: 73). In sum, Butler’s text illustrates the ways in which State-sanctioned (and induced) precarity “perpetuate[s] a way of dividing lives into those that are worth defending, valuing, and grieving when they are lost, and those that are not quite lives” (2010: 42), as well as the resistive practices that might disrupt the naturalization of “differential distribution[s] of pre- carity” (xxv). The remainder of the chapter considers to what extent Mara- cle’s texts offer such a disruption of the mundane frames of settler-colonial war within the context of an exceptional moment (an epidemic), and asks how her work gestures toward the alternatives that might be offered by Indigenous frames.

It was pitch black when the Border Patrol rolled up to Raymond Mattia’s home on a remote corner of the Tohono O’odham reservation in southern Arizona, investigating a report of gunshots.

Border agents, smugglers and migrants were a familiar sight in the tiny desert village a mile from the southern border where the Mattia family had lived for decades. Mr. Mattia often patrolled his property with a flashlight, his family said. That night in May, Mr. Mattia told an older sister over the phone that he was heading outside to meet the agents, she said.

“They all loved the state/corporate idea of fusing Mexican low-wage manufacturing with Israeli boundary building and homeland security companies.”

When hundreds of Central American migrants arrived in Tijuana, Mexico, in late November, planning to claim asylum in the United States, U.S. Customs and Border Protection closed the San Ysidro border crossing in anticipation of their arrival. In protest of the closure, asylum seekers rushed the fence separating Mexico and the United States, and border patrol agents fired tear gas at them through the fence. Images of children and their families running through clouds of CS gas went viral on social media. Palestine solidarity activists speculated that the agents used the same U.S.-manufactured tear gas as is used by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) against Palestinians and has been used against activists in the United States from Standing Rock to Ferguson, MO.

For Indigenous peoples of the Americas, the U.S.-Mexico border is increasingly a symbol and tool of genocide. When this border was created, Indigenous peoples of the region were divided, including the Yaqui, O’odham, Cocopah, Kumeyaay, Pai, Apache, and Kickapoo. These peoples are represented by 26 sovereign tribal nations in the United States with tribal relatives residing in Mexico. Indigenous peoples tend to understand and talk about the U.S.-Mexico border in different terms from those who understand the border to be an agreement between governments, often describing the border as artificial or “imaginary.”

Several international legal instruments, including the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), confirm the right of Indigenous peoples to maintain connections to their homelands and peoples across international borders. Some Indigenous groups such as the Lipan Apache have pursued actions to address rights violations through the U.N. reporting system. International human rights law, however, is not now recognized as binding for decision-making in U.S. courts.

There is perhaps no stretch of American land as politicized as the U.S.-Mexico border—and perhaps no place as surveilled.

Physical reminders of that fact are everywhere. There are towering fences and walls. Border agents stand guard, patrolling the boundary in trucks. But border security is becoming increasingly stealthy and high-tech as the government erects a "virtual wall"—a fortification not made of steel and concrete, but drones, surveillance towers, and artificial intelligence.

In a parallel fashion, the United States saw the development of its immigration detention infrastructure coincide with the implementation of aggressive birth control measures targeting immigrant and women of color. The current wave of sterilization violence is the latest manifestation of anti-immigrant sentiment, leading to the coercive management of reproductive rights and the expansion of immigration control infrastructure. In the late 1960s, public debates about the perils of unauthorized immigration from the southern border gained traction amidst the backdrop of the “conservative-led war on drugs” (Nevis & Dunn, 2008, 22) and its anti-Black and anti-civil rights movements suppression efforts. During the Carter administration (1977–1981), the construction of a “10-foot-high chain-link fence” began along the California/Mexico border (Nevis & Dunn, 2008, 22). Simultaneously, unconsented sterilizations were imposed on women of Mexican descent in California, driven by mounting fears about population shifts and the “Latinization of California” (Gutierrez, 2008, 4. See No más bebes Tajima-Peña & Espino, 2016. For a discussion on earlier eugenics in California, see Lira, 2021 and Mina-Stern, 2016) and the broader United States.

This scenario resurfaced with former president Donald Trump's attempt to secure the border with the expansion of the infrastructure of exclusion shaped by a white ethnic-nationalist agenda. What was once a fringe ideology has gained mainstream traction, as evident in Stern's (2019) observation that the white ethnostate's pursuit of “cleansing and separation” has become normalized (Kindle 149). During his presidential campaign, Trump pledged to build a “great wall” on the southern border with the assurance that Mexico would bear the cost. Fences and walls are a boundary-making technologies barriers against external threats that involve “two layers of ‘reinforced fencing.’” (Nevis & Dunn, 2008, 22). I contend that reproductive technologies, including unconsented sterilizations and other invasive gynecological procedures are part of the second layer that involves cameras, sensors, or radars. This argument resonates with Elise Andaya's (2019) call to consider walls and uteruses together, allowing for a renewed understanding of sterilization practices and their connection to infrastructures of exclusion and surveillance.

There is growing acknowledgment of the risks that AI technologies — those that can “differentiate, rank, and categorize” data, behaving intelligently to think, predict, and act with some degree of autonomy — pose, especially for already marginalized people. Yet the proliferation of AI technology continues largely unchecked, including in the context of border and immigration enforcement. This undermines migrants’ human rights including, as described by the former UN Special Rapporteur on Racism, through its “xenophobic and racially discriminatory impacts…on migrants, stateless persons, refugees and other non-citizens.”

In a recent landmark thematic hearing on human mobility and structural racism at the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), civil society organizations — including my own, the Promise Institute for Human Rights at UCLA School of Law, jointly with the Black Alliance for Just Immigration (BAJI) — made submissions arguing that the use of border technologies by the United States in immigration enforcement exacerbates the racial discrimination and abuse that Black migrants already face in their migration journeys, including through deterrence and border externalization policies. As we argued before the Commission, it is essential that a racial justice lens shape the development of U.S. laws, policies, and practices related to border technology, to avoid intensifying the racial discrimination already at the heart of the U.S. immigration system and its harmful impacts on Black migrants.

Hi-tech surveillance on the U.S.-Mexico border is pushing migrants onto deadly routes, humanitarian groups and researchers say

Deep in the Arizona desert on the southern U.S. border, a surveillance tower rises more than 150 feet (46 m) into the air, its swiveling cameras taking in the surrounding valley.

Border Technology Exacerbates Racial Discrimination and Abuse Against Black Migrants

The United States has increasingly relied on digital technology to enforce its border externalization policies. The Biden administration has allocated substantial funds toward border security technology. “Smart borders” include “remote video surveillance, drones, automated license plate readers, motion sensors, [and] integrated fixed towers [IFTs].” At the U.S.-Mexico border IFTs are tall long-range structures that use cameras and radar to detect moving people and collect data about them for immigration enforcement. The United States also employs small unmanned aerial systems (sUAS), a form of remote-operated drone originally designed for military operations, to identify and surveil migrants, facilitating their apprehension at the border. Such border surveillance technologies impinge on migrants’ privacy rights and can lead to increased violence and detention, and are a tool to externalize borders and impede migrants from entering the United States.

About the Towers¶ Currently, the map includes three primary styles of towers implemented by CBP: ¶ Integrated Fixed Towers (IFT). These structures are from vendor Elbit Systems of America, part of an Israeli corporation that has come under criticism for its role in surveillance in Palestine. Elbit previously was a subcontractor on the failed SBInet project, and has built many of the new towers at the same locations of the original SBInet towers. IFTs are exclusively found in Arizona, with several controversial towers installed on tribal lands owned by the Tohono O'odham nation. IFTs can reportedly detect a person up to 7.5 miles away. ¶ Remote Video Surveillance Systems (RVSS). These structures from vendor General Dynamics are most commonly, but not exclusively, found near the border fence. The platform at the top usually includes two sensor rigs with electro-optical and infrared cameras and a laser illuminator. The monopole version of the RVSS is found throughout the Southwest, but a new model— the "relocatable RVSS" (R-RVSS)—has been installed throughout the Rio Grande Valley in South Texas. RVSSs can reportedly detect a person up to 7.5 miles away, however the range may vary depending on the particular regional requirement.¶ Autonomous Surveillance Towers (AST). These "Sentry" towers are made by Anduril Industries, founded by Oculus creator Palmer Luckey. According to CBP, an AST "scans the environment with radar to detect movement, orients a camera to the location of the movement detected by the radar, and analyzes the imagery using algorithms to autonomously identify items of interest." In July 2020, CBP announced plans to acquire 200 of these towers by the end of Fiscal Year 2022, a deal worth $250 million. These towers are heavily concentrated in Southern California, with patches popping up in southern New Mexico and the Big Bend, Laredo, and Del Rio Border Patrol sectors in Texas. Because they are so new, and have yet to appear in updated, publicly available satellite imagery, we have only documented a small portion of these installations in our data set. ASTs can detect a person up to 1.7 miles away and a vehicle 2.2 miles away, according to company materials. ¶ The map also includes unusual and novel surveillance towers, such as a new Elbit tower that was installed on the Cochise County Community College campus and a tower installed on the property of Warren Buffet's son's ranch, both near Douglas, Ariz. Another Anduril tower was located 30 miles north of the San Diego border, where it watches the Pacific Ocean from the cliffs near the Del Mar dog beach. We have also included towers installed at inland border checkpoints as well as a number of towers of which we were unable to conclusively determine the models. ¶ We will continue to update and add to the data as we document new towers and technologies. If you are aware of a tower that isn't on our map, or know of a tower that has been relocated, please email aos@eff.org. ¶ Automated License Plate Readers (ALPRs). We have also mapped out 39 Border Patrol checkpoints where ALPR systems have been installed, either by CBP or the Drug Enforcement Administration. These cameras collect the license plates of vehicles that pass, attach a timestamp and GPS coordinates, then upload that data to a searchable database. The data is stored for 15 years—far longer than the retention period of any state or local law enforcement agency. CBP's ALPR vendor, Perceptics, was breached in 2019, resulting in the leak of 105,000 license plate images. A year later, the Government Accountability Office concluded that only about half of border checkpoints were using ALPR systems as intended with a system for documenting the outcomes of secondary inspections of vehicles.

Israel’s surveillance industry is one of the most advanced and prolific in the world. A unique environment of legal enablement, partnerships between private firms and the Israeli military, and the availability of Palestinians as free test subjects has allowed the country to become a world leader in surveillance tech exports.¶ With around twenty-seven surveillance companies, Israel has one of the biggest clusters of such manufacturers in relation to its size. The NSO Group’s Pegasus is a sophisticated form of spyware categorized as a military export by the Israeli state and only sold with its express permission. Like other surveillance manufacturers, the company is licensed by Israel’s Ministry of Defense.¶ Pegasus is especially dangerous because it can be planted secretly, giving the attacker total control over a victim’s mobile phone. It effectively undermines all the modern security features like encryption and turns a smartphone into a smart listening device. It can also copy messages, photos, and emails as well as recording calls.¶ Investigations have revealed that Pegasus was used against the inner circle of dissident Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who was murdered by Saudi intelligence in 2018. Over the last decade, several reports have also revealed the use of Pegasus against journalists, activists, and political dissidents in various countries. The spyware has facilitated assassinations and severe human rights violations by authoritarian regimes in the Middle East and South America.¶ Israel and the United States¶ Israel’s authoritarian tech exports serve the dual purpose of generating profits and fostering its military and diplomatic ties with client countries. Although this trade is done at the expense of human rights and free speech, the United States and its allies continue to take a permissive approach to the NSO Group and the pervasive Israeli surveillance industry.¶ Over the last four years, the United States has announced several steps to regulate the private surveillance market. In February this year, Washington imposed visa restrictions against those selling and abusing commercial spyware. The ban followed an executive order passed in March 2022 that prohibited US government agencies from purchasing such spyware.¶ Israel’s authoritarian tech exports serve the dual purpose of generating profits and fostering its military and diplomatic ties with client countries.¶ In November 2021, the US Commerce Department blacklisted the NSO Group and another Israeli firm for supplying spyware to foreign governments engaging in political repression. A joint statement released in March 2023 by the United States and its allies called for the regulation of commercial spyware. However, it failed to mention the NSO Group or Israel — the industry leaders who continue to export the technology for commercial and political benefits.¶ The NSO Group and other Israeli spyware manufacturers are integral to the country’s security and diplomatic establishment. For all practical purposes, they are an extension of the Israeli state. However, there has been no explicit diplomatic pressure on Israel from Washington or its allies to put an end to the export of these malicious technologies.¶ Big Tech Backlash¶ The major US tech companies — Apple, Meta, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon — possess immense resources and lobbying capabilities. They have filed lawsuits against the NSO Group and publicly condemned them as “cyber mercenaries.” This hostility stems from the fact that Pegasus undermines the technological architecture and the privacy/security narrative in which these companies have invested through decades of marketing and public outreach.¶ In addition, the spyware also jeopardizes the fundamental business models of these companies. In 2022, the Pentagon awarded a joint $9 billion cloud computing contract to four major tech companies. The ability of a minuscule spyware company to undermine their security can, therefore, have severe consequences for future defense contracts.¶ The big tech firms and the NSO Group have diverging interests, and that is reflected in the actions of the US government.¶ Clearly, the big tech firms and the NSO Group have diverging interests, and that is reflected in the actions of the US government. The superior influence and money-backed lobbying of American tech might explain why the US government has leaned toward banning the NSO Group and other spyware companies within its territory.¶ Yet while the NSO Group may have lost its market in the West, that has not deterred it from trying to use the Gaza war to revive itself. It has volunteered to play a role in Israel’s war effort, marketing its attempts to help trace missing Israelis and hostages.¶ A month into Israel’s war on Gaza, the NSO Group wrote a letter to the US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and officials of the State Department to request a meeting. Experts termed the outreach a desperate attempt at “crisis washing.” In the last few years, the company has spent millions to lobby US lawmakers and get off the government blacklist. It is now seeking to capitalize on Israel’s Gaza war, which has killed more than thirty thousand Palestinians in the last six months.¶ Surveillance Diplomacy¶ Despite facing losses due to mounting lawsuits and state action, the NSO Group continues to survive and export its authoritarian tech. It is now impossible for the Israeli firm to gain government clients in America. At the same time, the EU’s strict surveillance laws and robust civil society present additional challenges to its growth in the region.¶ Despite facing losses due to mounting lawsuits and state action, the NSO Group continues to survive and export its authoritarian tech.¶ However, the company’s flagship product makes it too important to fail. The software’s use in diplomacy follows the decades-old trend of using weapons sales to gain favor with foreign governments. Israel’s push for diplomatic normalization with Arab states such as the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Saudi Arabia has been accompanied by secretive weapons sales.¶ As the backchannel relations have grown, groups such as Amnesty International and the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab have traced the use of Pegasus in the phones of Arab journalists and dissidents. The spyware was also deployed against political opponents, journalists, and activists in India, Hungary, and Rwanda.¶ Israel has found fertile ground in the decline of democratic values in countries like India and the growing appetite for surveillance tech in the Middle East. In 2017, Narendra Modi became the first Indian prime minister to visit the country. The New York Times reported that a $2 billion deal for sophisticated weapons and intelligence gear was signed during this visit. Pegasus and a missile system were the highlights of this sale.¶ India has historically supported the Palestinian cause, and its relations with Israel have not been warm. However, in June 2019, it voted in support of Israel at the UN’s Economic and Social Council, opposing a move to grant observer status to a Palestinian human rights organization, marking a significant departure from its previous stance.¶ The New York Times investigation also revealed that countries like Mexico and Panama changed their UN votes in support of Israel after purchasing Pegasus. The report further stated that Pegasus played a significant yet undisclosed role in garnering support from Arab nations for Israel’s efforts against Iran, as well as in the negotiations leading to the Abraham Accords in 2020, which established diplomatic ties between Israel and some of its historic Arab foes.¶ Israel’s global isolation because of its unpopular war on Gaza will only boost its attempts to leverage its surveillance industry for diplomacy. The unquestioned support of the NSO Group from Benjamin Netanyahu’s government and the Israeli judiciary, along with the country’s corporate-military partnership, will ensure that the sales of the authoritarian tech continue, incentivizing the growth and proliferation of Israel’s spyware industry.¶ Although they pay lip service to democratic ideals, the countries of the self-styled free world not only tolerate Israel’s authoritarian exports but also enable them.¶ This industry thrives on a constant supply of trained and highly skilled individuals from Unit 8200, the Israeli intelligence unit likened to America’s National Security Agency (NSA). The unit is a launching pad for its members to join private spyware companies and start their own tech businesses.¶ Holding Israel Accountable¶ In spite of the proven role of Pegasus in facilitating human rights violations and subverting free speech globally, the United States and its allies continue to provide diplomatic support to Israel. NSO Group shares were even bought using British Gas pension funds. In 2020, the British government hosted the NSO Group at a secretive trade fair, which was visited by several authoritarian governments with an infamous track record on human rights. ¶ Although they pay lip service to democratic ideals, the countries of the self-styled free world not only tolerate Israel’s authoritarian exports but also enable them. Israel must be held accountable for its role in undermining democracies and emboldening autocratic regimes. The self-proclaimed “startup nation” that the West likes to call the “only democracy in the Middle East” must be questioned on its rogue surveillance industry.

Primary Responsibility for Human Rights Rests with the State This line of reasoning is valid as far as it goes, but in our opinion, it does not go far enough. For it is also true that genuine human rights protections for migrants, whether trafficked or not, can only be enforced and upheld by sovereign states or by intergovernmental and nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) working with their assistance. Ultimately, the primary responsibility rests with the state to address trafficking in persons and uphold the migrants’ human rights. This is the reality that a feasible and meaningful discussion on the role of border controls in anti-trafficking responses must take into account. To ignore or deny it will only serve to worsen the present situation. States are not going to open their borders to the free flow of migrants, no matter how much they are criticised. Even if one concedes that states are losing control, having a sense of control over one’s border, as Will Kymlicka argues, is of the utmost importance.23 First, it reduces fear, makes citizens feel secure, and takes some of the heat out of political debates on migration. Second, in most countries, there is little support for large-scale migration as well as a strong moralistic objection to rewarding irregular migrants who enter under false pretences. Third, it is easier for migrants to integrate into countries like Australia and Canada, where migration is managed and the result of state selection because large numbers of irregular migrants often result in a backlash against multiculturalism.24 None of these points makes a case as to why border controls should have a role to play in anti-trafficking responses per se; rather, they show that sovereignty and nationalism are still powerful norms influencing border controls and migration policies. Yet, however one appraises the overall relationship between border controls, regulated migration systems, trafficking in persons, and human rights, the analysis and suggestions that follow are constructed on a premise that few critics can dispute. Our premise is that most state border controls, as they currently stand, are neither preventing trafficking nor upholding the human rights of victims. For the most part, border controls worldwide fail to prevent and detect trafficking in persons. However, this needs to be fixed. States See Border Control as an Important Element to Anti-trafficking Interventions Given that it is the sovereign right of each state to control its border and regulate migration, it is also imperative that we see how the human rights of migrants can fit within the realpolitik of migration control. Again, one might ask why? To this question, our response is straightforward. States, for the most part, have adopted a criminal justice approach to address trafficking in persons. The main principles that form the basis of this approach are captured in the Trafficking and Smuggling Protocols as well as other international agreements, such as the Council of Europe Convention on Action against Trafficking in Human Beings. As of September 2013, 117 countries have ratified the Trafficking Protocol, requiring states to criminalise all forms of trafficking, prosecute and punish traffickers, strengthen national borders to combat the problem, promote cooperation among states, and protect and assist victims. As Chantal Thomas argues, ‘These international instruments suggest that states have not relinquished sovereign territorial prerogative – they have employed international law to enhance rather than to impede it.’25 Because both Protocols acknowledge the sovereign right of states to control their borders and regulate migration, UNODC fully supports this position and works with states, as part of its mandate, to promote adherence to the two Protocols and assist states in their implementation. Admittedly, the anti-trafficking frameworks developed by a number of states have more to do with political prerogatives than the legal obligations of the Trafficking Protocol. Nonetheless, as Gallagher and Holmes note, ‘The securing of general agreement on the nature of the problem [trafficking in persons] and the direction and scope of required solutions is widely lauded as evidence of real and tangible progress.’26 Regardless of arguments against it, the instrument is a clear signal that trafficking in persons, at least in the eyes of the states, is a criminal justice issue of which border controls are an important part. Does it suggest the reluctance of states to respect the rights of migrants? Perhaps to some, but as Susan Kneebone points out, the weak support for the UN Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers intimates that the ‘security-criminal justice dialogue succeeded when a rights dialogue failed’.27 Notwithstanding the support states give to the Trafficking Protocol and its Article 11, which mandates the strengthening of border controls to prevent and detect trafficking in persons, significant practical challenges remain in doing this effectively and with a human rights approach.

For four hours, Raymond V. Buelna, a cultural leader for the Pascua Yaqui Tribe, sat on a metal bench in a concrete holding space at the U.S.-Mexico border, separated from the two people he was taking to an Easter ceremony on tribal land in Arizona and wondering when they might be released. It was February 2022 and Buelna, a U.S. citizen, was driving the pair — both from the sovereign Native American nation’s related tribal community in northwestern Mexico — from their home to the reservation southwest of Tucson. They’d been authorized by U.S. officials to cross the border. But when Buelna asked an agent why they were detained, he was told to wait for the officer who brought him in. “They know that we’re coming,” said Buelna, who has made the trip for a variety of ceremonies for 20 years. “We did all this work and then we’re still sitting there.” Now, the Pascua Yaqui Tribe is trying to change this — for themselves and potentially dozens of other tribes in the U.S. Tribal officials have drafted regulations to formalize the border-crossing process, working with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s recently formed Tribal Homeland Security Advisory Council, comprised of 15 Native officials across the U.S. Their work could provide a template for dozens of Native American nations whose homelands, like those of the Pascua Yaqui Tribe, were sliced in two by modern-day U.S. borders. If approved, the rules would become the first clearly established U.S. border crossing procedures specific to a Native American tribe that could then be used by others, according to Christina Leza, associate professor of anthropology at Colorado College. The regulations would last five years, to be renewed and amended as needed, and require training local U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents and consular personnel on the tribe’s cultural heritage, language and traditions. It would require a Yaqui interpreter to be available when needed. It also would require close coordination with the tribe so border crossings are prompt. “This is just something that will help everybody,” said Fred Urbina, attorney general for the Pascua Yaqui Tribe. “It will make things more efficient.” Urbina said the tribe has met with Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas about the proposal. DHS did not immediately respond to repeated requests for comment by phone and email on the status of the regulations. When family members, deer dancers or musicians living in Sonora, Mexico, make the trip into the U.S. for ceremonies, tribal recognition celebrations or family events, they are typically issued an ID card from the tribe and a visitor visa or parole permit from the U.S. government. Still, they still face border officials who they say lack the cultural awareness to process them without problems. In the last two years, Buelna said, he has made the roundtrip about 18 times and was detained on four of them. He said border officials question the people he’s escorting, whose first language is Yaqui, without an interpreter, and cultural objects, such as deer and pig hooves, have been confiscated. Officials have touched ceremonial objects, despite only certain people being permitted by the tribe to do so. Urbina explained that the tribe encountered new challenges when Homeland Security was formed after 9/11 and border security was heightened. It became more pronounced in 2020, when the U.S. prohibited “non-essential” travel across the border to control the spread of the coronavirus. That ban ended this week, but new restrictions are in place. As a sovereignty issue, Native American nations should be able to determine their people’s ability to cross the border to preserve the ceremonial life of their communities, Leza said. “If the federal government is saying our particular priorities, our interests in terms of securing our borders, trump your interests as a sovereign nation, then that’s not really a recognition of the sovereignty of those tribal nations,” she said. Tribes along the U.S.-Canada border face similar problems. The Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians is headquartered in Michigan, but 173 of its more than 49,000 enrolled members live in Canada. Kimberly Hampton, the tribe’s officer-secretary and vice chair of the Tribal Homeland Security Advisory Council, said those members cross the border for powwows, fasting and to visit with traditional healers and family, but border officials have rudely rifled through eagle feathers and other cultural objects they are carrying. Hampton wants an agreement that includes having tribal liaisons at border crossings and training developed by the tribe for border personnel. Members of the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe and the Saint Regis Mohawk Tribe, which has about 8,000 members in the U.S. and about 8,000 in Canada, said they have also been asked at the border to prove that they possess at least 50% “blood of the American Indian race.” It stems from a requirement under the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act that “American Indians” born in Canada cannot be denied entry into the U.S. if they can prove this — often through a letter from the tribe. Saint Regis Mohawk Tribe Chief Michael L. Conners wants to eliminate the requirement and boost education for border agents on local and national tribal issues. Drafting regulations specific to the tribe, like the ones the Pascua Yaqui are doing, “would bring a lot of peace of mind to our whole community,” he said. For Buelna, waiting in that concrete holding space, he was reunited with the pair only after he told a border official he thought they’d been overlooked following a shift change, he said. “Why can’t there be a system?” Buelna asked. “Why can’t there be already a line for us where we can present the proper paperwork, everything that we need and go about our way?”