Neg - PF Starter Packet - Houston 2024

***Houston HDW Public Forum Starter Packet – Negative***
NC
Structural Violence DA---NC
The sole disadvantage is Structural Violence.
First, expanding border surveillance technology ensures increased violence against migrants.
Border surveillance is inevitably used to commit racialized violence against migrants---an increase is the worst of all worlds.
Priya Morley 24, Director of the International Human Rights Clinic at UCLA School of Law and the Racial Justice Policy Counsel at the Promise Institute for Human Rights, "AI at the Border: Racialized Impacts and Implications", Just Security, 6-28-2024, https://www.justsecurity.org/97172/ai-at-the-border/ - SDP
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.
Upon arrival to the U.S.-Mexico border, some migrants are required to use CBP One, a mobile AI application implemented by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) to submit their personal and biometric information to apply for asylum (or, previously, exceptions to Title 42). This app has come under scrutiny, including because it is less able to recognize the photos of Black and dark-skinned people, creating a barrier for them to access this portal to move their asylum applications forward. While the algorithms CBP One relies on are not publicly available, such facial recognition technology has been rejected as racially discriminatory in other contexts such as policing. For example, these algorithms have been found to inaccurately identify Black faces at a rate 10 to 100 times more than white faces.
Immigration officials continue to use technology to monitor migrants after they enter U.S. territory. This includes the Investigative Case Management System used by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), software that gives ICE access to migrants’ personal and biometric information; as well as the use of mobile applications like SmartLink or electronic ankle monitors as alternatives to (immigration) detention. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is developing a Homeland Advanced Recognition Technology System (HART) to “aggregate and compare biometrics data including facial recognition, DNA, iris scans, fingerprints, and voice prints—most often gathered without obtaining a warrant…[in order] to target immigrants for surveillance, raids, arrests, detention, and deportation.” Just as anti-Black racism operates in the criminal legal system, Black migrants face racial profiling, criminalization, and detention at disproportionate rates, and these technologies are another tool that perpetuates these differential outcomes in the U.S. immigration system.
Human Rights and Border Technology Policy-Making
As BAJI and the Promise Institute argued before the IACHR, the use of border technology exacerbates racial discrimination in U.S. immigration enforcement, particularly against Black migrants, as well as the racialized harms caused by U.S. border externalization. Border technology, as with technology in general, is often framed as “neutral,” “objective,” and “fair” – yet it has the “capacity to reproduce, reinforce and even exacerbate racial inequality within and across societies.” It is used for controlling, surveilling, and policing migrants. Despite claims that it makes immigration enforcement “safer,” smart borders are a form of deterrence that perpetuate the racial inequity at the heart of immigration laws, policies, practices, and enforcement.
Policymakers must act now to stop the racialized impacts of AI at the border. Necessary policy reforms include: the collection and publication of data about AI-enabled border technologies, their use, and the differential impacts on Black and other racialized groups; the development of effective measures for oversight and accountability; and the establishment of a global governance framework on the use of digital surveillance technologies. Ultimately, policymakers must acknowledge and address how AI-enabled technologies are perpetrating and exacerbating human rights abuses at the border.
There is no humanitarian way to surveil the border---migrants don’t know the difference, so they’re pushed to more dangerous routes and rely on smugglers to get across, which causes more deaths.
Avi Asher-Schapiro 22, Tech Correspondent for Thomson Reuters Foundation based in New York City, "Surveillance tech makes U.S.-Mexico border even deadlier", 11-23-2022, Conte, https://www.context.news/surveillance/surveillance-tech-makes-us-mexico-border-even-deadlier - SDP
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.
With a viewing range of up to 7.5 miles (12 km), it can watch over three nearby communities and into the foothills of the Baboquivari mountains, one of the most treacherous paths for migrants crossing from Mexico into the United States.
The newly-installed tower is among the latest additions to the so-called digital border wall that U.S. border enforcement agents say they rely on to safeguard the nearly 2,000 mile frontier.
Humanitarians and academics worry though that the ballooning surveillance apparatus is creating a deathtrap for migrants.
"Out here, surveillance equals death," said Sam Chambers, a geographer at the University of Arizona who studies surveillance infrastructure and migration.
"The more cameras you put up, the more migrants are forced to take longer, riskier routes to avoid them - putting their bodies under stress and their lives in danger," he told Context.
The growing assemblage of cameras, sensors, drones, and aerial surveillance is especially visible along the Arizona border zone known as the Tucson Sector, one of the busiest and deadliest crossing points for migrants from Mexico.
Since the 1990s, U.S. border forces have attempted to block migrants from crossing into urban areas, Chambers said, with traditional checkpoints gradually superseded by technology that monitors huge tracts of land.
Chambers builds intricate models that show how camera towers push migrants away from safer, more direct routes to circuitous paths through hard-to-monitor mountainous zones and deserts where scores die from thirst and exposure to extreme weather.
He has calculated that the routes which migrants take to avoid detection often require more water than they can carry and more exertion than the traditional ones - with deadly results.
Using data from the coroner's office, Chambers has mapped how the locations of corpses found in the desert have changed in response to the surveillance push, with more bodies now being uncovered in remote areas outside the towers' range.
"There's simply no humanitarian way to surveil the border," he said.
'Humane' border policy
As the numbers of people fleeing war, poverty, and environmental disaster reach record highs worldwide, states are increasingly turning to digital technologies to monitor migrant flows and enforce border controls.
According to a Government Accountability Office report, $743 million was allocated for border surveillance tech from 2017-20 under former President Donald Trump.
While Trump planned to construct a physical border wall, President Joe Biden froze the project on his first day in office and pledged a more "humane" policy.
The Biden administration is voicing support for tech-enabled smart borders that use data analysis and AI to monitor and respond to events, and is directing money into digital surveillance tools.
In July, Biden inked a deal with the Mexican government to funnel more than $1.5 billion into border infrastructure, with much of the funds going to smart technologies.
Biden's 2022 budget proposal includes $1 billion for both "border infrastructure" and "investments in modern border security technology and assets."
At the border patrol's Tucson station operations room, agents pull in a staggering amount of intelligence.
There are real-time feeds from hundreds of motion sensors placed on suspected migrant routes, short-range cameras hidden in trees, and images from high-powered camera towers. Cameras even monitor the underground drainage system of the U.S. border town of Nogales for migrants scrambling through the tunnels.
All of this data streaming into the operations room will soon be accessible on agents' smartphones in the field, through an app that is currently being piloted in Arizona.
"This is the proving ground for all sorts of tech," said Jose Robert Ortiz, a border agent who was recently trained to fly a drone.
'We help them'
Border authorities say that people smugglers are to blame for migrants' deaths, and hi-tech surveillance is necessary to find - and save - people in an increasingly difficult job.
Arrests of undocumented migrants hit a record of over 2 million this year. Known deaths on the United States-Mexico border reached a high of 727 last year, according to data compiled by the U.N.'s International Organization for Migration.
"(People smugglers) take them up to the mountains and say, 'Go, this is your best chance'. They don't care about human life," said John Mennell, a spokesperson for Arizona's border patrol force.
"When people get in trouble, we go help them - and the surveillance helps us know where they are," he said, noting that agents respond to over a dozen calls for help a day.
Paige Corich-Kleim, a spokesperson with humanitarian group No Más Muertes, which means No More Deaths, said that the involvement of people smugglers was largely reaction to U.S. border policy.
"By making it harder to cross, migrants had to turn to these groups for help - it used to be a simple journey," she said.
Agents say it is hard to draw a direct connection between the surveillance tech and an uptick in arrests at the border, but the tools provide "situational awareness" in an environment where law enforcement is outnumbered by migrants seeking to cross.
On one day in September, agents remotely redirected a camera to home in on a group of migrants crossing a mountain ridge after they tripped a motion sensor.
The group was just outside the camera's range, about eight miles away, making the figures slightly blurry on the computer screen. But agents knew the path they were likely to take, and planned to intercept them when they descended the mountain.
Agents estimate they have approximately three days to catch a migrant after they cross into a town on foot or get picked up by a vehicle before they melt into the broader population, what agents call the vanishing line.
"The mission here is to detect, identify, and classify," said Steven Adkison, deputy chief of border patrol in the Tucson Sector. "Our aim is area dominance."
'Weaponized the desert'
In 2021, 225 bodies were found near the Arizona border - the highest number since humanitarian groups started keeping count in the 1990s, and likely a severe undercount, as bodies often languish for years in the desert before they are found.
"Border patrol weaponized the desert," said Raymond Daukei, an immigrant rights activist and member of the Tohono O'odham Native American people, whose reservation spans the border.
When Daukei was growing up in the 1980s, migrants rarely crossed in the remote reaches of the reservation, but stepped up enforcement in urban areas is funneling more migrants on to the tribe's land, he said.
Tohono O'odham leaders have grudgingly welcomed the new surveillance towers, saying they are necessary to help protect tribal members from the smuggling cartels that increasingly come on to their land.
"There are now people walking around with guns, homes have been broken into ... we are desperate for security," said Kendall Jose, vice chairperson of the reservation's Chukut Kuk District, where surveillance towers were recently erected.
The aid groups that have sprung to provide migrants with food, water and medical help doubt that the more surveillance technology will result in a safer border region.
"There's this idea that building a wall is violent and xenophobic but smart tech is not," said Corich-Kleim of No Más Muertes. "But really, it has the same effect."
These injustices are on racial lines.
Priya Morley 24, Director of the International Human Rights Clinic at UCLA School of Law and the Racial Justice Policy Counsel at the Promise Institute for Human Rights, "AI at the Border: Racialized Impacts and Implications", Just Security, 6-28-2024, https://www.justsecurity.org/97172/ai-at-the-border/ - SDP
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.
Racism in U.S. Immigration Laws, Policies, Practices, and Enforcement
Structural racism shapes migrants’ journeys and experiences of immigration enforcement in the Americas, with particularly harmful impacts on Black migrants. As Black African migration (as well as Haitian migration) to/through South America has increased in recent years, successive states have enacted policies that impede their movement and ability to reach and seek asylum in the United States. The United States has adopted various border externalization policies that prevent migrants from crossing the U.S.-Mexico border, such as “Remain in Mexico” and Title 42, which have been found to violate the international right to asylum and the principle of non-refoulement found in the 1951 Refugee Convention; more recently, the Biden administration enacted another “asylum ban” that restricts access to the asylum process. Black migrants are often disproportionately affected by these policies. For example, in May 2022, Haitians were just 6% of the migrant population crossing the U.S.-Mexico border but represented 60% of those ordered on expulsion flights under Title 42; conversely, predominantly white Ukrainian refugees were largely given exception from Title 42 measures.
Starting in 2019, the U.S. and Mexican governments took coordinated steps that effectively externalized U.S. immigration enforcement into southern Mexico. Mexican immigration officials in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas stopped issuing the “exit permits” that had allowed them to transit north and leave Mexico through the U.S.-Mexico border. Mexico also deployed its militarized National Guard to Southern Mexico for immigration enforcement, which led to an increase in apprehending and detaining migrants without documentation. This resulted in thousands of African, Haitian, and other migrants being stranded in Tapachula, Chiapas, near the Mexico-Guatemala border. Black migrants are, due to their skin color and language, particularly visible and targeted by the National Guard and other immigration enforcement. While stuck in Mexico – as elsewhere on their journey – Black migrants face racial discrimination, violence, and other rights violations. This includes overt acts of racism and hostility by Mexican immigration officials, challenges navigating the Mexican immigration system due to bias, national origin, and language differences, and barriers in employment, housing, and education.
And, an expansion of surveillance infrastructure stokes white ethnonationalism--- that reinvigorates racial tropes of immigrants as burdens and promotes forcibly sterilizing migrants.
Julieta Chaparro-Buitrago 24, Wellcome Trust Early Career Fellow, Department of Sociology, Affiliated Researcher, Reproductive Sociology Research Group, Department of Sociology, University of Cambridge, “Sterilizing body‐territories: Understanding contemporary cases of forced sterilization in the United States and China”, 2-23-2024, AnthroSource, https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/fea2.12135 - SDP
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 tech

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