The walls have eyes: How Trump plans to supercharge border security with tech
By Petra Molnar | January 7, 2025
Graffiti adorns the border in Nogales, Mexico. Photo by Petra Molnar
In December 2024, president-elect Donald J. Trump was named Time’s Person of the Year. Immigration ran like a current through his interview for the magazine, and Trump reiterated his goals again: “Whatever it takes to get them out. I don't care. Honestly, whatever it takes to get them out... I won it in 2016 on the border, and I fixed the border, and it was really fixed, and they came in and they just dislodged everything that I did… I consider it an invasion of our country.”
Borders are both real and artificial. They are what historian Sheila McManus calls an “accumulation of terrible ideas,” created through colonialism, imperial fantasies, apartheid, and the daily practice of exclusion. Today, there are millions of people on the move because of conflict, instability, and climate change, as well as for economic reasons. But politicians and the media often talk about the people crossing borders—whether by force or by choice—in apocalyptic terms, as a “flood” or “wave” or, according to president-elect Trump, “rapists” or “vermin,” terms that are underscored by xenophobia and racism.
In recent years a technological frontier has emerged to control migration through tightening of borders and inland surveillance. Some of the control methods are old. Passports and physical border walls have always been used to separate and exclude people, but new technologies are making their way into immigration, deportation, and refugee processing, at a faster rate than ever before. Decisions such as whether to grant a visa or deport or detain someone, which would otherwise be made by administrative tribunals, immigration officers, or border agents, are now made by machines through algorithms. Enforcement agencies like Europe’s Frontex, for example, use predictive analytics, which call on large datasets to forecast human behavior, in this case to project where people may be crossing borders.
There has also been a rise in the use of biometrics, or the automated recognition of individuals based on their biological and behavioral characteristics. Biometrics can include fingerprint data, retinal scans, and facial recognition, as well as less well-known methods of using technology that can recognize a person’s vein and blood vessel patterns, ear shape, and gait. Even more experimental are lie detectors relying on AI to determine who is telling the truth at the border, while voice-printing technologies analyze accents and patterns of speech.
Meanwhile, the surveillance dragnet is only continuing to expand, with a growing arsenal of cameras, blimps, loud sound cannons, and even robodogs deployed to control borders. Indeed, in the United States, president-elect Donald J. Trump has signaled an increasing reliance on surveillance to help him accomplish his goals. And the goals are many.
Petra Molnar
Petra Molnar is a lawyer and anthropologist specializing in migration and human rights. She co-runs the Refugee Law Lab at York University and is a... Read More
A border wall in Nogales, Mexico. Photo by Petra Molnar
Throughout his campaign and after reelection, Trump has committed to sweeping reforms of the US immigration system, vowing to: conduct the largest mass deportation in American history, assisted by the military; end birthright citizenship; militarize the border and introduce more border surveillance; reintroduce travel bans similar to the infamous Muslim travel ban in his first term; revive the “remain in Mexico” policy; penalize sanctuary cities that limit cooperation with federal deportation agents; greatly expand the ambit of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE); deputize the National Guard to carry out immigration arrests; suspend refugee admissions; and more.
But the Trump administration cannot do this alone. An already multibillion-dollar border and surveillance industry is set to win big under Trump’s plans for new border enforcement spending, immigration surveillance, and mass deportation. And with very few safeguards and laws to govern the development and deployment of new technologies like AI, the border continues to be the perfect laboratory for high-risk experimentation. The door to the Oval Office seems to be wide open, and private sector actors like Elon Musk, Palantir Technologies’ Peter Thiel, and Anduril’s Palmer Luckey may all play a major role in the new administration and are already making massive profits.
And while the Trump administration will likely increase this turn to techno-solutionism, it is important to note that much of the “smart border” and detention infrastructure was greatly expanded by the Democrats, laying the groundwork for the next iteration of dehumanization. The growing corporate capture of the Oval Office plays up technical solutions to the “problem” of migration, weaponizing politics of difference trumpeted by the incoming administration to control, punish, and exclude those who are desperate to seek, or maintain their, safety. But this populist pitting of groups against one another obfuscates a stark reality: Border technologies do not remain at the border. They filter into our cities and streets, intimately connecting the infringements to the human rights of non-citizens with everyone else.
Israeli Elbit Systems tower in the Sonoran Desert, Arizona. Photo by Petra Molnar
Dehumanization through technology
Borders have historically been violent spaces. They are opaque and discretionary environments, where an anything-goes frontier attitude informs what technologies are normalized and what logics underpin who is welcome and who is not. I have spent six years at various borders around the world trying to understand the implications of technological experimentation, culminating in the book The Walls Have Eyes: Surviving Migration in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. From the US-Mexico border to Greece to Kenya, technologies are increasing divisions and stoking the othering of people who are often at their most desperate.
Israel’s invasion of Gaza is one of the most recent examples of how technologies can be used to repress and dehumanize people. On November 14th, 2024, the UN Special Committee to investigate Israeli practices found Israel’s warfare methods in Gaza are consistent with genocide, raising serious concerns about the use of AI-enhanced targeting systems. On November 21st, the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, but it remains to be seen if and how the court handles the use of technology in Palestine.
Israeli surveillance companies like Elbit Systems and Cellebrite are mainstays of the border industry, operating AI surveillance towers at the US-Mexico border. In his book The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World, journalist Antony Loewenstein contends that Israel has succeeded in dehumanizing Palestinians through omnipresent surveillance, “battle-testing” technologies in Gaza and the occupied West Bank. In the Spring of 2023, I visited the West Bank, including the occupied city of Hebron, to document the effects of surveillance first-hand. I have also worked with hundreds of people over the years who have been caught at the sharpest edges of border surveillance around the world. Many spoke about the dehumanization inherent in the growing reliance on surveillance, of always being watched and feeling reduced to a fingerprint or an eye scan.
These narratives of dehumanization illustrate who determines how and why technological innovations are used along borders. If migration is seen as a “problem” to be solved, and the private sector increasingly has so-called solutions, it starts becoming clear why innovations like AI-lie detectors and robodogs are mainstays in the effort to control migration—and why AI is not used to identify racist border-guards or to audit discriminatory decision-makers in immigration courts. Powerful narratives of dehumanization, othering, and exclusion drive the bottom line for the dizzying array of projects that are now on the market.
Border zones and transnational surveillance transform migration into a site of potential criminality that must be surveilled and managed. Equating migrants with criminals and describing them as threats can be used as justification for hard-line and intrusive technologies, such as drones, remote sensors, and integrated autonomous surveillance towers with infrared cameras.
President-elect Trump continues to double down on his rhetoric of mass deportations. Once again, it seems, businesses with technological approaches to mass surveillance are benefitting. GEO Group, one of the country’s largest private prison companies whose subsidiary BI Inc runs the SmartLink facial recognition used by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to track people’s every move, saw its stock prices surge by nearly 73 percent after Trump got re-elected. And with the existing system of inland surveillance, like drones, cameras, license plate readers, GPS tracking, growing biometric databases, social media screening, and spyware aimed at the migrant justice sector, civil society groups (like Just Futures Law, Mijente, and the Surveillance Resistance Lab) worry about what will come swiftly after the January 2025 inauguration.
In Evros, Greece, graves of people who died making their journeys to Europe. Photo by Petra Molnar
Existential risks in a dying world
Technology quite literally has the power to decide who lives and who dies among those crossing borders to survive. From surveillance pushing people into life-threatening terrain to avoid detection to the use of predictive analytics for border interdictions, thousands have already succumbed to manufactured graveyards produced by governmental deterrence policies from the Mediterranean Sea to the Sonoran Desert, punished for the very human impulse to seek safety and provide for their families—while exercising their internationally protected right to seek asylum, one guaranteed by the 1951 Refugee Convention and international human rights law. Indeed, according to the UN’s International Organization on Migration (IOM), 2024 has been the deadliest year on record.
As the planet further degrades and instability grows around the world, human movement is inevitable, especially from areas facing the brunt of inaction on the climate crisis, the Majority World regions that are not part of the West and where most of the world live.
Again, it is politics of fear that animate this global turn to exclusion.
Graffiti in Athens, a city where migration, environmental degradation, and ethics of care intersect. Photo by Petra Molnar
But the human rights of non-citizens is intimately linked to everyone’s human rights. Although they may be tested out initially at borders, technologies like robodogs, drones, and facial recognition do not stay there; they have made their ways to US streets and stadiums. In places like China, with its omnipresent 540 million cameras countrywide—more than one camera for every three people—mass surveillance and emotion recognition is “touted as a way to predict problematic behaviour in prisons, workplaces, schools and care homes.”
Concerns around technological experimentation and use will not be resolved in the short term. Fostering deep community commitments is an antidote to the divide-and-conquer mentality presented as inevitable by politicians who choose to make human migration “a problem” to be solved. It is also about recognizing the experiences and expertise that affected communities have, showing up for one another and redistributing resources to efforts being done on the ground. For example, I direct the Migration and Technology Monitor Project, which incubates projects on border surveillance directly by people on the move—interventions that critique the violent nature of these technologies but also ones that see the promise of technology to hand power back to affected communities. This community-led work is also a commitment to refocusing on the fact that it is not just numbers and nameless crowds of people but rather real people who are caught at the sharpest edges of high-risk technological experimentation—experimentation that may soon turn its eye towards us all.
Petra Molnar
Petra Molnar is a lawyer and anthropologist specializing in migration and human rights. She co-runs the Refugee Law Lab at York University and is a... Read More
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The Bulletin elevates expert voices above the noise. But as an independent, nonprofit media organization, our operations depend on the support of readers like you. Help us continue to deliver quality journalism that holds leaders accountable. Your support of our work at any level is important. In return, we promise our coverage will be understandable, influential, vigilant, solution-oriented, and fair-minded. Together we can make a difference.
Keywords: AI, Palantir, Trump, artificial intelligence, border security, deportation, immigration, surveillance
Topics: Disruptive Technologies
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Dehumanization through technology
Borders have historically been violent spaces. They are opaque and discretionary environments, where an anything-goes frontier attitude informs what technologies are normalized and what logics underpin who is welcome and who is not. I have spent six years at various borders around the world trying to understand the implications of technological experimentation, culminating in the book The Walls Have Eyes: Surviving Migration in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. From the US-Mexico border to Greece to Kenya, technologies are increasing divisions and stoking the othering of people who are often at their most desperate.
Israel’s invasion of Gaza is one of the most recent examples of how technologies can be used to repress and dehumanize people. On November 14th, 2024, the UN Special Committee to investigate Israeli practices found Israel’s warfare methods in Gaza are consistent with genocide, raising serious concerns about the use of AI-enhanced targeting systems. On November 21st, the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, but it remains to be seen if and how the court handles the use of technology in Palestine.
Israeli surveillance companies like Elbit Systems and Cellebrite are mainstays of the border industry, operating AI surveillance towers at the US-Mexico border. In his book The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World, journalist Antony Loewenstein contends that Israel has succeeded in dehumanizing Palestinians through omnipresent surveillance, “battle-testing” technologies in Gaza and the occupied West Bank. In the Spring of 2023, I visited the West Bank, including the occupied city of Hebron, to document the effects of surveillance first-hand. I have also worked with hundreds of people over the years who have been caught at the sharpest edges of border surveillance around the world. Many spoke about the dehumanization inherent in the growing reliance on surveillance, of always being watched and feeling reduced to a fingerprint or an eye scan.
These narratives of dehumanization illustrate who determines how and why technological innovations are used along borders. If migration is seen as a “problem” to be solved, and the private sector increasingly has so-called solutions, it starts becoming clear why innovations like AI-lie detectors and robodogs are mainstays in the effort to control migration—and why AI is not used to identify racist border-guards or to audit discriminatory decision-makers in immigration courts. Powerful narratives of dehumanization, othering, and exclusion drive the bottom line for the dizzying array of projects that are now on the market.
Border zones and transnational surveillance transform migration into a site of potential criminality that must be surveilled and managed. Equating migrants with criminals and describing them as threats can be used as justification for hard-line and intrusive technologies, such as drones, remote sensors, and integrated autonomous surveillance towers with infrared cameras.
Petra Molnar
Petra Molnar is a lawyer and anthropologist specializing in migration and human rights. She co-runs the Refugee Law Lab at York University and is a... Read More
As the coronavirus crisis shows, we need science now more than ever.
The Bulletin elevates expert voices above the noise. But as an independent, nonprofit media organization, our operations depend on the support of readers like you. Help us continue to deliver quality journalism that holds leaders accountable. Your support of our work at any level is important. In return, we promise our coverage will be understandable, influential, vigilant, solution-oriented, and fair-minded. Together we can make a difference.
Keywords: AI, Palantir, Trump, artificial intelligence, border security, deportation, immigration, surveillance
Topics: Disruptive Technologies
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