In this episode of the PARA/normal Borders Podcast, Ed Gomez sits down with Ana Muñiz, Associate Professor of Criminology, Law and Society at UC Irvine’s School of Social Ecology. Muñiz is the author of Police, Power, and the Production of Racial Boundaries and Borderland Circuitry: Immigration Surveillance in the United States and Beyond. Muñiz’s scholarship explores the emergent digital surveillance systems which law enforcement agencies and U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement employ to profile, arrest, and detain people of color at progressively higher rates.
The discussion centers on how the border has become increasingly militarized and surveilled following NAFTA and 9/11 through the implementation of digital surveillance systems. Ana analyzes the ways in which these digital, disembodied mechanisms of control become embodied through their facilitating of cross-border flows of capital while simultaneously restricting physical migration. The episode explores how these practices are part of a larger trend of internalizing the border, wherein digital surveillance flows are directed into the interior of the country to track, detain, incarcerate, and deport individuals already residing in the U.S.
Together, Ed and Ana analyze how databases used to track gang members often have little oversight, with vague criteria that arbitrarily targets large swathes of people—especially young Black and Latino men—based on their appearance, personal associations, physical location, or even clothing choices. In fact, law enforcement agencies have begun to track individuals’ social media posts as a means of identifying supposed criminality. In turn, generative AI used to expedite the analysis of this data reifies white supremacy as these programs are almost exclusively trained to recognize white faces, and to identify Black and brown faces as aberrant. Ana also looks at the implications of the expanding role of tech companies in shaping law enforcement strategies whose systematization of databases facilitates the collaboration of various law enforcement agencies.
Ana discusses ways in which community members can employ similar surveillance techniques against agents of state violence to mitigate potential harm. She identifies Black Lives Matter protestors in Chicago who developed a database of police officers with use of force charges and Los Angeles activists who have distributed flyers with information on individual ICE agents as means of turning surveillance back on agents of state violence. Ana describes racialized state violence as a form of haunting, wherein the threat of incarceration and deportation constantly lurks in the shadows of the mind.
The PARA/normal Borders Podcast is made possible by a grant from the Mellon Foundation.
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Photo credits and image sources:
[0:00:55] Ana Muñiz, Police, Power, and the Production of Racial Boundaries. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2015.
[0:01:00] Ana Muñiz, Borderland Circuitry: Immigration Surveillance in the United States and Beyond. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2022.
[0:02:10] Photograph of Sonoran Desert courtesy of World Atlas. Image credit Anton Foltin.
[0:12:25] Image of CalGang website courtesy of WitnessLA. Image credit Taylor Walker.
[0:14:24] Photographs of tattoos belonging to L.A. County Sheriff’s Department deputy gangs, the Executioners and the Banditos,, courtesy of Los Angeles Times. Image credit Office of Inspector General.
[0:23:50] Photograph of cross-border volleyball game between residents of Naco, Sonora, and Naco, Arizona courtesy of Univision. Image credit personal archive.
[26:51] US Troops Landing at the Border. Produced by whitehouse.gov
[27:35] Video of Transborder Game (2010) performance by the artist collective Homeless courtesy of the MexiCali Biennial. Video credit Ed Gomez and MexiCali Biennial.
[29:51] Photograph of Haitian migrants detained at Guantánamo Bay in 1993 courtesy of the Guantánamo Public Memory Project. Image credit The Miami Herald.
[39:46] Image of excerpt from Cesare Lombroso’s 1889 book l’Uomo Delinquente courtesy of Mental Floss. Image credit Wellcome Collection.
[42:47] Photograph of Black Lives Matter protestors during 2020 demonstrations in Chicago courtesy of Chicago Tribune. Image credit Paige Fry.
[44:00] Photograph of flyers identifying I.C.E. agents in Los Angeles courtesy of Straight Arrow News. Image credit Harry Fogle.
[1:08:08] Photograph of Tiananmen Square protestor and tanks courtesy of VOA News. Image credit Reuters.
[1:10:18] Photograph of the Gates of Hell at Turnbull Canyon, Whittier, CA, courtesy of Atlas Obscura. Image credit BUSHNAK.
[1:11:30] Photograph of protesting family members of those disappeared during Argentina’s “Dirty War” of the 1970s courtesy of The New York Times. Image credit Daniel Garcia and Agence France-Presse.
Selected resources and recommended reading for further research:
- Knock LA sheriff gang: https://knock-la.com/tradition-of-violence-lasd-gang-history/
- Virgina Eubanks, Automating Inequality
- Ruha Benjamin, Race After Technology
- Univision NACO volleyball game: https://www.univision.com/univision-news/culture/when-neighbors-played-volleyball-over-the-u-s-mexico-border-fence
- Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters
- Amna Akbar, Unbuild Walls: Why Immigrant Justice Needs Abolition