The use of electronic surveillance and dataveillance in policing are topics of ever-increasing interest. In the pages of JOTWELL, Chris Slobogin recently provided a helpful introduction to Sarah Brayne’s Predict and Surveil, which represents an important contribution to this field of study. In this post, I want to celebrate Ana Muñiz’s contribution to this growing body of work: her latest book, Borderland Circuitry: Immigration Surveillance in the United States and Beyond.
While Brayne focuses on the LAPD, Muñiz initially trains her scholarly gaze on the practices of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and particularly Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP). She explores the surveillance and information sharing practices that these agencies pursue as part of their efforts to identify and remove alleged gang members and “criminal aliens,” which is the term the federal government uses to describe “a noncitizen who has had contact with the US criminal justice system.” (P. 15.) Of course, her research quickly extends right back to agencies like the LAPD and other law enforcement agencies, whose labeling and surveillance practices shape, and are shaped by, federal immigration enforcement prerogatives.
Muñiz draws from thousands of pages of documents that she obtained from various agencies. Some were publicly available, but many were obtained through FOIA and Public Records Act requests. Using these documents, in Chapter 2, she breaks down the development and uses of the Enforcement Integrated Database (EID) data repository, and and another data system called TECS. (P. 13.) In Chapter 3, she explores how federal surveillance systems and practices are linked to those of state and local law enforcement, examining “how interoperable gang databases move racialized, unreliable, and at times falsified information across law enforcement jurisdictions to form a set of regional gang surveillance circuits.” (Id.) Chapter 6 shows how the circuit is closed. Here, she examines how federal agencies share EID and TECS data with state and local law enforcement, and how federal agencies in turn rely on these sub-federal agencies to assist in the surveillance of “criminal aliens” and alleged gang members. (P. 14.)
In Chapter 4, she provides a textured understanding of the impact of these networks of surveillance by revealing how lawyers seeking immigration relief for their clients in the form of access to the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program confront the “gang labels ricocheting between databases as they guide immigrant youth through the…application process.” (P. 13.) Chapter 5 examines the risk assessment tools used in ICE detention facilities. She reveals how both discretionary determinations and automated categorizations in these risk assessment processes operate to generate additional criminal labeling. (Id.) Criminal labels travel through the circuitry across jurisdictions, and also across borders. In Chapter 7, Muñiz follows the information across the national border to reveal how electronic records concerning individuals’ criminal records and alleged gang activities are sent to other countries along with deported immigrants themselves, “aggravate[ing] global precarity.” (P.14.)
Muñiz labels the resulting network of information and surveillance “borderland circuitry”: “the particular geographic patterns or circuits along which authorities deploy surveillance and information-sharing programs and as a result enable enforcement against an expanding group of criminalized immigrants.” (P. 8.) As the book makes clear, the surveilled populations are not just “criminalized immigrants,” but also immigrants with no contact with the criminal legal system, and US citizens. Muñiz argues that surveillance systems are used in the service of a broader and more insidious set of bordering practices that are inherently racialized. (P. 3.)
Several important themes run through the book. First, Muñiz grounds her evaluation of contemporary surveillance practices in the history of racialized colonial practices which, in the U.S., served as precursors for the surveillance methods used to facilitate slavery and native land dispossession. She thus situates the practice of surveillance within historical paradigms of racial control, noting how such practices continue to target racially subjugated groups disproportionately. (P. 4.) She argues that the border control project is inherently “rooted in frameworks of White supremacy,” and preoccupied with the targeting of racial outsiders. (P. 17.) As her book makes clear, this is not just about the policing of external boundaries, but also interior ones. In this sense, her project serves as an important companion to Monica Bell’s work –also profiled in JOTWELL–exploring the segregationist aspects of policing. Different forms of racialized border patrolling come to the fore as a central feature of policing in both of these works.
Second, she expands on the work of scholars like Anil Kalhan (who first coined the term “immigration surveillance” and mapped its contours) and Etienne Balibar. These scholars have helped to document the ways that immigration surveillance has come untethered from the border. Muñiz provides further illustrations of how radiates outward and inward, constructing a cross-jurisdictional, physically ubiquitous “punitive digital borderland spaces that enable detention, deportation, brutality, and precarity against an expanding group of criminalized immigrants.” (P. 5.)
Third, Muñiz illustrates that it is not just the border that is a moving target. Since the data systems used for immigration surveillance are operated and accessed by a wide variety of agencies, other boundaries also blur. Criminal records and immigration records, benefits data and enforcement data are intermingled and conflated. (P. 31.) Moreover, categorical boundaries around citizenship and criminality are also in flux because the threat of the criminal alien serves to justify extraordinary data collection on citizens and noncitizens alike. Rather than passively record information about criminality, the data systems Muñiz explores contribute to racialized criminalization. “[T]he pool of ‘criminal’ or ‘dangerous’ immigrants is expanding, not because immigrants are committing more crimes or joining gangs in greater numbers, but because policies enable the application of criminalizing categories to progressively broader groups of immigrants.” (P. 10.) The apparently growing threat, in turn, justifies more surveillance, more data collection, more labeling, and more punitive responses in the form of detention, incarceration, and removal.
Finally, Muñiz offers some well-placed advice about data collection. Like many scholars who work on immigration policing, Muñiz had a hard time gaining access to information about ICE and CBP surveillance practices. Lacking people on the inside who would be willing to share information, Muñiz worked primarily with documents, supplemented by interviews with lawyers attempting to help clients navigate the system. When necessary, she sued for documents. (Pp. 158-160.) She observes that scholars can be reluctant to take an adversarial stance toward agencies they study, and that they may also downplay concerning information that they uncover out of fear that they might lose access. That is not her style. She strongly urges scholars to assert their right to public data from public agencies. “The data does not belong to the police but to the public. It is our data. If a government organization refuses to release public data, it is not protecting its own property, but rather privatizing and pilfering public property.” (P. 165.)
My summary gives you a sense of the scope and significance of the work. It does not, however, capture its lyricism. Muñiz writes, first and foremost, as a child of the borderlands. She remembers the desert beauty and racialized violence of her childhood in Arizona, and sees metastasizing borderland circuitry as a growing threat to those who dwell in those lands, and beyond. She closes her book with a call to remove rot of this circuitry by the root, going “out into the borderlands at the exact moment the sun sets behind the mountains, when dust particles swirl in the low light and the ground still retains warmth from the day.” My own childhood in El Paso was filled with such electric moments. Borderland spaces, and the people who are navigating the violence of bordering processes within them, come alive in the pages of this worthwhile book.
