Smart Borders or a Humane World?

Smart borders involve the expanded use of surveillance and monitoring technologies including cameras, drones, biometrics, and motion sensors to stop unwanted migration and track migrants. This report details some of the more prominent deployments of smart-border technologies. Beyond drones and automatic license plate readers, such technologies include integrated fixed towers (IFTs), ankle monitors, and migrant data analysis and tracking. This report also highlights core harms of US border policing, including a boom in the surveillance industrial complex, separation and undermining of families and communities, the maiming and killing of large numbers of border crossers, exacerbation of socioeconomic inequality, and more. Lastly, this report highlights key demands of various migrant rights and advocacy groups, which collectively would start to dismantle the border and immigrant control regime.