Available From UC Press

Political discourse on immigration in the United States has largely focused on what is most visible, including border walls and detention centers, while the invisible information systems that undergird immigration enforcement have garnered less attention. Tracking the evolution of various surveillance-related systems since the 1980s, Borderland Circuitry investigates how the deployment of this information infrastructure has shaped immigration enforcement practices. Ana Muñiz illuminates three phenomena that are becoming increasingly intertwined: digital surveillance, immigration control, and gang enforcement. Using ethnography, interviews, and analysis of documents never before seen, Muñiz uncovers how information-sharing partnerships between local police, state and federal law enforcement, and foreign partners collide to create multiple digital borderlands. Diving deep into a select group of information systems, Borderland Circuitry reveals how those with legal and political power deploy the specter of violent cross-border criminals to justify intensive surveillance, detention, brutality, deportation, and the destruction of land for border militarization.

Ana Muñiz is Associate Professor in the Department of Criminology, Law and Society at the University of California, Irvine. She is the author of Police, Power, and the Production of Racial Boundaries.

"Borderland Circuitry provides a groundbreaking description and analysis of US immigration surveillance databases and a sobering assessment of the costs of our intrusive, racially discriminatory enforcement system. Using research methods that force governmental transparency, Ana Muñiz exposes the insufficiency of technocratic reforms and convincingly calls for an abolitionist stance toward borders."—Jennifer Marie Chacón, coauthor of Immigration Law and Social Justice

“Engaging and well-written. Muñiz offers novel insights into the use of databases and technology to facilitate immigration enforcement and surveillance by federal immigration authorities.”—Bryce Clayton Newell, Police Visibility: Privacy, Surveillance, and the False Promise of Body-Worn Cameras

"A powerful, important book. Weaving together careful research and analysis, eloquent personal reflections, and incisive critique, Muñiz examines the hidden ways in which a sprawling network of digital technologies has fundamentally reshaped gang enforcement and immigration control practices in the United States. The book’s urgent call to reassess these developments in light of their devastating human costs deserves wide attention."—Anil Kalhan, Professor of Law, Drexel University