#Robo_Dogs and Refugees: The Future of the Global Border Industrial Complex
The future is here, and it’s a nightmare for migrants. Robo-dogs are joining the global arsenal of border enforcement technologies. The consequences will be deadly.
A painting of an eye shedding a single tear adorns the concrete rampart of the rusty wall bisecting the city of Nogales at the U.S.-Mexico border. Elsewhere, other kinds of eyes scan the Sonoran Desert—drones, artificial intelligence (AI) surveillance towers, and now military-grade “robo-dogs,” which, according to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in a February 1 article, might soon be deployed in this vast area of the Arizona-Mexico borderlands, a frequent crossing point for refugees and people on the move from Latin America, the Caribbean, and beyond.
The robo-dogs, built by Ghost Robotics, are the latest border tech experiment. Originally designed for combat and tactical training operations, these quadruped autonomous machines are strong, fast, and sometimes armed. They can break down doors and right themselves when kicked over. Police departments are already using them, such as in Honolulu and New York (although the latter city cut short its use of them after a public outcry). On the border, DHS first tested what they call “programmable pooches” in El Paso, but officials didn’t give a clear indication of when nor where the machines would eventually be deployed.
While these mechanical dogs may be a surprising addition to U.S. border enforcement, they join a technological infrastructure on the U.S.-Mexico border that has been developing for decades, often constructed by private companies and now championed by the Biden administration. The idea of mechanized Border Patrol agents is not exactly new either; in 2015, for example, the GuardBot company proposed that rolling, rubber spheres full of surveillance cameras (first designed for exploring Mars) “swarm” the borderlands in packs of 20 or 30. While that contract was never issued, it was a preamble to the robo-dogs. Here, now, is a glimpse into the future: an aggressive techno border fueled by a global industrial complex.
The robo-dogs form part of a long process of border robotization on the U.S. Mexico border—from autonomous and integrated fixed towers (built by Anduril and Elbit Systems, respectively) to Predator B and medium-size drones (General Atomics), to university experiments to create miniature drones the size of locusts (as was done at the University of Arizona via a grant it received from the Department of Homeland Security for R&D).
Petra, who was at the Arizona-Mexico border when DHS announced the robo-dogs, has been studying surveillance technologies and their effects on people crossing borders for years in Europe and globally, focusing on the real harms of automation, surveillance, and border tech experiments in spaces that have become testing grounds for innovation. The very real impacts these technologies will have is all the more stark, given the sheer number of people dying in the desert. In 2021, deaths at the U.S.-Mexico border were the highest ever recorded. Thus, although it is difficult to write about surveillance technologies—since they are hidden by design—the real-world impacts of “technosolutionism” are clear enough.
On the rumbling roads of the West Arizona desert, Petra and colleagues traced the routes that people take after crossing the border, and this led them to various gravesites, like the modest orange cross that marks the arroyo where Elías Alvarado, a young husband and father, perished in 2020. His son was never able to see him again, only leaving a scratchy voice recording saying “I love you, papa,” which was played at Alvarado’s ceremony by a group called Battalion Search and Rescue, whose volunteers comb the desert for survivors and remains. It’s terrifying to imagine a not-so-distant future in which people like Alvarado will be pursued by high-speed, military-grade technology designed to kill. The future is not just more technology, it is more death.
Virtual Fortress Europe
The U.S.-Mexico frontier is by no means the only place where experimental border technology is being tested. For example, the European Union has been focusing on various surveillance and high-tech experiments in migration and border enforcement, including maritime and land drone surveillance; long-range acoustic devices (LRADs), or sound cannons; and AI-type technologies in newly built camps in Greece. The violence in many of these technologies is obvious: the sound cannons that were rolled out at the land border between Greece and Turkey emit a high-pitched sound that can hurt people’s eardrums in an attempt to deter them from getting close to the EU’s border, while AI “threat detection” surveillance monitors refugees in Greece’s new prisonlike refugee camps on the Aegean Islands. AI-driven surveillance using unpiloted drones and other types of technologies is also increasingly used along Europe’s maritime borders by actors such as Frontex, the EU’s border enforcement agency. As in the U.S.-Mexico desert, border surveillance makes the crossing more dangerous, since it forces them to take riskier routes to avoid detection.
The increasing reliance on automation in border enforcement also brings with it a host of concerns, from privacy infringements when data is shared with repressive governments to discrimination and bias, particularly against groups that have historically borne the brunt of violent state action. For example, facial recognition has proved time and again to be biased against Brown and Black faces, as well as female faces, and yet it is increasingly used for migration control in the U.S., Canada, and soon various EU countries. These issues around discrimination and bias are not merely theoretical; they have had palpable impacts on people on the move such as Addisu, a young man from East Africa in his early 30s. He was living in an occupied building in Brussels when he told Petra, “We are Black, and border guards hate us. Their computers hate us too.”
Tech pilot projects have also introduced AI-type lie detection into border enforcement, relying on emotion recognition and micro-expressions to apparently determine whether someone is telling the truth at the border. Yet what about differences in cross-cultural communication? Or the impact of trauma on memory, or the overreliance on Western norms of plausibility and lie detection grounded in biased and discriminatory determinations? Immigration and refugee decision-making by border enforcement officers is already replete with discretionary, opaque, and often biased reasoning that is difficult to challenge.
Through the phenomenon of “border externalization,” the EU is also pushing its geographic borders further and further afield through biometric data collection and migration surveillance into North and sub-Saharan Africa. The United States is extending its border as well into southern Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean, among other places. As these sorts of technological systems extend all over the world, so does the global border industrial complex, which is worth billions of dollars. Each new place becomes a testing ground for the next one.
A Regulatory Free-for-All: Border Tech Unchecked
Border technologies are political; they are developed and deployed in an ecosystem of private and public partnerships that are largely unregulated and unchecked. Big Tech interests are given free rein to develop and deploy technologies at the border and set the agenda of what counts as innovation and whose perspectives really matter when conversations around borders happen in national, regional, and international policy circles.
There is big money to be made in the sharpening of borders with draconian technologies. According to the market forecast company Market and Markets, the global homeland security market will grow more than 6 percent by 2026, reaching $904.6 billion. As border and immigration budgets only continue to rise in Europe, the United States, and places beyond, there will only be more armed “robo-dogs,” drones with tasers, and border AI-lie detectors filling border zones. This coincides with forecasts for more and more people on the move in the coming decades—for various reasons, including catastrophic climate change. The collision of aggressive tech borders with human mobility has the makings of a monumental human rights disaster.
Participation in discussions around technologies at the border is still limited to a select few, often in the suffocating constraints of the public-private nexus. The viewpoints of those most affected are routinely excluded from the discussion, particularly regarding no-go zones and ethically fraught uses of technology. Much of the discussion, such as it is, lacks contextual analysis or consideration of the ethical, social, political, and personal harm that these new technologies will have. While border and immigrant rights groups such as Mijente, Just Futures Law, the Immigrant Defense Project and others have been fighting the use of high-risk surveillance along the U.S.-Mexico border, the lucrative political climate of exclusion and border enforcement at all costs is what animates the move toward a surveillance dragnet. This dragnet will only increase the suffering and death along the frontier. “It’s a slow-motion genocide,” James Holeman, founder of Battalion Search Rescue, recently told Petra Molnar in the Arizona desert.
Borders are the perfect testing ground for technologies: unregulated, increasingly politicized, and impacting groups already struggling with adequate resources. Ultimately, Big Tech and quick fixes do not address the systemic causes of marginalization and migration—historical and present-day decisions that perpetuate vast inequalities in the world and that benefit the fortressed West while disenfranchising and displacing the rest. Whether it be armed agents, imposed walls, or robo-dogs, border militarization ensures that rich countries can keep looting, exploiting, and polluting the rest of the world.
▻https://www.theborderchronicle.com/p/robo-dogs-and-refugees-the-future
#robots_dogs #complexe_militaro-industriel #robots #robots_chiens #frontières #surveillance #technologie #asile #migrations #réfugiés #robo-dog #Ghost_Robotics #Nogales #Mexique #USA #Etats-Unis #désert_du_Sonora #DHS #El_Paso #programmable_pooches #GuardBot #Anduril #Elbit_Systems #Predator_B #general_atomics #drones #robo_dog
Border barrier boondoggle. Trump’s promised inexpensive, impregnable wall was anything but.
“I would build a great wall — and nobody builds walls better than me, believe me. And I’ll build them very inexpensively,” Donald Trump said in 2015 as he announced his presidential run. “I will build a great, great wall on our southern border, and I will have Mexico pay for that wall. Mark my words.” During the campaign, Trump offered more details. His wall would span the entire length of the border, or nearly 2,000 miles, it would be fashioned with concrete — not unlike the Berlin Wall — and would be “impregnable” and “big and beautiful.”
It didn’t quite work out that way. By the end of Trump’s term, his administration had completed construction of about 450 miles of barrier, none of which was concrete and all of which was demonstrably pregnable, at a cost at least five times that of the existing barriers. Mexico did not pay a dime for it. And the “beautiful” part? That, of course, is in the eye of the beholder.
When Trump first promised to build the wall along the border, he apparently didn’t realize that his predecessors had already constructed hundreds of miles of barriers. It all started in 1996, when President #Bill_Clinton signed the #Illegal_Immigration_Reform_and_Responsibility_Act. Fences were constructed in urban areas, such as #Nogales and #San_Diego, with the intention of driving border crossers into the desert, where they could be more easily apprehended — but also where they were at greater risk of dying of heat-related ailments.
A decade later, President George W. Bush signed the #Secure_Fence_Act of 2006, authorizing the construction of 700 miles of barriers. As a result, 652 miles of pedestrian and vehicle barriers already lined the border, mostly between #El_Paso and San Diego, by the time #Trump was elected. All the evidence, however, suggests that it did very little to stop undocumented migration, in part because at least two-thirds of undocumented immigrants in the U.S. arrived on #visas and then overstayed them.
Besides, no wall is truly impregnable, as Trump himself indicated in a speech on the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, when he said: “Let the fate of the Berlin Wall be a lesson to oppressive regimes and rulers everywhere: No Iron Curtain can ever contain the iron will of a people resolved to be free.” Oddly enough, “iron curtain” may be the most accurate description of Trump’s new segments of the wall.
On the day of his inauguration, President Joseph Biden signed an executive order halting further construction. Now, many observers are urging him to go further and dismantle the barrier, as well as try to repair the damage done. Or, as President Ronald Reagan put it in 1987, “Tear down this wall!”
▻https://www.hcn.org/issues/53.3/infographic-borderlands-border-barrier-boondoggle
#cartographie #infographie #visualisation #murs #prix #coût #longueur #barrières_frontalières #Trump #promesses #promesses_non_maintenues #statistiques #chiffres #George_Bush #overstayers #Joe_Binden #walls_don't_work
ping @reka
What Is the Great Replacement? - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/06/us/politics/grand-replacement-explainer.html
Le #Pentagone débloque 3,6 milliards de dollars pour le mur de Trump
Le Pentagone a annoncé mardi avoir débloqué 3,6 milliards de dollars pour financer la construction de 280 km de mur à la frontière mexicaine, à la demande du président Donald Trump.
Pour débloquer ces fonds, le ministère américain de la #Défense a décidé de « reporter » 127 projets de construction et de modernisation des locaux militaires aux Etats-Unis et à l’étranger prévus dans son budget 2019, a indiqué à la presse un porte-parole du ministère, Jonathan Hoffman.
Le ministre de la Défense #Mark_Esper « a décidé que ces projets de construction sont nécessaires pour soutenir l’usage des forces armées et le ministère de la Défense va donc mener 11 projets de construction militaire de barrière frontalière », a précisé M. Hoffman au cours d’un point de presse.
« La longueur totale (...) est de 175 miles », a précisé le responsable des affaires de sécurité intérieure au Pentagone, Kenneth Rapuano. Il a précisé qu’il s’agit de renforcer des segments de barrière frontalière déjà existant mais considérés comme insuffisants, ainsi que de construire de nouveaux segments.
Les zones considérées sont notamment situées près de #Yuma (Arizona), #El_Centro et #San_Diego (Californie), #Laredo et #El_Paso (Texas).
Le général Andrew Poppas, directeur des opérations à l’état-major américain, a assuré que la construction de ces pans de mur frontalier permettrait de réduire le nombre des 5.000 militaires américains déployés à la frontière mexicaines à la demande de Donald Trump, qui souhaite endiguer une vague d’immigration en provenance d’Amérique latine.
Les projets de construction militaire reportés n’ont pas été décrits à la presse, le Pentagone souhaitant informer d’abord les élus des Etats concernés par les 127 projets, mais les élus du Congrès ont très rapidement réagi à cette annonce.
Parmi les projets affectés figure notamment un bâtiment de la prestigieuse académie militaire de West Point, a indiqué le leader des démocrates au Sénat, Chuck Schumer.
« C’est une gifle pour les forces armées qui servent notre pays », a-t-il tweeté. Le président Donald Trump est « prêt à cannibaliser des fonds militaires déjà alloués pour satisfaire son ego et pour un mur qu’il a promis que le Mexique paierait », a-t-il ajouté.
▻https://www.courrierinternational.com/depeche/le-pentagone-debloque-36-milliards-de-dollars-pour-le-mur-de-
#murs #financement #barrières_frontalières #frontières #USA #Etats-Unis #armée
ping @mobileborders
How the #El_Paso Killer Echoed the Incendiary Words of Conservative Media Stars
It remains unclear what, or who, ultimately shaped the views of the white, 21-year-old gunman, or whether he was aware of the media commentary. But his post contains numerous references to “invasion” and cultural “replacement” — ideas that, until recently, were relegated to the fringes of the nationalist right.
#vocabulaire #terminologie #invasion #rhétorique_de_l'invasion #mots #médias #journalisme #presse #Tucker_Carlson #tuerie #massacre #USA #Etats-Unis #eau #métaphore #liquide #remplacement #grand_remplacement
]]>The Spark: Editorial
We Are All One Class – the Working Class, All One Race – the Human Race ►https://the-spark.net (Aug 5, 2019)
Twenty people are dead, massacred in an El Paso, #Texas_Walmart; twenty-six more were wounded. (These were the casualty figures Sunday noon, August 4. They will get worse.)
The people killed weren’t all #Mexican_Americans or #Mexicans who crossed the border to do their weekly shopping – but they were all victims of a young man angered by what he called the “Hispanic invasion of #Texas.”
A so-called “manifesto” was posted on an extreme-right on-line forum just before the gunman struck, apparently by the gunman or someone close to him.
It described the weapon and ammunition which was about to be used in the Walmart shooting. And it analyzed their capacity to cause maximum damage to human flesh – in cold, technical terms, as though the shooting were simply a “test” to see which gun and which ammunition could produce the most terrifying result.
With the same cold, technical language, the killer discussed the purpose of his carnage: he intended to “provide” Hispanic people with “the right incentive ... to return to their home countries.”
That’s #terrorism, outright terrorism: inflict horrifying casualties to “give them an incentive to leave.” It’s the moral ethic of the gangster.
It’s also the moral ethic with which #Trump approached the migrant crisis. On the 3rd of July he said it: “If illegal immigrants are unhappy with the conditions in the detention centers, just tell them not to come.”
The location of the massacre in #El_Paso was not an accident. El Paso is the port of entry which the Trump administration has turned into a hell-hole for #migrants, fleeing desperate situations in their own countries.
But El Paso is also the place where Americans of Mexican descent have lived for generations. It is connected by the “Bridge of the Americas” with the Mexican city of Ciudad Juárez. Dozens, hundreds, even thousands of people go back and forth every day. It’s an area where families have lived on both sides of the border for generations, with a grandparent in El Paso, parents in Ciudad Juárez, and adult children in both places. It’s a place where Americans of Mexican descent have married Americans whose ancestors came from someplace else – which finally is the issue that most outraged the man who killed those 20 people.
In internet posts, he denounced “race-mixing,” which, according to him, foretells the “replacement of the white race.”
These are not the ideas of just one crazy guy. They are the unscientific ideas that float every day on extreme-right, on-line forums around the world. The white man who killed 50 Muslims in New Zealand repeated them. So did the white man who killed 77 teenagers in Norway – as well as the white man who killed six Muslims in Quebec, and the white man who killed nine black people in a church in South Carolina.
These men may all be white, but that’s not what links them. What they have in common is their commitment to terrorism and to racist ideology. Today, they may seem to be a few crazy people, but behind them there is money making sure these ideas circulate around the world.
Trump sits in the White House today. The #racism didn’t start with him. Nor did the violence. But occupying the presidency, he gives legitimacy to these vile ideas.
Behind Trump is the capitalist class. If they were really horrified by him, they would have dumped him long ago. No, the poison he spews can be useful in the future for dividing the working class. It’s why they keep him.
The violence these “crazy” guys have created should be a warning to us. We’re going to face it in the future, carried out by more than a few crazies. We need to begin organizing ourselves today, figuring out how to deal with it.
The #working_class – no matter where we come from, no matter what our nationality is – we are one class. We have the capacity to deal with the problems we will face. No matter what our “race” is, we are all one race: the human race. That is OUR manifesto.
]]>#El_Paso to Trump: Stop Telling Lies About Us
The president is holding a rally in the city on Monday. El Paso leaders are not pleased.
https://www.motherjones.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/190206_El-Paso-Juarez.jpg?resize=990,556#.jpg President Donald Trump used his State of the Union address on Tuesday to repeat the made-up claim that border barriers “immediately” saved El Paso from being one of America’s most dangerous cities. On Wednesday, Trump’s reelection campaign announced that he will double down on the lie by holding a rally on Monday at the El Paso County Coliseum.
Local officials have not been pleased with Trump’s interest in their city. “What he’s saying and doing is extremely insulting,” says Peter Svarzbein, one of El Paso’s eight district representatives. He adds that Trump’s message is also damaging to El Paso’s economy at a time when the city is trying to attract professionals and students.
Alexsandra Annello, another district representative, says it was disappointing to hear Trump continuing to mislead Americans. “El Paso has been a diverse, binational, bilingual community,” she says. “And it has been safe long before the fence was put up.”
Trump’s claim that El Paso went from being one of America’s most dangerous cities to one of its safest because of a border fence is entirely false. El Paso’s violent crime rate peaked in 1993 and fell by more than a third by 2006. The El Paso Times reported in January, “From 2006 to 2011—two years before the fence was built to two years after—the violent crime rate in El Paso increased by 17 percent.” El Paso is now one of the safest cities in America.
After Trump’s speech, El Paso County Sheriff Richard Wiles, a Democrat, said in a statement, “It is sad to hear President Trump state falsehoods about El Paso, Texas in an attempt to justify the building of a 2,000-mile wall…El Paso was a safe city long before any wall was built.” Rep. Veronica Escobar, the Democrat who replaced Beto O’Rourke in Congress, called Trump’s El Paso reference a “sucker punch” in an interview with the El Paso Times.
El Paso’s Republican mayor Dee Margo tweeted that “El Paso was NEVER one of the MOST dangerous cities in the US” but called Trump’s upcoming visit “a positive” on Wednesday.
Svarzbein lamented that if Trump actually came to El Paso with an open mind, he would see the benefits of a free exchange of people and ideas across the border, between El Paso and the Mexican city of Ciudad Juárez. “You constantly have people from outside of this city and this region that don’t understand those dynamics,” Svarzbein says. “They don’t understand that the border is a blessing.”
He says, “I really wish this president would come here to see how these two cities thrive with each other, not in spite of but because of our relationships.”
▻https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2019/02/el-paso-to-trump-stop-telling-lies-about-us
#mensonges #fake_news #USA #Trump #sécurité #murs #frontières #barrières_frontalières #tur_tur
Trump border wall construction underway in #Chihuahuita in Downtown #El_Paso
Construction of the border wall in the Chihuahuita neighborhood of Downtown El Paso continued Wednesday beneath the Stanton Street International Bridge. The U.S. Border Patrol announced Friday that the new wall would replace existing fencing south of Downtown El Paso and that construction would begin Saturday as part of President Donald Trump’s executive order authorizing construction of the U.S.-Mexico border wall.
The wall starts in Chihuahuita and continues east for four miles. Chihuahuita is El Paso’s oldest neighborhood, with about 100 people currently living in the area. The southern boundary of the neighborhood is the border fence separating El Paso from #Juárez.
The existing fence will be removed, and an 18-foot-high steel bollard wall will be constructed in its place. The construction project is expected to be completed in late April. The estimated cost for the project is $22 million.
Mexican Smuggler Says Trump’s Wall Won’t Stop Him — Here’s Why
Everything from dogs and blimps to Gamma-ray imaging systems and video surveillance is used to prevent people from crossing the U.S.-Mexico border, making the prospect of a wall seem obsolete.
▻http://www.seeker.com/mexican-smuggler-says-trumps-wall-wont-stop-him-heres-why-2260853414.html
#passeurs #Trump #murs #barrières_frontalières #USA #Etats-Unis #fermeture_des_frontières #frontières
cc @albertocampiphoto @daphne @marty
Why the Border Crisis Is a Myth
EL PASO — TO hear the national news media tell the story, you would think my city, #El_Paso, and others along the #Texas-Mexico border were being overrun by children — tens of thousands of them, some with their mothers, arriving from Central America in recent months, exploiting an immigration loophole to avoid deportation and putting a fatal strain on border state resources.
There’s no denying the impact of this latest immigration wave or the need for more resources. But there’s no crisis. Local communities like mine have done an amazing job of assisting these migrants.
#frontière #USA #Etats-Unis #Amérique_centrale #border_crisis #crise #mythe #réfugiés #enfants #mineurs #migration #solidarité #solidarité_locale #surveillance #business #coût #détention #détention_administrative #rétention
And despite President Obama’s efforts to work with Central American leaders to address the root causes of the migration, his recently announced request for $3.7 billion, supposedly to deal with these new migrants, contains yet more border security measures: Almost $40 million would go to drone surveillance, and nearly 30 percent of it is for transportation and detention.
–-> v. lien : ▻http://www.defenseone.com/threats/2014/07/obama-requests-drone-surge-us-mexico-border/88303
Will the Border Ever Be Secure Enough for Immigration Hawks?
El Paso is the safest city in the U.S., the Border Patrol is bigger than ever, and illegal crossings have reached a 40-year low — among other surprising facts.
▻http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/02/will-the-border-ever-be-secure-enough-for-immigration-hawks/273386
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