Economic and political initiatives since the 1970s have driven relentlessly towards US investments in more militarised, criminalising, and digitised migration-control practices. Since 9/11, the US convergence of ‘national security’ with unauthorised migration has fueled an ever expanding border externalisation regime—currently there are 23 CBP offices and 48 ICE offices worldwide—and consequently has provided an especially lucrative market for digital surveillance corporations.7 Through programmes such as the Mérida Initiative and the Central American Regional Security Initiative, the US has tied aid to countries such as Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras to increased militarisation, policing, incarceration, and migration control.
Yet migration patterns to the US from Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean cannot be divorced from the practices and policies that the US employed for over a century to dominate countries in these regions. Decades of US practices and policies have fuelled economic, political, and environmental instability – key factors that drive migration to the US. Over the past 20 years the number of people migrating from Central America has more than doubled, the largest increases coming from Guatemala, Honduras and Mexico. The US-backed ‘war on drugs’ in Mexico and Central America has dramatically increased violence and instability.8 In Mexico, the fight against organised crime has resulted in 350,000 deaths and more than 72,000 disappearances between 2006 and 2021. According to the World Bank, 60% of rural Central Americans live in poverty. While the largest contributors to the climate crisis are wealthy countries, these already impoverished populations suffer the most acute impacts of climate change. For decades, prolonged droughts together with natural catastrophic events such as hurricanes and floods have deeply affected Central America. The number of people facing food insecurity tripled between 2019 and 2021, affecting 6.4 million people. Asegurado, Pérez and Ramírez – like many others – are grasping for alternatives to this intolerable situation.
Rather than acknowledge these underlying causes, the US response has been to extend its border ever further. General John Kelly, former Secretary of the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS), stated, ‘I believe the defense of the Southwest border starts 1,500 miles to the south’. Mexico has long been central to the US border-externalisation regime, and digital infrastructure plays an increasingly critical role. Tony Crowder, former director of CBP’s Air and Marine Operations, shared Kelly’s sentiment ‘We have taught the Mexicans how to fish…[but] even though we have all this surveillance capability, we don’t have enough, we need more’.9
While part of a continuum of US efforts to enlist Mexico in support of its regional objectives, this ‘security and rule-of-law partnership’ accelerated following 9/11. In 2007, the US shifted the focus of its drug war from Colombia to Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean. Under this frame of securitisation, the drug war merged with the migrant-control regime. In 2008, the Mérida Initiative was launched – a bilateral partnership between the US and Mexico in the name of the US war on drugs. It initially provided financing for Mexico to purchase equipment for its military and police forces and for intelligence gathering. In 2013, Mérida was revamped to include four pillars, incorporating the creation of a ‘21st century US-Mexican border, while improving immigrant enforcement in Mexico and security along Mexico’s southern borders’. Effectively an extension of US policy, some $3.5 billion has helped shape Mexico’s migration-control agenda since 2008.
In 2014, Programa Frontera Sur further securitised Mexico’s southern border by increasing the migration policing and deportation apparatus. Consequently, Mexico now has one of the world’s largest immigration detention systems. Between 2014 and 2017, Mexico deported more Central Americans than the US Border Patrol. Doris Meissner, the former commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS, the predecessor to ICE and CBP), underscored the importance of Mexican migration control, explaining in 2017 the need to look at both US and Mexican data to assess the effectiveness of US border enforcement.10
Under these agreements, the US Department of Defense has provided training and sold millions in military equipment to Mexico, including an array of ‘smart border’ technologies provided by corporations such as Dev Technology, General Dynamics, Amazon Web Services, and NEC. The CBP and ICE have provided training on intelligence-gathering, info-sharing, and migration policing. A key element of US support to Mexico has been to develop an infrastructure to collect and share data – such as biometric and biographical information, and criminal history – in a manner that interfaces seamlessly with US databases.
The digital infrastructure that tracks and catalogues migrants is central to US migration policy in Mexico. The US-backed Instituto Nacional de Migración (INM) strategy relies on this infrastructure as the primary means to control migration rather than sealing Mexico’s southern border with Guatemala. Biometric collection is essential to making migrants more legible to the state. In 2011, the US provided four biometric kiosks to Mexico’s southern border, and 117 additional biometric scanners the following year. Between 2018 and the first half of 2022, the Mexican government gathered and shared information on over 360,000 migrants in detention facilities.11 Information from CBP reveals that Mexican authorities shared information from 10,000 humanitarian visa applications with DHS. The release of approximately 1,800 unregistered migrants from a shelter in Piedras Negras was conditional on the registration of their data.12
An ‘Information Sharing Environment’ that includes inter-operable data-sharing systems is central to achieving the objectives of the homeland security state. ‘Inter-operability’ enables seamless connectivity between police, immigration agencies, foreign governments, and more.13 Key forms of US-initiated digital infrastructure rely on widespread information-gathering and seamless sharing of data for surveillance across borders.
This vast amount of data-collection and sharing has been fuelled by unleashing the power of the carceral state – including the centrality of the ‘criminal alien’, ‘gang member’ and ‘drug trafficker’ as threats to national security – at all geographic levels of the US migrant-control regime. For example, the Biometric Identification Transnational Migration Alert Program (BITMAP) allows DHS and its partner countries to know where and when an individual arrives in the Western Hemisphere and their travel patterns before they reach the southwest US border. BITMAP is currently deployed to 18 countries, including Mexico. DHS also has a Criminal History Information Sharing (CHIS) programme that allows for the global sharing of biographic, biometric, and descriptive information on individuals deported from the US (e.g. alleged immigration, employment, family, and criminal histories).
The structural criminalisation of poverty in both countries is amplified with CHIS. According to the National Survey of Imprisoned Population in Mexico, conducted by the National Institute of Geography and Statistics (INEGI) in 2021, nearly 44% of the respondents declared having been imprisoned on the basis of false accusations or incriminations. Forty-two percent claimed they had been forced to plead guilty or to incriminate someone else. Nearly half of those who are jailed have not been convicted, and nearly half of all convictions are for theft of under US$100. This is the kind of data that feeds CHIS.
In another example, DHS is developing the Homeland Advanced Recognition Technology System (HART) to replace its current centralised biometric database, IDENT, through a contract with Peraton (a subsidiary of Veritas Capital, a private equity firm). Hosted by Amazon Web Services, HART will enable DHS to aggregate and compare biographical and biometric data on hundreds of millions of people across the globe. This includes so-called encounter data from police stops, facial recognition, DNA, iris scans, and voice prints – usually gathered without the individual’s knowledge or consent. The massive HART database draws from widespread biometrics collection in all realms – for example, the US DOS INL’s development of integrated DNA databases in Mexico and Central America in the name of combating trafficking or the proposed national biometric digital ID in Mexico. In this way, multiple state initiatives merge, and the power of the state to police, track and control migrants and all people under their watch grows exponentially.
While the Mérida Initiative formally ended in 2019, its approach has been sustained by the Mexican government. In 2021, the Mexican government increased the military by 46% and the National Guard dedicated to stopping migrants by 300%. In July 2022, President López Obrador committed $1.5 billion in smart border infrastructure over the next two years.
For US partner states, any technological and data-sharing channels that are financed and exported to them become assets – not just for monitoring migrants, but to advance multiple agendas of coercive power-building. This infrastructure can therefore end up fuelling violence and criminalisation, undermining the right to asylum, exacerbating inequality, and expanding the power of paramilitaries and the police, while privileging securitised neoliberal and corporate prerogatives.