"Smart" Exclusion and ICE’s Prison-Warehouse Duplex

Keywords: Migration, Logistics, Topology, Exclusion, Borders, Surveillance, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Sunday
Session Start / End Time: 2/27/2022 05:20 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/27/2022 06:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 8

Abstract

This paper examines the logistical operation of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) through its partnership with Palantir and Amazon that enables “smart detention”, a big data-driven system of targeted raids, incarceration, and deportation of migrants. A topological view undermines the persistent inconsistencies that divide the world into sovereign spaces by “debordering or overbordering” set jurisdictions (Bratton 2015, 7). These divisions reveal the “polysemic character” of borders, operating along class lines by those who circulate capital and those “whom capital circulates” (Balibar 2002, 83).

Beyond ICE’s political mandate, this operation is an enterprise with multimillion dollar contracts and guaranteed inmate quotas as incarcerated migrants logistically circulate through this system of delivery, sorting, storage, and processing akin to commercial goods (Ramos 2018). This prison is not only warehouse-like by function, but also by technological organization, where the same commercial cloud and data analytics systems are used to govern movements of both products and people in relation to warehouses. Thus, the ICE prison can be understood as a ‘prison-warehouse duplex’.

This system relies on an increasingly totalized security state, where an entire population must be coded and modeled to identify targets (Munn 2020). This ubiquitous capture of data turned the security state simultaneously “inside out” and “outside in” through partnerships of the state and corporation as suspicion turned on all internet subjects (Bauman et al. 2017, 126). Looking to the future, this paper examines how control over totality of communication infrastructure is not equivalent to total dominance (Rossiter 2016), exploring pockets of resistance.