Paper details
| Paper authors | Melissa Gatter |
| In panel on | Resisting Border Violence: The Role of Civil Society, Local Actors, and Researchers |
| Paper presenter(s) will be presenting |
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Abstract
On 4 June 2025, ten asylum seekers reporting to an immigration courthouse in Chicago as part of their required check-ins were detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents in what has become a pattern of ‘surprise arrests’ by ICE across the US. The ICE agents were met on the scene by Chicago Police, who are not supposed to cooperate with ICE in the sanctuary city, as well as by local city officials, mutual aid actors, and members of civil society who showed up to resist the arrests. All those present, including the asylum seekers, were brought to the courthouse responding to digital forms of communication, whether through government text messages or encrypted communication apps like Signal.
This paper contributes a focus on border violence and resistance at the mundane municipal level in a geographic context that is usually not associated with humanitarian aid. It examines the technologies that both distinguish and blur the boundaries between federal ICE agents, those who enable ICE (Chicago Police), and those who resist ICE (local city officials, aid actors, and civil society volunteers) in the anti-immigration theatrics of Donald Trump’s America. US borders have become ‘internalized’, with border violence pushed inward from the Southern US-Mexico border to sanctuary cities like Chicago, LA, and New York City, and digitized through biometric technology like the SmartLINK app and surveillance tools like ankle monitors. While ICE is tracking asylum seekers, civil society actors and asylum seekers track ICE, documenting and exposing undercover ICE agents and communicating with a network of rapid response volunteers via Signal. But distinctions between federal agents, law enforcement, and local city officials are not always clear, leaving asylum seekers feeling unsettled.
This paper poses questions around how borders can be challenged and mobilized and by whom and how technology complicates these questions.
