Thoughtlessness in the Age of Homeland Security: Race, Surveillance, and Bureaucratic Violence in Immigration Enforcement

In recent years, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has created a vast digital drag net by scaling up its use of surveillance technology on immigrant populations. This paper asks what internal logics the DHS, as a bureaucratic entity, has utilized to legitimate the use of these intrusive technologies. To answer this question, I employ an archival approach, analyzing approximately 11,800 pages of internal documents from the DHS obtained through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, and publicly accessible documents from the DHS repository. I argue that surveillance and technology occupy a particular role in achieving the bureaucratic vision of a secure border. Modernization has operated as a central discourse in the agency’s mission because improving the DHS’s technological capacity is seen as essential to increasing efficiency in enforcement. As such, the DHS has aimed to maximize its enforcement power by pursuing initiatives that allow the agency to constantly access as much information as possible about any potential border violation. However, this discourse of efficiency masks how increased monitoring further reinforces a particular racialized vision of the American body politic; when deportable populations are increasingly surveilled and controlled, it reinforces their status as “other.” The DHS can thus be thought of as a “race-making” bureaucracy, or a central site at which the processes of everyday bureaucracy substantiate and enforce types of racial meaning making. The discourse of efficiency renders certain subjects, primarily Latinx immigrants, the targets of surveillance and deportation, while also distancing DHS actors from the racialized consequences of their policies.