Digital Technologies and the Re/bordering Practices of Empire: How Digital Coyotes and Charge-for-Charge Businesses Transform the Trails for Precarious Migrants

In the United States, both Republican and Democratic administrations have expanded militarized border infrastructures. While Trump prioritized physical wall construction, Biden redirected investment toward surveillance technologies, advancing a “virtual wall.” Across administrations, binational agreements have fostered new forms of digital border power. Drawing on community-engaged ethnographic fieldwork with Latin American migrants traveling through Mexico, this article examines how digital technologies mediate contemporary re/bordering practices and reshape migrant mobility. I develop a framework for analyzing how evolving sociotechnical assemblages produce new forms of control. Technologies such as the CBP One™ app and migrants’ mobile devices generate digital, spatial, and economic bordering practices that enable exploitation by state and nonstate actors, including digital coyotes and charge-for-charge businesses. At the same time, pro-migrant solidarity networks create provisional shelter, which I conceptualize as transient refuge. Attending to migrants’ perceptions of safety and movement, the study demonstrates how digital technologies reconfigure the spatial and economic terrains of transnational migration.