This is Part 2 of a series I am developing: “The Psychology of Becoming a Border”
- Part 1: Becoming tables or borders
Becoming a border is a process and an event. The definition of “border” has been refined to account for its ability to move around and transform in shape: from biometric systems that instantly communicate across security points to check points placed far away from the 100 mile border zone. Each border extension blocks, redirects, and slows the flow of movement, often funneling people-in-motion into dangerous bottlenecks that derail and end lives. The border concept can be extended even further, where people themselves join physical walls and technology as the materials that borders are built from.
When you become a border, your mind and body function as fleshy extensions of the geopolitical border, where your presence and actions align with and advance the imperial interests of the country you reside in (to the detriment of everyone involved). When you function as a border, your social interactions marshal institutional & hierarchical power to place obstacles or violence in others’ lives. Police and border patrol are obvious examples of this (all cops are borders, even JD Vance understands this). But we need to understand that under the right conditions the potential & imperative to become a border is everywhere, all around, ready to occupy minds.
Everyday there’s countless new traumatic stories and video evidence of ICE agents and lay citizens targeting and terrorizing people they deem as surplus/expendable/removable populations. For these acts to be possible in the first place, they require aggressors to embody a mode of perception, one that identifies and illegalizes people as matter-out-of-place, as intruding vermin or conniving snakes, and that licenses them to act on that perception by becoming a border. Black Mirror’s episode Men Against Fire provides the perfect analogy where soldiers get eye implants that co-opt their field of vision by transforming the physical appearances of military-targeted people into subhuman (and thus easily killable) monsters. (It’s not lost on me that the storyline also showcases how these violent perceptions can be instilled even in people who are racialized as not white).
Combatting the psychology of becoming a border needs an understanding of the visual & psychological politics that produce this mode of perception:
What does bordered perception attend to, seek out, surveil?
How is it activated, under what conditions does it emerge?
Bordered Gazes
Having lived illegalized for ~3 decades in this country, I’ve thought a lot about hiding from police and state gazes. I tried putting myself in the mind of an agent: what sources of information would I have access to when moving through (terrorizing) this world?
I’ve identified two avenues by which I could be perceived:
- Indirectly through institutional record/data systems
- Directly through IRL encounters
Indirect Perception
Official forms or documents that require you submit sensitive information (address, family records, medical history, etc) to institutions leaves you vulnerable to indirect (unobservable & surveillant) gazes. Consider the database ICE has been building by merging data across government systems (including IRS tax-payments) to plan out targeted attacks. It is filled with hundreds of different pieces of personal information about every one of us that they can filter through (including your tattoos). It is then no surprise that illegalized immigrants have developed various strategies for managing visibility to institutional record systems.
This type of gaze doesn’t rely on what you look like in a physical sense. It instead operates through quantified data that sorts you into categorical types (“criminal”, “latinx”, “black immigrant”, “welfare user”, or some combination) which ICE agents can then choose to target with precision, given all the info they have to triangulate you.
This indirect gaze has significant consequences :
- Locatability: Agents can find you easily if they choose to, without you even being aware that you’re on their radar.
- Networked surveillance: These data systems interlink across borders and institutions, allowing access to information that circulates far beyond its original context. For example, surveillance technologies developed in Israel are deployed at both the Palestine and US-Mexico borders, linking them through shared exposure to the same infrastructures of control.
- Broad visual capture: Nuancing the common discourse that darker-skinned people are specifically targeted for immigration enforcement, those who are targeted through database categories can actually look very different from one another, as categories like “latinx”, “criminal”, “welfare user” lump together people who are visually heterogeneous since these classifications are politically constructed and imposed, not based in physiognomic biology.
An example
On my birthday this year, Trump deported 200+ Venezuelan immigrants to a prison in El Salvador, many were detained unexpectedly during their immigration cases, locatable precisely because they were already embedded in U.S. data systems. ProPublica published each deported person’s story alongside their face (likely sourced from social media). I analyzed the 191 available images, generating an overall average face and additional averages clustered by skin tone.
The skin tone of the overall average face skews darker than what is typically perceived as “white” in the U.S., yet the skin tone clusters show how targeting “Venezuelan” and “tattoo-havers” indirectly through a database captured immigrants with a wide range of complexions. Medium to darker-skinned people made up the majority of those deported (why the overall average face is darker), but even the lightest skin cluster represented a sizable 34% of the total.
This is one way that a border perceives, indirectly through data and information systems that don’t necessarily rely on physical appearance, which makes the scope of its violence more individually targeted (i.e., specific classes of people can be found easier) yet visually broad (i.e., not restricted to immigrants with specific appearances). More direct psychological forms of bordered perception come into play once people themselves become borders.
Direct Perception
There’s so many videos circulating social media of roving gangs of ICE agents (and pretend agents) terrorizing and snatching people off public streets and private spaces. These search sweeps do not rely on indirect database-driven vision, they instead rely on direct human vision. Who are these agents looking for/at? How do they know they have encountered an illegalized immigrant?
My Ph.D. dissertation was exactly on this question:
What do people in the US think illegalized immigrants look like?
How is illegality encoded in people’s mental images of immigrants?
I asked hundreds of university students, residents specifically living in border states (California and Texas), and people living across the US to complete an online experiment where they visualized what they thought an “undocumented immigrant” looked like (or an “illegal immigrant”, or a “US citizen”, or a “documented immigrant”). Using a computational technique called reverse correlation, I was able to re-create the mental images they visualized 📸
Here are the average mental images they visualized:
The results were really clear: citizens were mentally visualized as lighter skinned, immigrants as darker skinned. Legality further structured these images: documented immigrants were visualized with friendlier expressions, undocumented immigrants with a more dangerous-looking face (as rated by a separate naive sample). Confirming this racialized distinction, skin tone tracked with how “American” the faces were rated to be, enabling another sample to sort the images by documentation status using faces alone. This visual audit of how migrant illegality is imagined by society reflects how imperialism and colorism (a reflection of global antiblackness) produce the mental border that separates Americans from outsiders (a reiteration of the deeper human/nonhuman distinction).
At the same time, not everyone visualized the same dark-skinned face. As someone who studied to how averaging can itself produce stereotypes, it’s important to note that people’s age and perceptions of local undocumented immigrant population size shaped what they imagined. In california and Texas, Younger people and those who perceived MORE undocumented immigrants in their neighborhoods visualized faces with more diverse skin tones and less threatening expressions, while older people and those who perceived LESS local immigrants visualized the darker more threatening face—hinting at both the interpersonal effects of living within social diversity and the detached social demographies and geographies where bordered perception takes hold.
While these images were not produced by border agents or police themselves, there are good reasons to think the findings still apply; that agents’ direct bordered perception relies on colorist logics to terrorize those deemed removable. The darker-skinned “threat” image was the most widespread visualization across diverse samples, and there is no reason to assume that cops are immune to broader antiblack societal imaginaries (“policing is a function of racism, not the other way around”). Border agents’ perception of someone’s race has even been legally allowed as a relevant (though not sufficient) factor for reasonable suspicion in immigration stops since at least 1975. Although no comprehensive face database of deported people exists to show the colorism directly, the steady stream of videos and accounts of immigrants and U.S. citizens alike being swept up in street raptures shows a consistent pattern of darker-skinned targets. A 2019 attempt to deport a U.S. citizen and Marine veteran (see below) is an example of how perception itself can operate as a sensory extension of the border, a border that can even gaze on those who prop it up.
This dynamic is likely to intensify as more police and citizens are deputized to hunt for “trespassers” in the name of the U.S. and as automated biometric systems become more deeply embedded in everyday life. These systems practice hybrid perception, combining direct and indirect gazes at once. When you are processed through biometric systems (e.g., airports or police stops where they scan your face) your physical body is datafied and linked to databases that decide whether you move forward or are reclassified as a threat. These (in)direct gazes fall upon us all, no one is immune. Even non-immigrants recognize this vulnerability: “I can be stopped just because of my accent. Then that gives them probable cause to think that I am undocumented. So what do I carry that is going to be now with me, I am in their system. They have my fingerprints” What no one should take comfort in is the belief that only “criminals” will be affected. The boundaries of criminality are continually reshaped, expanded, and differentially imposed in service of shifting political projects.
Borders can fail
Borders promise safety. Yet with the installment and expansion of borders, that promise is revealed as conditional and illusory: movement becomes criminal, proximity becomes threat, and perception itself becomes a weapon. Becoming a border happens in ordinary acts of looking, reporting, complying, and bystanding… But becoming one is not inevitable. Its maintenance depends on the continuation of material infrastructure (e.g., databases, walls, technology, agents, courts) and ideological work (e.g., legislation, widescale scapegoating, authoritarian theater, mental occupation), and all that machinery can fail.
In my next installment of The Psychology of Becoming a Border, I will explore how bordered perception is activated, where these mental images come from, and their consequences.