Borders as Algorithms as Borders

On 8 March 2026, the US Department of Homeland security unlawfully arrested recent Columbia graduate and activist, Mahmoud Khalil, a permanent resident of the United States. He was intercepted and detained by men in unmarked vehicles, who picked him up without explanation as he returned home from dinner with his wife. Khalil’s arrest came on the back advocating for a free Palestine and an end to the genocide in Gaza, while studying at Columbia – an institution that capitulated to the unlawful surveillance requested by the Trump administration into records of students participating in Palestine protests, foregoing their duty of care towards their students and their constitutional rights. Shortly before Khalil’s arrest, reports emerged of the State Department’s use of an AI-assisted ‘Catch and Revoke’ system, intended to scour thousands of student visa holders’ social-media accounts for ‘support of Hamas’.1 While the reports of such systems seemed preposterous and unprecedented at the time, in particular their use in historic cities of sanctuary like New York, their deployment follow a long trajectory of expanding geopolitical ‘borders’ to cities, bodies, and infrastructures that govern mobility in everyday life as it pertains to racialised communities. Bordering, ‘smart’ technologies, and the city have become intimately tied with the ‘unruly’ migrant body.

Increasingly, the same processes by which racialised communities are surveilled, assessed, and controlled in ‘liminal’ spaces – such as at camps, at border crossings, or under conditions of occupation – are replicated and scaled to operate within borders, including in the interaction with everyday technological interfaces between communities, state authorities, and now Big Tech companies. For decades, we have known about biometric experimentation with refugees: from Afghan refugees facing compulsory iris registration programmes, administered by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), in order to receive assistance, to the World Food Programme’s EyePay programme, supplied by the company IrisGuard, for the Za’atari refugee camps. In Europe, billions of euros have been invested in Frontex’s (European Agency for the Management of Operational Cooperation at the External Borders) capacity to surveil, register, and track migrant communities. The agency is directly complicit in the deaths of at least 36,570 migrants attempting to cross the Mediterranean to safer shores.2 As recently as July 2023, Worldcoin, the crypto-currency project founded by OpenAI CEO, Sam Altman, announced its plans to provide a zero-trust decentralised human identification system, named World ID, aimed at distinguishing humans from bots.3 Through the roll out of some 1,500 ‘Orbs’ equipped with biometric recognition across over thirty-five cities, Altman promises a roughly $50 equivalent of its Worldcoin currency, in exchange for scanning your eyeballs and registering them with a unique identification. Predictably, World ID was quickly touted as a natural intervention in refugee camps.4

These technological developments are part and parcel of an evolving industrial complex that has made it its business to develop near-immutable means of encoding stratification, marginality, and statelessness onto human bodies and their digital traces. They emanate most virulently from the occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT) where they serve as technocratic alibis for apartheid, illegal occupation, and more recently, genocide. In Palestine, the draconian closure regime – intended to isolate, blockade, and limit Palestinians – is re-inscribed in digital terms through subjecting the everyday movement of Palestinians in the West Bank to algorithmic decision-making, facial recognition surveillance, and other experimental AI systems. Here, the faces, relations, property, and associations of Palestinians are added to vast databases through which Israeli forces reassert and expand its settler-colonial horizons and maintain its illegal occupation and system of apartheid. 

Such techno-governmental entanglements traverse beyond the boundaries of Israel’s apartheid policies against Palestinians to now service the supremacist homeland security aspirations of many Western states. From the AI-driven surveillance of movement, speech, and so-called pre-emptive crime detection, to digital platforms purporting to connect communities with court appointment and city services, and quotidian mobile apps serving social, religious, or other informational purposes, borders are not just externalised and expansive, but increasingly diffuse, algorithmic, mundane, and speculative.5 The same digital border logics that entrap Palestinian’s everyday lives, now coerce, displace, and track Lebanese, Iranians, and Sudanese; digitally exploit and marginalise Ethiopians and Syrians; detect, detain, and cage Hondurans, Venezuelans, El Salvadorians, and countless racialised communities far beyond any conventional border.

Racial capitalism has long been sustained by orientalist, colonial configurations of value capture, chiefly through the control of mobilities of racialised people. Whether under the auspices of the capture of dissenting students on visas, to curb undesirable ‘migrants’ from Latin American and Muslim-majority nations, or operationalising (in other ways) arbitrary but ideologically convenient processes of racialisation, surveillance, capture, and expulsion, race, technology, and border entanglements drive vulnerable communities into the digital periphery.6

It is helpful to understand racial capitalism and its contingent practices of bordering as emanating from two key methods of direct and indirect racial subjugation, namely: i) categorisation – the classification of particular groups of people as a category of race; and ii) containment – the entrapment of a particular racial category in either space or perpetual movement for the purpose of value extraction. These modes have worked hand in hand to commodify racialised people, their bodies, their labour, their spaces, and their movement; they have, through mystifications – that is, tropes, myths, and iconography – innovated and atomised increasingly quotidian manners of value extraction, since the early days of capitalism and into the twenty-first century. Race has, in other words, always been central to capitalism’s devaluation of specific populations to extract surplus value, while bordering has made up the means by which those subjected to such logics were captured by the system. Racial categorisation moves through media; through lore, numerical representation, images, and iconography, and eventually through digital media. Ann Laura Stoler reminds us of the discursive process of racialisation: that the concept of race itself is mobile and consistently subject to historical renewal.7 By thinking of race as programmatic, and as a technology in and of itself, we see how racial ‘innovations’, as Geraldine Heng describes them, drive many of the imaginaries resulting in everything from normalised and accepted forms of domination and control to mass atrocities and genocide.8

While categorisation allows us to see how borders are curated and constructed along racial lines, practices of containment, which are deployed to keep those classified according to particular racial categories contained in space, or in perpetual movement,9 for their exploitation, harken back to settler-colonial practices of ‘clearing’ indigenous land,10 and the subsequent internal colonisation manifest through enclosure laws.11 The former was a critical component of settler colonialism, which saw the systematic erasure of indigenous people, land, objects, and reality altogether, ‘cleaning’ up what was considered wild and untamed space for conquerors, transforming them into commodities intelligible by whiteness, or what Nicholas Mirzoeff refers to as the violent construction of ‘white space’.12 Internally, the British Empire also utilised ‘enclosures, the poor laws, debtors’ prisons [and] transportation (forced emigration)’ to contain what many, including Cedric J. Robinson, have characterised as the ‘internal barbarians’, subject to racial tropes, economic stratification, and exploitation, or what we might think of instances of ‘racialism’ (which Robinson argues predates capitalism).13 

Technical language and numbers have long been used to veil processes of categorisation and containment in advancement of racial domination. We can find numerous examples of such practices throughout the history of colonial-capitalism: the nineteenth-century birth of the British census in India as an attempt at exerting atomised social control over its colonised subjects; early eugenicist classifications of intelligence (IQ); the IBM Hollerith punch-card system used to systematise and manage concentration camps; symbols and letters drawn on the skin of immigrants arriving on Ellis Island; the ethnic and racial classifications in personal identification cards in South Africa and Rwanda. These lucrative modes of subjugation were also employed under the guise of technical or scientific fixes to various socio-economic problems associated with largely racialised communities.

Returning to our contemporary predicament, technology deployments under what some have referred to as ‘techno-authoritarianism’, the ‘rise of the new radical right’, or just plain old fascism reproduce these modes of subjugation, albeit through new tropes (e.g., international students falsely equated with antisemitism for protesting genocide; communities resisting occupation, apartheid, and violence being transmuted into ‘terrorists' and ‘terrorist sympathisers’) and sites (campuses, municipal offices, and virtual platforms like social-media profiles and the totality of our online presence). This is why I insist on understanding racial capitalism and practices of bordering as the organising structure behind technological development and innovation today. Racialised borders now seeping deep into our cities and everyday life become the experimental sites where populations are digitally enclosed and where life is subject to intensifying exploitation by tech actors.

Since before the Nakba, Palestinian communities have been subjected to border experimentation – analogue and digital – in service of a settler-colonial ethno-state.14 Such border experimentation has, on the one hand, demanded the containment, forcible transfer, ethnic cleansing, and wholesale removal of Palestinians, while, on the other, also relying on Palestinian existence, presence, and imagery to battle-test and market Israeli military and surveillance technologies abroad. In the occupied Palestinian territory, the wall, fences, and borders are woven together through a digital assemblage of biometric and AI-driven technologies such as facial recognition, anomaly detection, autonomous weapons and crowd dispersal systems, and robotics. This also includes the enabling infrastructure – including cloud computing and services, storage, data sets, and processing facilities – that connects, powers, and operationalises many of the technologies discussed. 

In Hebron, where Palestinian access to certain city streets and neighbourhoods is restricted in favour of Israeli settlers, the Israeli occupation forces utilise the Blue Wolf system, dubbed ‘Facebook for Palestinians’.15 Blue Wolf is a mobile application that serves as the backbone of the Israeli occupation forces’ automated practices of mass surveillance against Palestinians.16 Gamified with a leaderboard, military units are incentivised to register as many Palestinian faces in the system as possible, with rewards going to the unit with the most images captured.17 Red Wolf, the latest biometric surveillance experiment to join the fray,  now governs the movement of 250,000 Palestinians in Hebron, including their entry/exit to their own neighbourhood, such as at Checkpoint 56, located by the Tel Rumeida neighbourhood in the part of the city designated as H2.18 Even by their own admission, soldiers see these technologies as a means of making ‘the presence of the military felt’.19

Presently, many of these very systems are generating enthusiasm about Israel’s sophisticated arsenal of technologies of oppression. Across the globe, border agencies have sought out Israeli high-tech products, sold under the value proposition of being ‘combat proven’ in the occupied Palestinian territory.20 Israeli apartheid logics, now undergirded by AI-driven surveillance and targeting infrastructures, have been repackaged into the gold standard of homeland security, in particular in so-called liberal democracies like the United States and the European Union.21 This narrative is what makes technologies used against Palestinians in Gaza, Hebron, and East Jerusalem transferable to places hosting other oppressed or marginalised communities, like London and New York City, framed in terms of greater convenience and safety, while inevitably diffusing the same logics of control.

Let’s take the US southern border, where US Customs and Border Protection is using dozens of surveillance towers set up by the Israeli company Elbit Systems ‘to improve border security and force protection’ with the help of ‘artificial intelligence and automation’.22 Or take the everyday policing in the United States, where the Israeli company Oosto – the controversial mass surveillance manufacturer formerly known as AnyVision – is now offering law enforcement agencies facial recognition technologies with real-time watchlist alerting capabilities.23 Since Microsoft sold its 40 percent stake in Oosto’s predecessor following revelations that its technology was being used at checkpoints in the occupied West Bank, the company shifted its focus to the United States, where it has increased its presence.24 Or take Corsight, which supplied Israeli occupation forces with facial recognition software used during the genocide in Gaza, and has since been supplying UK, US, and many other police forces. 

Around the world, such systems are increasingly adopted as almost inevitable in the growth and development of urban infrastructure. Their deployments are found in contexts as diverse as automated welfare assessment, prison systems, refugee camp administration, border control, and in the management of so-called ghettos.25 They follow many of the same racialised logics of control used in the occupied Palestinian territories.These developments are symptomatic of a larger pattern of investments – in the hundreds of millions of dollars – in the militarisation and datafication of societies within Western liberal democracies and beyond, a pattern that can best be described as automating and normalising xenophobia.26

From the lamp posts and rooftops of Hebron in occupied Palestine to the payment systems in Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan and the streets of New York City, technologies that trade in the management of mobility transmute border regimes and their underlying racial logics into elastic nets. These nets seek to ensnare bodies at different points in the system and to foreclose any evasion of it before, during, or as an individual, categorised as ‘undeserving’, arrives at a material or virtual frontier. They serve to datafy, automate, and further scale neocolonial relations of power. They may bounce you back to your neighbourhood under illegal occupation, foreclosing access to medical services, education, work, and critical means of survival; they may land you in an ICE detention facility if you came from the ‘wrong’ point of origin or spoke in solidarity with Palestinians; or they may label you a burden on the state by virtue of being born outside of Europe’s borders. This elastic and conditional re-inscription of border logics is inextricably entangled with Big Tech, whose products are designed on the very premise that they may, through a bizarre combination of experimental biometric identification (such as fingerprinting, iris scanning, voice and facial recognition, and even DNA collection), predictive algorithms, and pseudo-omniscient Large Language Models (LLMs), pre-emptively make a decision based on any of the aforementioned scenarios, often from as little as a photo, a social-media post, or a mention online by a third party. These high technology fantasy projects accentuate and reproduce xenophobic, anti-pauperist, and racial logics, which treat migrants and oppressed communities as suspicious by default, as modern vagrants deserving of the bare minimum or of removal altogether.27 From its deployments in service of Israel’s brutal regime in Palestine to its use against marginalised communities seeking refuge and a life within the Western nation-states, algorithmic bordering now encompasses interior and interstitial spaces of racialised everyday life. Much of it is engaged in mimicry of the homeland security architecture devised on the back of Palestinians, reproducing a globalised carceral regime that takes Israel, the ‘start-up nation’, as a techno-industrial aspiration.28

Today, the violence of many of these state-corporate practices of bordering is on unapologetic display. However, it is critical to remember that these configurations also developed under the auspices of more ‘tolerant’ and ‘liberal’ political regimes that widely applauded such tech entrepreneurial aspirations. As these technological systems now reach their logical extremes, we see more than ever that the violence at the core of many of these products was not a technical bug but a feature; that no amount of ‘de-biasing’ data sets or community consultation would change the fundamental structural logics that many of these products reproduce; that retorts of ‘fixing’ the technology, or making the it more palatable, was always about promulgating the fiction that such systems were inevitable, thus reifying a new paradigm of power and integrating Silicon Valley symbiotically in the exercise of governance. These insights, in turn, help us to see that the fight against apartheid in Palestine is part of a shifting frontier that extends beyond Israel’s military, political, and economic domination to include systems of algorithmic border and its infrastructural technologies. Actions over the past three years – at weapons factories, tech company headquarters, container ports, and increasingly by tech workers – continue to be generative and instructive of the revolutionary engagements required to resist the normalisation and entrenchment of these violent systems.