Lupe Alberto Flores

Managing Im/mobilities Under the Digital Security State: An Ethnography of CBP One™ Across the Extended Mexico-US Borderlands

Flores ethnographically examines migrant shelters and Latinx expressive/popular culture as key sites for staging the far-reaching effects of restrictive asylum policies and digital innovation projects outsourcing United States border and migration control into Mexico. A recent case of this external bordering is the CBP One™ Mobile Application that, so far, has facilitated the entry of nearly half a million global migrants through lottery algorithms and biometric verification. Drawing on multisited fieldwork in Matamoros and Mexico City between 2021-2023, Flores traces CBP One’s sociotechnical relations and the app’s implementation away from the territorial boundary, documenting its impact on migrant shelters’ humanitarian work, people’s im/mobility strategies, and possibilities for solidarity and digital resistance. By juxtaposing the affective encounters between differently positioned actors along the migrant trail – asylum seekers, Mexican activists and aid workers, American state actors and software engineers, and even cultural icons such as Kiko from the sitcom El Chavo del Ocho – Flores reveals how bordering practices as emergent state and cultural forms are enacted, experienced, and contested across the digital borderlands between Mexico and the US.