John,

Imagine a tracking bracelet locked to your ankle, and your face, eyes, and fingerprints scanned and stored, just for crossing a country’s border. This is the US’s so-called “humane” approach to border security: working with profit-hungry tech companies to create a technological nightmare for migrants and their families.

Two things are true: This surveillance apparatus is growing every year. And its growth is incompatible with human rights.

Technology like facial recognition cameras, Predator B drones, tracking apps, and ankle monitoring programs^{1, 2} make crossing the border deadlier and cause lifelong psychological harm.³ Far from a more “humane” approach to border security, this “digital border wall” is an instrument of precise cruelty against immigrants. President Biden and Congress must defund their secretive digital border wall.

Contact Congress

In 2020, President Biden said that “not another foot” of border wall would be built on his watch.⁴ But just last Tuesday, Biden signed off on an appropriations bill with $415.4 million for these border surveillance projects. Next week, he’s going to ask for more. We can’t let any more money go towards a digital border wall.

Constant surveillance should not be the price of crossing the border, and it will ultimately put more people in danger, not less. To prevent the spread, we must make opposing border surveillance synonymous with being serious about human rights.

Can you ask your legislators to defund the digital border wall, and shift those millions to fund immigrant communities?

Thanks for everything you do,

Anna @ Fight for the Future

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Footnotes:

1. Coda: https://www.codastory.com/authoritarian-tech/us-border-surveillance/
   

2. The Verge: https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2021-06-04/asylum-bidens-got-an-app-for-that-with-privacy-risks-and-surveillance-beyond-border

3. The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jul/12/immigrants-report-physical-emotional-harms-electronic-ankle-monitors

4. NPR: https://www.npr.org/2020/08/05/899266045/biden-would-end-border-wall-construction-but-wont-tear-down-trump-s-additions
   

 

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