Imagine walking down the street of a country where you are a citizen and suddenly being stopped by federal immigration officials, questioned about your movements, and asked to prove your identity. For Jesus Gutiérrez, a 23-year-old US citizen in Chicago, this was not a hypothetical situation. Gutiérrez, who had not committed a crime or acted in any way that required intervention, told immigration agents that he was a US citizen, but they ignored and proceeded to arrest him simply because he was unable to immediately prove his legal status. They did not set him free until a face scan process through an internal federal database confirmed his citizenship.
Gutiérrez passed no physical checkpoint. No border crossing was involved. But a database, biometric scan, or algorithm may now be enough to bring the border into ordinary encounters well within the United States. Petra Molnar has argued that the creation of “smart borders” through technological surveillance, biometrics, and artificial intelligence is transforming migration governance, often at the expense of fundamental human rights. But the United States reveals another dimension of this transformation: the border is moving inward. It is now a barrier that can follow people rather than one they cross.
From border security to digital governance
Traditional border enforcement is geographically defined. Federal immigration authorities operate at ports of entry, along land borders, and within designated areas where federal law provides particular enforcement powers. Digital systems, like internal biometric databases, complicate that geographic model by allowing information collected in one place to be retrieved and analyzed in another.
The federal government maintains extensive biometric and biographical databases for immigration enforcement and other domestic operations. One example is the Department of Homeland Security’s Automated Biometric Identification System (IDENT), begun in the 1990s, which is being replaced by the Homeland Advanced Recognition Technology (HART) system. HART is designed to store and process fingerprints, facial images, iris scans, and other identifiers submitted by immigration agencies like US Customs and Border Protection and US Citizenship and Immigration Services.
Significantly, these systems do not simply make identification faster; instead, they fundamentally change the nature of an immigration encounter. A government official who previously needed a document or direct access to a particular record can now use a biometric identifier to establish a person’s identity and retrieve information associated with it. In some cases, individuals may not even be aware that a database search has occurred or which system or systems influenced an officer’s decision.
Federal information-sharing practices further expand this capacity. One example is the 287(g) program, which effectively embeds immigration screening into routine policing by allowing state and local law enforcement agencies to collaborate directly with federal immigration authorities.
The result of all this is that immigration enforcement does not necessarily begin with an individual presenting themselves at a border. It can begin with a traffic stop in Arizona, a booking procedure in a county jail in Texas, or a routine identity check in a city hundreds of miles from any international boundary.
Due process in the age of unknown databases
Moreover, individuals may have difficulty identifying, accessing, or correcting the information used to make decisions about them as part of these digital immigration-enforcement processes.
Government databases can easily produce erroneous results even when the technology performs as designed. A facial recognition system can correctly match a person to a record, but the underlying record itself may be outdated or inaccurate. In more extreme cases, the record may be associated with an entirely different individual who simply has a similar name or biometric profile. These risks are not distributed equally. Studies of facial recognition systems have found higher error rates for certain demographic groups, particularly women and people with darker skin tones, creating a greater risk for mistaken identification and government scrutiny.
An inaccurate or misapplied database is not merely an administrative inconvenience if it contributes to detention, removal proceedings, or the denial of an immigration benefit. Yet the person affected may not even know which database was consulted, what information generated the government's decision, or which agency is responsible for correcting it.
Immigrants, regardless of legal status, are entitled to due process of law, a fundamental right outlined in the Fifth Amendment of the US Constitution and repeatedly affirmed by the Supreme Court. Due process generally requires procedural safeguards designed to mitigate the risk of erroneous decisions and proportionate to their consequences. But the US government is not strengthening these procedural safeguards—a danger recognized by federal agencies themselves. Instead, it is increasingly and actively expanding digital immigration enforcement mechanisms with known errors that tend to fall disproportionately on already vulnerable populations.
Expansion of the digital border and federal databases
Federal immigration databases are increasingly expanding their scope beyond biometric and identification technologies. Information originally generated for purposes largely unrelated to border enforcement (including taxation, air travel, social media, healthcare, and other ordinary interactions with government institutions) is increasingly incorporated into immigration enforcement systems.
Integrating data collected in everyday civic life into the machinery of immigration control extends the digital border beyond the nation’s physical boundaries and into the routine activities of people throughout the United States.
Molnar warns that making migration increasingly subject to biometric identification, automated decision-making, and data collection creates new frontiers of surveillance and contributes to the erosion of human rights. In the United States, the border is no longer confined to the place where people cross it. The government’s technologies, databases, and information-sharing systems increasingly operate throughout domestic society, far beyond the state’s physical boundaries.
As the reach of the digital border continues to expand, so too must the protections of due process, transparency, and human rights.