The technopolitics of crimmigration control: targeting bodies and re-scaling borders

The digitalization of borders is closely connected to the merger of border control with the logics of law enforcement, criminal justice, and national security. Despite burgeoning empirical work on digital crimmigration control, there is still scope to more rigorously theorize how exactly new digital technologies shape criminal justice and border control practices, and how digitalization relates to ideas of political agency, accountability, and social change. In this chapter, we provide a set of theoretical tools for critically analyzing digital crimmigration control technologies by bringing border criminologies into conversation with adjacent fields such as Science and Technology Studies and surveillance studies. We deploy these theoretical tools to demonstrate that new digital technologies are increasingly central to the rescaling of crimmigration control across time and space. Digital borders are shaped by logics of policing, punishment, and law enforcement, while threatening to undermine the usual protections and principles of criminal justice. We also outline a future research agenda that embraces interdisciplinary engagement beyond the social sciences and considers the prospect of technology co-creation as source of progressive social change.