Data Borders investigates entrenched and emerging borderland technology that ensnares all people in an intimate web of surveillance where data resides and defines citizenship. Detailing the new trend of biologically mapping undocumented people through biotechnologies, Melissa Villa-Nicholas shows how surreptitious monitoring of Latinx immigrants is the focus of and driving force behind Silicon Valley's growing industry within defense technology manufacturing. Villa-Nicholas reveals a murky network that gathers data on marginalized communities for purposes of exploitation and control that implicates law enforcement, border patrol, and ICE, but that also pulls in public workers and the general public, often without their knowledge or consent. Enriched by interviews of Latinx immigrants living in the borderlands who describe their daily use of technology and their caution around surveillance, this book argues that in order to move beyond a heavily surveilled state that dehumanizes both immigrants and citizens, we must first understand how our data is being collected, aggregated, correlated, and weaponized with artificial intelligence and then push for immigrant and citizen information privacy rights along the border and throughout the United States.

" "This book is essential for those who want to understand where the surveillance of migrations and borders stands and where it is heading after the construction of the data borderland in the U.S.A.–Mexico context. Similarly, this text inspires or should be a source of inspiration for academic work in other latitudes where borders are being digitalized and where the use of data as well as artificial intelligence is a resource that is spreading in order to manage international migrations about which we do not know much."
 " - Journal of Borderlands Studies

"Centred on Mexican-to-US experiences of immigration and law enforcement, Data Borders draws on critical scholarly approaches to discuss the absence of “data rights” within big data, and its impact on the history and voice of undocumented migrants."
  - Significance