Book Review | The Cybernetic Border: Drones, Technology and Intrusion, by Iván Chaar López (Duke University Press, 2024)

The Cybernetic Border: Drones, Technology, and Intrusion amidst the ongoing onslaught of the Trump presidency against immigrants.While Trump unleashed the National Guard on neighborhoods in Los Angeles, its residents are fighting back against the Immigration and Customs Enforcement's (ICE) practices of mass deportations and abducting people from their homes, places of work, and the streets.Already during the first Trump presidency, the budget for ICE and Customs and Border Patrol increased, significantly fueling an infrastructure set up during the Obama administration in which technology and data processing companies such as Palantir provided the tools for Trump's racist conjuring of immigrants as a threat to the American nation (Mijente 2019).The Cybernetic Border is an exceptional work of historical and cultural analysis of the socio-technological and legal-political developments that have led to this moment in the "war" against immigrants.Chaar López draws on an impressive range of materials, including government documents, promotional materials, journalistic coverage, corporate materials, film, art, surveillance footage, and congressional reports.His reflexive engagement with an imperial archive fragmented by the secrecy of military and state institutions manages simultaneously to reconstruct the stories and scripts of drones, smart borders, and intrusion detection systems, and to offer a history of what he calls the "Border Technopolitical Regime."To this end, Chaar López traces how the theories and science of cybernetics entered the work of border and migration enforcement