A/HRC/48/Add.xx 51. Another submission reported the participation of thirteen European nations in the ROBORDER project, a “fully functional, autonomous border surveillance system, consisting of unpiloted mobile robots capable of functioning on a standalone basis or in swarms, in a range of environments—aerial, water surface, underwater, and ground. 143 This proposed increased use of drones to police Europe’s borders exacerbates the decentralization of the border zone into various vertical and horizontal layers of surveillance, turning people into security objects and data points to be analysed, stored, collected, and rendered intelligible. 144 The usage of military, or quasi-military, autonomous technology also bolsters the connection between immigration, national security, and the increasing criminalization of migration and use of risk-based taxonomies to flag cases.145 Globally, States have been using various ways to pre-empt and deter those seeking to legally apply for asylum. This type of deterrence policy is very evident in Greece, Italy, and Spain, 146 countries which are on the geographic frontiers of Europe, and which increasingly rely on violent deterrence and ‘push back’ policies. 52. One submission highlighted Croatia’s uses of EU-funded technologies to detect, apprehend and return refugees and migrants along the Balkan route, traveling from Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia through Croatia to reach the Schengen border. 147 This submission alleges hundreds of human rights abuses in the past three years, including “illegal push-backs” that reflect “inherently racist cleavages.”148 Surveillance technologies such as drones and helicopters with automated searchlights “have been weaponised against people on the move, making them easier to detect and thus compounding their vulnerability and the dangers they face.”149 53. Discriminatory border externalization is also achieved through transnational biometric data-sharing programs. One submission reported a biometric data sharing program between the governments of Mexico and the U.S.150 As of August 2018, Mexico had deployed the U.S.-funded program in all fifty-two migration processing stations.151 This bilateral program uses biometric data to screen detained migrants in Mexico who allegedly had tried to cross the U.S. border or are members of a criminal gang. 152 However, Mexico’s National Institute of Migration has denied processing biometric data in answers to freedom of access to information requests.153 4 Immigration Surveillance154 54. One submission reported the ongoing construction at the US-Mexico border of “a network of fifty-five towers equipped with cameras, heat sensors, motion sensors, radar systems, and a GPS system.”155 This border enforcement system also surveils the Tohono O’odham Nation’s reservation, located in Arizona approximately one mile from the border.156 This “smart” border surveillance system has shifted the routes used by migrants, thereby “increasing [their] vulnerability to injury, isolation, dehydration, hyperthermia and exhaustion”—and deaths.157 Another submission notes that researchers and civil society 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 Homo Digitalis, Submission. See also https://roborder.eu/.. Csernatoni. See Van Den Meerssche, Submission. https://www.statewatch.org/news/2017/november/eu-spain-new-report-provides-an-x-ray-of-thepublic-funding-and-private-companies-in-spain-s-migration-control-industry/; https://www.efadrones.org/countries/italy/. BVMN, Submission. Ibid. Ibid. PI et al., Submission. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Anil Kalhan, “Immigration Surveillance,” (2014) (defining immigration surveillance as the product of dramatically expanded identification, mobility tracking and control, and information sharing, and evasion of the traditional substantive and procedural legal protections that have typically been relied upon to protect non-citizens from a host of human rights abuses). Campaign to Stop Killer Robots, Submission. Ibid. Samuel Norton Chambers et al. 17