A decade ago, when Iván Chaar López first began researching drones, his Tumblr webpage served as a kind of makeshift digital archive filled with images, articles, reports, and videos he came across online. Some were cheerful depictions of drones delivering pizzas and presents, but a few more sobering pieces detailed drone strikes and deployment for surveillance in the Global War on Terrorism. The striking contrast between the two aesthetics would ultimately prove to be an impetus for his work examining the intersection of technology and border control.
“I’m less concerned about neat continuations of cause and effect over time,” he explains. “I’m more interested in moments of disturbance or emergence, moments when things congeal and come together to create a slight shift, and moments when things fall apart.”
Now an assistant professor of American studies at The University of Texas at Austin, Chaar López studies how drones and other information technologies have evolved from tools used in aerial defense into instruments of border control. And while contemporary policy discussions around border enforcement often center on whether AI-powered systems can outperform physical walls, Chaar López poses a more fundamental question: What values and politics are embedded within these technological systems themselves? We tend to believe that a virtual border is a contemporary conception made possible by things such as drones, computers, and artificial intelligence, but in his recent book, The Cybernetic Border: Drones, Technology & Intrusion (2024), Chaar López argues that the roots of automated border control run deeper than we realize.
Growing up in Puerto Rico — and in a family divided between those who advocated for statehood and those who wanted independence — Chaar López experienced politics not as an abstract concept but just as life as he knew it to be. The debates that often broke out at family dinners were about politics, but they were also about competing visions of belonging and sovereignty, and from these discussions Chaar López gained an intimate understanding of how political frameworks shape personal lives. This understanding would in turn inform his scholarly work on border technology.
Chaar López traces the first major attempt to digitize border enforcement to an experimental “electronic fence” built along the U.S.-Mexico border in the 1970s. This network of ground sensors, computers, and radio transmitters emerged during a period of mounting anxiety about unauthorized migration — one not so unlike our current time — following changes to immigration law that led to a dramatic increase in apprehensions of “deportable aliens.”
But the electronic fence represented more than just a technical response to what was seen as a failure of the immigration system; it fundamentally transformed how the border itself was conceptualized, says Chaar López. By converting human movement into data points — footsteps becoming seismic readings, body heat translated into infrared signals — the system reduced complex human migration into abstract information flows to be monitored and controlled and a territory produced through the policing of its “intruders.” Notably, this technology was adapted from the “McNamara Line” used in the Vietnam War, an artificial barrier across the demilitarized zone between North and South Vietnam consisting of listening devices and sensors alongside traditional defenses such as land mines and barbed wire. The McNamara Line example, he says, highlights how domestic border control borrowed from military operations abroad and how the U.S.-Mexico border functioned as a laboratory for the U.S. military. And despite frequent malfunctions, with sensors triggering false alarms or failing to detect actual crossings, Chaar López shows that official enthusiasm for automated enforcement remained high in government and tech circles.
These early border technologies were never neutral tools for processing migrants more efficiently. Instead, Chaar López says, they were deliberately designed to transform individuals into “data bodies” that could be more easily categorized, tracked, and managed. His research also demonstrates how these systems specifically targeted Mexican migrants, embedding racial bias into their fundamental architecture.
This fusion of race and technology persists, he says, in today’s border surveillance systems. Chaar López points to Anduril Industries’ current work with U.S. Customs and Border Enforcement, including their Lattice surveillance system — an AI-powered sensor fusion platform — as a contemporary example of how networked technologies reproduce and maintain borders. In many ways, he says, today’s AI-powered border surveillance is simply executing code written half a century ago, continuing the ideal of automated control—and its inherent biases — that became embedded in America’s approach to border enforcement long before the digital age.
Iván Chaar López, assistant professor of American studies.
At UT Austin’s Border Tech Lab, which he directs, Chaar López continues to examine how these historical patterns manifest in modern border enforcement alongside broader research on computing in the Americas and digital technology and precarity. The lab investigates the technopolitics of digital systems and information infrastructures, and is presently tracking the full scope of Texas’ computing infrastructure—from the mining of earth elements to the construction of semiconductors, data centers, and platforms. This work parallels López’s focus on technopolitics but employs more traditional methods of technological analysis.
Chaar López’s research methodology is deliberately unorthodox — a hybrid of media archaeology and ethnic studies. He draws from an expansive list of artifacts, including promotional documents, government memoranda, surveillance footage, and protest art. The goal, he says, is to allow him to decode something essential about how border technologies function, to expose the gap between how these systems are sold to the public and how they actually operate on the ground.
“When you hear about advances in digital technology — at the border or in our daily lives — it’s with a language that emphasizes the immaterial, the ethereal, the cloud,” he says. “As if it’s something that rises above, away from us. But I’m interested in grounding understandings in physical matter and material relations.”
Drawing from years of research, Chaar López argues something both profound and deeply unsettling: the future of border enforcement is less about efficacy than the illusion of it. While tech companies pitch ever more sophisticated systems of digital walls powered by machine learning and AI surveillance, Chaar López points to what he sees as the most telling part of this story — how little the actual success of these systems matters to those in power. In his studies of automated and artificial barriers used in military defense to his analysis of contemporary border technology, Chaar López demonstrates a consistent pattern: sensors can misfire, algorithms can fail, and drones can crash, but the imperial promise of perfect technological control remains irresistible to those who wish to maintain power. “Technology, after all, includes the desires of control programmed into hardware and human practices,” Chaar López explains. This seductive vision persists not because it works but because it offers the illusion of clean, automated authority without the messy reality of human movement and resistance. And until we confront this fundamental political reality or imagine our way toward creative alternatives, Chaar López says, we’re just writing new code for the same old dreams of empire.