Surveilling Sanctuary
Following data trails from the ground to the cloud in Chicago
Coming Soon
The research
Chicago, 2023-present
Sanctuary cities claim to protect asylum seekers through radical noncompliance with federal immigration enforcement, but together, technocrats and federal agents are innovating their way into sanctuary through an assemblage of disparate surveillance feeds, automated technologies, and cloud infrastructures. This ethnography applies a granular focus to the sanctuary city of Chicago as the anchor from which to see how relationships between people, technology, and data play out within an opaque and global political economy of surveillance technology. It follows the data trails linking people and technology on the ground and in the cloud, orienting a disobedient gaze toward the spectacle of immigration politics as a lens to interrogate what is made unseen and unknowable.
By piecing together ethnographic observation with asylum seekers and rapid responders, intermittent data published by municipal and federal institutions, and an elusive web of public-private partnerships, the research aims to make the border between sanctuary and surveillance knowable. Advancing anthropological thinking on human-data-machine reconfigurations in increasingly surveilled and digitized cities, this project offers ethnographers the epistemological tools to inform data futures for people currently and not yet on the move.