Research Fellows · Tiara Roxanne: Research · Bio
“As ICE tears through North America, the Kill Cloud — a destructive surveillance entity — not only monitors and captures Mexican Indigenous peoples, but also has disastrous environmental effects, calling for urgent questioning of its use and mobilisation.”
Research: Automated Extraction: Tactics of Surveillance and Targeting Indigenous Peoples on the border of Mexico and the US
Tiara Roxanne · Scholar and Artist, US/DE
Amid ongoing political upheaval surrounding border control, ICE agents are flooding towns and cities throughout North America. Drone deployment, surveillance and the tactics of the Kill Cloud — a growing interconnected network infrastructure with global reach (Ling & Westmoreland, 2021) — have been amplified. Since late 2024, the state of Texas started used drones with Infrared to capture and surveil civilians near the border of Texas and Mexico, and just recently, in June 2025, ICE used flying surveillance over the Los Angeles protests. With the current ICE Raids ramping through North America, the use of the Kill Cloud — the political, technical, and cultural infrastructure used to surveil and capture Indigenous civilians — has increased. This calls for more information on the ethical problems of using Kill Cloud for surveillance and capture at the border region between Mexico and the US.
In addition to this invasion of privacy, the Kill Cloud interrogates the safety and well-being of migrants and Indigenous people which extends toward harm on the climate. The use of drones requires elements such as Aluminum, Titanium, Iron and many more which are sourced globally. The kind of extraction is multifarious in its negative impacts on migrants and Indigenous communities living near or displaced by sites of extraction which is amplified by the interconnected web of material the Kill Cloud is built from.
This research will scaffold on the author/artist’s previous work regarding data colonialism and territorial extraction for means of AI and usage of digital technologies. The output will be twofold. A research paper by the author will showcase a written visualization / cartography of the negative impacts the Kill Cloud has on migrant / Indigenous communities on or near the Mexico / US border as well as climate effects of its use for surveillance and capture. The secondary part will be displayed in a performance by the author / artist.
What ethical problems does the Kill Cloud raise for surveillance against ‘undocumented migrants’ / Indigenous people? What are its effects on the climate?
Tiara Roxanne
Scholar and Artist, US/DE
Tiara Roxanne is a Purhépecha (descendant) Mestisaje (Italian) transnational scholar and artist based in Berlin. Dr. Roxanne’s work is dedicated to rethinking the ethics of AI through a decolonial cyberfeminist lens. They are currently developing their concepts, digital attunement and the technological haunt, through research and writing. Both of which will be showcased in their book supported by University of California Press, forthcoming 2026. As a performance artist and practitioner, they work between the digital and the material using textile, from the space of the body as a site of refusal, dehiscence, decolonisation and ceremony. Their research and artistic practice aim at developing a wider scope of understanding, accessibility and critique of AI, Digital Technologies and their impact. Tiara Roxanne has presented at ARS Electronica (Linz), Images Festival (Toronto), Squeaky Wheel Film and Media Art Center (NY), Trinity Square Video (Toronto), Leuphana Univeristy (Lüneberg), European Media Art Festival (Osnabrück), University of Applied Arts (Vienna), SOAS (London), SLU (Madrid), among others.