Automated Extraction: Tactics of Surveillance and Targeting Indigenous Peoples at the US-Mexico Border
Tiara Roxanne
Scholar and Artist, US/DE
October 5, 2026 · Research Paper
Part of the project Investigating the Kill Cloud: AI, Big Tech and Militarisation (2025–2026) by Disruption Network Institute.
Artist and scholar Tiara Roxanne argues that automated extraction is a manifestation of settler colonialism enacted through technological surveillance infrastructures, specifically at the US-Mexico border. While data colonialism has long participated in the extraction and erasure of Indigenous peoples, contemporary AI-driven surveillance systems intensify these conditions through entangled modalities that continuously aggregate, classify, monitor, and intervene Indigenous, Mestisaje, and migrant communities.
Read Abstract
Tiara Roxanne
Scholar and Artist, US/DE
Tiara Roxanne is a Purhépecha (descendant) Mestisaje (Italian) transnational scholar and artist based in Berlin. Their work is dedicated to rethinking the ethics of AI through a decolonial cyberfeminist lens. Read full bio
As mechanisms of digital surveillance continue to grow alongside ICE and the integration of the Kill Cloud, it is imperative to shed light on the interconnectedness between settler colonialism and surveillance technologies while also offering contemporary insights that move us toward resistance and solidarity.
Tiara Roxanne
Quotes from Automated Extraction: Tactics of Surveillance and Targeting Indigenous Peoples at the US-Mexico Border
Within the borderlands, a human body is no longer encountered through its history, relationships, ancestral connection to land, or lineage. It becomes data. It becomes a signal. It becomes a moving target. It becomes a blip upon a surveillance interface.
Tiara Roxanne
Through ICE and the implementation of technologies such as Palantir, ImmigrationOS, ELITE, Mobile Fortify, and biometric surveillance systems, contemporary warfare has expanded into everyday life at the US-Mexico border.
Tiara Roxanne
Living within conditions of continuous surveillance reshapes how individuals and communities relate to one another. Rather than fostering trust, relation increasingly becomes constrained by the awareness of being watched, of being surveilled, with the possible outcome of deportation or disappearance.
Tiara Roxanne
Join Tiara Roxanne & many more at TESTING GROUNDS in Berlin, November 27–29 2026 · Register now
The border is not only a line that separates territories, but also a condition that runs through the body—through my body.
Tiara Roxanne
Abstract
Automated Extraction: Tactics of Surveillance and Targeting Indigenous Peoples at the US-Mexico Border
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?
Other works by Tiara Roxanne
📄 Digital Surveillance in a Pandemic Response: What Bioethics Ought to Learn from Indigenous Perspectives · with Hendl,T, Bioethics, 2022
📄 Re-präsentation verweigern · In Wenn KI, dann feministisch: Impulse aus Wissenschaft und Aktivismus, netzforma*, 2021
📄 Digital Territory, Digital Flesh: Decoding the Indigenous Body, APRJA, 2019
▶️ Loops: Tiara Roxanne & Pedro Oliveira, New Practice in Art and Technology, 2024
Reports 2025–2026 · Investigating the Kill Cloud: AI, Big Tech & Militarisation
Architecture of Disappearance
The Kill Cloud’s Dispersal of Violence and Erosion of Sovereignty
Cian Westmoreland · Whistleblower, Former US Air Force Drone Technician, US
Telecoms, Ubiquitous Surveillance and State Crime
A Case Study From Kenya
Namir Shabibi · Independent Investigative Journalist, UK
Automated Extraction
Tactics of Surveillance and Targeting Indigenous Peoples on the border of Mexico and the US
Tiara Roxanne · Scholar and Artist, US/DE
Tiara Roxanne
Scholar and Artist, US/DE
Tiara Roxanne is a scholar and performance artist whose work rethinks the ethics of AI through an anticolonial, eco-feminist, and cyberfeminist lens. Their research critiques how digital technologies rely on the extraction of resources from Indigenous lands and examines how these infrastructures carry colonial legacies inscribed in land, bodies, and memory. They are the author of the forthcoming book with University of California Press (2027), which develops their concepts of digital attunement and the technological haunt. Tiara has presented at ARS Electronica (Linz), Images Festival (Toronto), Squeaky Wheel Film and Media Art Center (NY), Trinity Square Video (Toronto), Leuphana University (Lüneberg), European Media Art Festival (Osnabrück), University of Applied Arts (Vienna), SOAS (London), SLU (Madrid), Transmediale (Berlin), Duke University (NC), Cambridge University (UK), among others.