Carolina Sanchez Boe

CAROLINA BOE, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark, was approved Fejos Postdoctoral Fellowship funding in October 2023 to aid research and edtiing on “Digital Detention Electronic Monitoring of Asylum Seekers in the USA.” Across the USA, every day, hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers and migrants are tracked through a GPS device strapped to their ankle or wrist, or through facial recognition, as they await their case determination. This deployment of for-profit surveillance technologies creates a parallel system to the ever-expanding detention system that makes the USA the country with the largest immigrant detention population in the world. The documentary Digital Detention (2026) is created in collaboration with monitored asylum seekers, community activists, lawyers, and scholars in Austin, Texas, a city which is itself rapidly transformed by the tech industry. Together, we explore how these technologies are unnecessary and impose both a significant financial cost on US taxpayers and a considerable human toll on migrants, their family members, and larger community. Confinement and migration control are often laboratories for what is to come later for the general population, and the film shows how such extractive for-profit surveillance capitalism concerns us all. The Fejos Grant generously supported editing, additional filming, post-production, and music for the documentary, and visual content for a 2024 American Bar Association report. Screenings of the documentary are scheduled in the USA, Latin America, and Europe, including at EASA 2026.